Hesiod’s arithmetic put the phoenix at roughly 972 human lifetimes, which tells you he was measuring eternity rather than a bird. This episode follows the phoenix from a Greek name that essentially meant red, through the wildly contradictory descriptions of Pliny the Elder and Lactantius, to Herodotus’s account of a bird sealing its parent inside a ball of myrrh and carrying it to the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, a ritual that looks a lot like Egyptian embalming.

We examine the debate over whether the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptian Bennu or influenced it in reverse, the Roman sightings dated to specific consulships, the Great Year cycle of 1461 years, and the alleged live phoenix exhibited in Rome in 47 AD for the city’s 800th anniversary. Then the bird becomes pure symbol: Gnostic texts, the Old English Exeter Book, Dante, Queen Elizabeth I’s maiden phoenix emblem, Thomas Carlyle’s World Phoenix, and a Neil Gaiman story about eating one.

• Why a fire bird was painted in sapphire and Tyrian purple, the colors of kings
• How Pliny called out an emperor’s fabricated phoenix in real time
• Why Elizabeth I used a self-reproducing bird to answer demands that she marry
• Why heraldic phoenixes are only ever drawn from the chest up
• The Garuda, firebird, Simurgh, and Fenghuang as global cousins of the same idea