Sometimes you hear a performance called the performer’s “swan song.” It’s supposed to mean that it’s a last performance. The final speech of an ousted politician is sometimes called the same thing. But what do swans have to do with it, and why a song? Swans don’t sing — different kinds of swans make different sorts of noises, but they’re more on the order of hissing, hooting, or whistling — definitely not singing.
The ancient Greeks and Romans, though, thought they did. Well, some ancient Greeks and Romans thought they did. They were going by a myth that swans did sing, but only once, just before they died. Pliny (I think this would have been Pliny the Elder, not his nephew Pliny the Younger or his second cousin Pliny the Middle-Aged) pointed out around the year 77 that it was just a myth, saying “observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false.”
Well okay, that’s not exactly what he said. He would have said something more like “olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis,” but that’s not very helpful, right? In any case, as with most firmly held beliefs, neither reality nor evidence had any effect, and people went right on believing that swans sang before they died.
It was a well publicized myth, too; it was mentioned in writings by Aristotle, Seneca, Euripides, Plato, and Cicero. So that’s where the idea of “swan song” comes from. But as for the actual phrase, humanity had to wait a couple thousand more years. Shakespeare came close when he mentioned it in The Merchant of Venice: “Let music sound while he doth make his choice; / Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, / Fading in music.” But for once he fell short of coining a single, memorable phrase.
It wasn’t until 1831 that “swan song” first appeared in English, in a book by Thomas Carlyle: “The Phoenix soars aloft … or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame.” By the way, “spheral” is supposed to mean “round.” Poetic licenses can stretch pretty far.
So here’s what we’re left with: thousands of years ago some people believed that swans sang a song before they died, even though anyone who actually checked knew it wasn’t true. Then many centuries later, people who didn’t believe that about swans any more came up with a common expression in a different language, based on the myth most of them probably never even heard of — and now everybody somehow knows what the expression means. Makes perfect sense!
