59. That bird in the country of Arabia, which is called the Phoenix, restored by the renovating juices of its flesh, after being dead comes to life again: shall we believe that men alone are not raised up again? Yet we know this by common report and the authority of writings, Scripturarum. It is impossible to suppose that St. Ambrose here means Holy Scripture, but is referring to such writers as Herodotus, Tacitus, and Pliny. Other Fathers, Tertullian, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Basil, with several more, refer also to the fable of the Phœnix in speaking of the Resurrection. namely, that the bird referred to has a fixed period of life of five hundred years, and when by some warning of nature it knows that the end of its life is at hand, it furnishes for itself a casket of frankincense and myrrh and other perfumes, and its work and the time being together ended, it enters the casket and dies. Then from its juices a worm comes forth, and grows by degrees into the fashion of the same bird, and its former habits are restored, and borne up by the oarage of its wings it commences once more the course of its renewed life, and discharges a debt of gratitude. For it conveys that casket, whether the tomb of its body or the cradle of its resurrection, in which quitting life it died, and dying it rose again, from Ethiopia to Lycaonia; and so by the resurrection of this bird the people of those regions understand that a period of five hundred years is accomplished. So to that bird the five hundredth is the year of resurrection, but to us the thousandth: St. Ambrose may have believed that the world would end with a.d. 1000, or possibly a thousand is simply taken as a number signifying completeness, as St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, XX. 7) explains the thousand years of Rev. xx. 1. it has its resurrection in this world, we have ours at the end of the world. Many think also that this bird kindles its own funeral pile, and comes to life again from its own ashes.