In Greek mythology, the SWAN was a bird consecrated to Apollo, and it was therefore considered a symbol of Harmony and Beauty and its limited capabilities as a singer were sublimated to those of songbirds.
Aesop's fable of "The Swan Mistaken for a Goose" incorporates the swan song legend thus: "The swan, who had been caught by mistake instead of the goose, began to sing as a prelude to its own demise. His voice was recognized and the song saved his life."[1] There is a subsequent reference in Aeschylus' Agamemnon from 458 BC. In that play, Clytemnestra compares the dead Cassandra to a swan who has "sung her last final lament". Plato's Phaedo records Socrates saying that, although swans sing in early life, they do not do so as beautifully as before they die. Aristotle also noted that swans "are musical, and sing chiefly at the approach of death". By the third century BC the belief had become a proverb.[2][3]
Ovid mentions it in "The Story of Picus and Canens": "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song."[4] The swan was also described as a singer in the works of the poets
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