“Birds enter popular culture from the earliest times, and they continue to pervade literature and art throughout the classical period. They are mentioned in the very first sentence of European literature – as scavengers, at the start of Homer’s Iliad. They feature repeatedly in subsequent epic, lyric, didactic, pastoral and personal poetry, in tragedy and comedy, in epigrams and invective, and in prose writings on geography, history, travel, medicine and early science.” – Aeon