The familiar cocks and hens of our poultry-yards are, in the West, post-Homeric. Their native home is in India; but through human agency they were early transported to Iran, where the cock, as the bird that first greets the light, acquired in the eyes of Zoroastrian devotees, a pre-eminently sacred character. His introduction into Greece was a result of the expansion westward of the Persian empire. No cocks are met with on Egyptian monuments; the Old Testament leaves them unnoticed; and the earliest mention of them in Greek literature is by Theognis of Megara, in the middle of the sixth century B.C.[149] Pigeons, on the other hand, are quite at home in Homeric verse. They are of two kinds. One is the rock-pigeon, called from its slate-coloured plumage _peleia_ (πελόs = dusky), and described as finding shelter in rocky clefts, and evading pursuit by a rapid, undulating flight.[150] Its frequent recurrence in similes can surprise no traveller who has observed the extreme abundance of _Columba livia_ all round the coasts of the Ægean.[151] The second Homeric species of _Columba_ is the ring-dove, once referred to as the habitual victim of the hawk. Tame pigeons are ignored, and were, indeed, first seen in Greece after the wreck of the Persian fleet at Mount Athos in 492 B.C.[152] Yet dove-culture was practised as far back as the oldest records lead us in Egypt and Persia. The dove was marked out as a ‘death-bird’ by our earliest Aryan ancestors, and figures in the Vedas as a messenger of Yama. But Homer, unconcerned, as usual, with animal symbolism, makes no account, if he had ever heard, of its sinister associations. Footnote 149: Hehn and Stallybrass, _Wanderings of Plants and Animals_, pp. 241-43. Footnote 150: Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 120. Footnote 151: Lindermayer, _Die Vögel Griechenlands_, p. 120. Footnote 152: Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 257. Among Homeric wild animals, the first place incontestably belongs to the lion, and the Iliad, in especial, gives extraordinary prominence to the king of beasts. In savage grandeur he stalks, as it were, through the varied scenery of its similitudes, indomitable, fiercely-despoiling, contemptuous of lesser brute-forces. His impressive qualities receive no gratuitous enhancement; he rouses no myth-making fancies; there is no fabulous ‘quality of mercy’ about him, nor of magnanimity, nor of forbearance; he is simply a ‘gaunt and sanguine beast,’ a vivid embodiment of the energy of untamed and unsparing nature.