Swan Song

The belief that swans, silent for most of their lives, sing beautifully only as they die was proverbial in ancient Greece by the 3rd century BC, referenced by Socrates in Plato's Phaedo. It was known to be false even in antiquity. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder studied swans directly and concluded, in his Natural History around 77 AD, that "observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false." That didn't stop the image being irresistible to poets: Chaucer used it in the 14th century, and Shakespeare leaned on it in both The Merchant of Venice and Othello. The English phrase "swan song" itself is later still, entering the language around 1831 as a translation of the German "Schwanengesang."