poem of the Phœnix, which most likely served as pattern to the
Anglo-Saxon poet.[4] It consists of 170 lines, hexameters and
pentameters; terse, poetical, classical. This old Oriental fable, as
told by Ovid, was short and simple: "There is a bird that restores and
reproduces itself; the Assyrians call it Phœnix. It feeds on no common
food, but on the choicest of gums and spices; and after a life of
secular length, it builds in a high tree with cassia, spikenard,
cinnamon, and myrrh, and on this nest it expires in sweetest odours. A
young Phœnix rises and grows, and when strong enough it takes up the
nest with its deposit and bears it to the City of the Sun, and lays it
down there in front of the sacred portals." Such is the story in Ovid;
and there we know we have a heathen fable. But in the poem of
Lactantius, it is so curiously, and, as it were, significantly
elaborated, that we hardly know whether we are reading a Christian
allegory or no. Allegory has always been a favourite form with Christian
writers, and more than one cause may be assigned for it. Already there
was, in the taste of the age when the Christian literature arose, a
tendency to symbolism, which is seen outside the pale of Christianity.
Moreover, the long time in which the profession of Christianity was
dangerous, favoured the growth of symbolism as a covert means of mutual
intelligence. Then Christian thought had in its own nature something
which invited allegory, partly by its own hidden sympathies with Nature,
and partly by its very immensity, for which all direct speech was felt
to be inadequate. But what doubtless supplied this taste with continual
nutriment was that all-pervading and unspeakable sweetness of Christ's
teaching by parables. The Phœnix was used upon Roman coins to express
the aspiration for renewed vitality in the empire; it was used by early
Christian writers[5] as an emblem of the Resurrection; and in the
Anglo-Saxon poem the allegory is avowed.