Picus

Summary

Picus is an ancient king of Latium in Roman accounts, son of Saturn, father of Faunus and grandfather of King Latinus; he was a soothsayer and then became the woodpecker, the bird of Mars. Virgil sees his statue in the palace of Latinus among the statues of the ancestors: seated, holding in his right hand the augur's curved staff, wearing a short robe and carrying on his left arm one of the Salian shields, the tamer of horses whom Circe, whom Virgil calls his wife, struck with a golden wand and drugged into a bird, spattering his wings with colours.

Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses. Picus was a handsome young man whom the nymphs of every spring and river in Latium loved, but he wanted none of them and married Canens, daughter of Janus by the nymph Venilia, whose voice moved woods and rocks, tamed wild beasts and stopped long rivers, which is why she was called "the singer". One day Picus rode out to hunt the wild boar, and Circe, daughter of the Sun, who was gathering herbs in that wood, saw him and loved him. She made a phantom boar that ran before him into a thicket no horse could enter; Picus left his horse and followed on foot, and Circe darkened the air with her spells until his companions were scattered. Then she stood before him and asked him to be hers, with the all-seeing Sun for his father-in-law. He refused: my heart belongs to another, and I will not break faith with my wife while the Fates keep Canens for me. Circe turned twice to the west and twice to the east, touched him three times with her wand and chanted three spells. Picus fled and found himself moving faster than ever, with wings at his sides; angry at becoming a new bird in the Latin woods, he struck the wild oaks with his new hard beak and wounded their branches. The purple of his robe became the colour of his wings, the gold clasp of his robe became golden feathers round his neck, and nothing of his old self remained but the name. Canens searched for him six nights and six days without food or sleep, until she lay down on the bank of the Tiber weeping in a faint voice like the swan that sings before it dies; her body melted away little by little into air, and the place still bears her name.

At Rome Picus remained a bird that knows the hidden. Plutarch says the Latins revere the woodpecker and do not eat it, either because Picus became a woodpecker that gives oracles to those who consult him, or because when Romulus and Remus were exposed a she-wolf suckled them and a woodpecker brought them food, or because it is the bird of Mars, brave and spirited, with a beak so strong that it can bring down an oak by pecking until it reaches the inmost part. In the dream of their mother Rhea Silvia in Ovid, a woodpecker, the bird of Mars, and a she-wolf fight to defend twin palm trees that her uncle wants to cut down. Plutarch, Roman Questions 21, Plutarch, Romulus 4, Ovid, Fasti 3.27–54. Picus and his son Faunus were also the two gods King Numa bound at the spring on the Aventine until they taught him how to draw Jupiter down from the sky.

The idea his story turns on is that Picus is a soothsaying king who became the very bird of soothsaying. In life he held the augur's staff with which the sky is divided to read the birds; when he refused Circe he became the bird that is read. As son of Saturn and father of Faunus he is a link in the line of woodland kings who know what is hidden; as the bird of Mars he feeds the sons of Mars and guards their trees in the dream. The Roman rereading essay in this project reads the animals of Mars as the animals of the Latin wild: the wolf for strength, the woodpecker for prophecy, because it knocks on wood and so tests the trees.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue on a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read it. Pīcus is the Latin word for the woodpecker itself, and the king bears the bird's name. Taking off the ending -us leaves pīc-; p answers Arabic f, since Arabic has no p, and c answers q. Arabic has two roots on these two letters that mean boring and splitting: faqara al-kharaz, he bored beads for stringing, faqara al-arḍ, he dug the ground, and faqaʾa al-ʿayn, he put out the eye, said also of a pustule that burst. The woodpecker is known for exactly this: it bores into trees with its beak, and the first thing Ovid's Picus does as a bird is strike the oaks with his beak.

Linguistic Root

De Vaan derives pīcus from Proto-Italic *piko-; Umbrian has peico in the same sense, and a god named piquier martier, matched in Latin by Picus Martius, Picus the bird of Mars. He gives a possible Indo-European *(s)piko-, with a question mark, says the word may imitate the bird's shrill, laughing cry, and suggests the long ī came from pīca, the magpie. Pliny says woodpeckers are small birds with hooked claws, named after Mars and of great importance in augury. So -us is the case ending and the reading covers pīc- alone: p is f, and c is q.

In the method's Latin table q becomes c or qu, and f answers p in the project's earlier readings, as in Pandora. Lane gives faqr, the boring of beads for stringing, faqqartu al-kharaz, I bored the beads, faqr also as cleaving or rending, faqara al-arḍ, he dug the ground, faqaʾa al-ʿayn, he put out the eye, infaqaʾat al-bathrah, the pustule burst, and mufaqqiʾah, watercourses that cleave the earth. Together f and q mean opening a hole in something hard. The limit of the reading is that it takes two letters that many Arabic roots share, so it needs a Semitic witness to a name for the woodpecker, or for boring wood, with f and q.

Key Mythic Narratives

Picus in Plutarch

Plutarch makes Picus and Faunus two demigods haunting the Aventine, like Satyrs, who used drugs and spells and roamed Italy with tricks like those of the Idaean Dactyls of the Greeks. When Numa bound them they changed into fearful shapes, then told him what would come. In the Roman Questions he calls the Circe who enchanted Picus his wife.

Wolf and woodpecker together

Plutarch reports from Nigidius that wherever the woodpecker is found, in foothills and thickly wooded places, the wolf is found too. So the two animals that keep the twins alive live in the same place, the woods at the edge of the city.

Symbolic Reading

The Roman rereading essay makes Mars older than a god of war: the power of spring that opens the earth, and the father of the city who came out of the Italian wild. His animals in the essay are the animals of that wild: the wolf that suckles, and the woodpecker that feeds and prophesies. This meets what Picus does in the stories: a king without a city who lives in the woods and knows the hidden, and who then keeps the children of the first city alive before it is built.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Odin has two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, whom he sends out at dawn to fly over the world; they come back and tell him all they have seen and heard. In Norse and Roman story alike the bird carries knowledge of hidden things to the one who asks, though Odin's ravens are the god's servants while Picus is himself a god turned bird.

In the Shahnameh the Simurgh sees a child left by his father on Mount Alborz, carries him to her nest and feeds him with her young until he grows up; he is Zal. This is what the woodpecker does for the twins exposed by the Tiber: a bird feeds an abandoned child who will later lead his people. Both stories belong with the divine twins and the exposed child kept alive by animals.

The Circe who enchanted Picus is the Circe of the Odyssey, daughter of Helios, who turned the companions of Odysseus into swine with her wand and herbs. In both stories she changes men with a wand, but Odysseus overcomes her with a herb from Hermes and wins his men back, while Picus stays a bird.