The thieving magpie: from Ovid's Pierides to Rossini's opera
The daughters of Pierus turned into magpies, the words learnt in Pliny, the English rhyme and Rossini: the symbolic history of a bird under suspicion.
Elegant in its black and white plumage, noisy and curious, the magpie is one of the most familiar birds of the European countryside and one of the most heavily suspected. Its fame as a thief of shiny objects, as a bird of ill omen and as a chatterbox has different roots, some ancient and others surprisingly recent. Following them means crossing classical mythology, Roman natural history, British folklore and the musical theatre of the nineteenth century.
The Pierides and idle chatter
Ovid, in the fifth book of the Metamorphoses, tells of the contest between the Muses and the nine daughters of Pierus, king of Macedonia, who had dared to challenge them in song. Defeated, the young women insulted the victors and were turned into magpies, birds that kept their old talkativeness. The poet calls them «nemorum convicia», the clamour of the woods, and the myth fixed for centuries the image of the magpie as a symbol of idle chatter.
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, observes that magpies learn to repeat words with great application and reports the belief that they may die of vexation if they cannot pronounce a difficult one. Their gift for imitation, common to many corvids, helped make the bird a mysterious animal: a creature able to speak like human beings without understanding their words aroused both wonder and distrust.
Omens and greetings in the British Isles
In the United Kingdom and Ireland the magpie is at the centre of one of the liveliest superstitions in Europe. A rhyme recorded by John Brand in 1780 in his Observations on Popular Antiquities gives a meaning to the number of magpies seen: «one for sorrow, two for mirth», and so on through weddings and births.
To ward off the misfortune linked to meeting a solitary magpie, small gestures of courtesy spread, such as greeting it or wishing it well, still performed in jest by many people today. The belief is probably connected with the idea, documented in several regions, that the magpie was a bird of bad omen, sometimes associated with the devil because of its restless character.
Rossini's thief and modern science
Its reputation as a thief was consecrated by the theatre. In 1815 the melodrama La Pie voleuse by Caigniez and d'Aubigny was staged in Paris, the story of a young servant accused of theft when the culprit was a magpie. Two years later, on 31 May 1817, Gioachino Rossini brought La gazza ladra to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, on a libretto by Giovanni Gherardini, and its overture is still among the most performed in the repertoire.
Science has partly cut the legend down to size. Experiments carried out in England in 2014 showed that magpies tend to avoid shiny objects rather than seek them out, while a study published in 2008 demonstrated that they can recognise themselves in a mirror, an ability rare in the animal kingdom. The image of the thief thus seems more literary than natural.
The magpie shows how an animal's fame can arise from very different sources: a myth of pride punished, an observation about its voice, a country rhyme and a successful opera. The beliefs that concern it describe not so much the bird as the way human beings project onto it their own fears of theft, of slander and of bad luck.