“Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.” Flavius Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews II.10 (circa A.D. 94), recounts one of those mighty deeds: While on the march against the Ethiopians

[Moses] gave a wonderful demonstration of his sagacity; when the ground was difficult to be passed over, because of the multitude of serpents […], Moses invented a wonderful stratagem to preserve the army safe, and without hurt; for he made baskets, like unto arks, of sedge, and filled them with ibes, and carried them along with them; which animal is the greatest enemy to serpents imaginable, for they fly from them when they come near them; and as they fly they are caught and devoured by them, as if it were done by the harts; but the ibes are tame creatures, and only enemies to the serpentine kind: but about these ibes I say no more at present, since the Greeks themselves are not unacquainted with this sort of bird. As soon, therefore, as Moses was come to the land which was the breeder of these serpents, he let loose the ibes, and by their means repelled the serpentine kind, and used them for his assistants before the army came upon that ground. When he had therefore proceeded thus on his journey, he came upon the Ethiopians before they expected him; and, joining battle with them, he beat them, and deprived them of the hopes they had of success against the Egyptians, and went on in overthrowing their cities, and indeed made a great slaughter of these Ethiopians.

Translator William Whiston adds a footnote:

Pliny speaks of these birds called Ibes, and says [Natural History 10.28], “The Egyptians invoked them against the serpents.”

In other words: “The little bird attacks the green snake, and in an astounding flurry drives the snake away.” Now if only I knew a classical reason why the rod should scare the bird…

Roughly the same legend is recounted in the Book of Jasher 24.4–7, although that telling omits the wicker cages.

My “[…]” elides Josephus’ lengthy parenthetical:

(which it produces in vast numbers, and, indeed, is singular in some of those productions, which other countries do not breed, and yet such as are worse than others in power and mischief, and an unusual fierceness of sight, some of which ascend out of the ground unseen, and also fly in the air, and so come upon men at unawares, and do them a mischief)

Serendipitously, in between bookmarking that passage in Josephus for its Adventure resonance and actually getting around to blogging it, I read Canto XXIV of Dante’s Inferno (circa A.D. 1310, tr. Hollander), in which the poet writes of Malebolge’s seventh ditch:

In it I saw a dreadful swarm of serpents,
of so strange a kind that even now
when I remember them it chills my blood.

Let Libya with all her sands no longer boast,
for though she fosters chelydri, jaculi,
phareae, cenchres, and amphisbaena,

she never reared so many venomous pests,
nor so appalling — not with all of Ethiopia
and the lands that lie along the Red Sea coast.

The “Libya” here is the one depicted in gory detail by Lucan’s Pharsalia (circa A.D. 65), book IX (tr. J. D. Duff):

In this land [Medusa’s blood] sent up the asp […] And there the huge haemorrhois, which will not suffer the blood of its victim to stay in the veins, opens out its scaly coils; there is the chersydros, created to inhabit the Syrtis, half land and half sea; the chelydrus, whose track smokes as it glides along; the cenchris, which moves ever in a straight line — its belly is more thickly chequered and spotted than the Theban serpentine with its minute patterns; the ammodytes, of the same colour as the scorched sand and indistinguishable from it; the cerastes, which wanders about as its spine makes it turn; the scytale, which alone can shed its skin while the rime is still scattered over the ground; the dried-up dipsas; the fell amphisbaena, that moves towards each of its two heads; the natrix, which pollutes waters, and the iaculus, that can fly; the parias, that is content to plough a track with its tail; the greedy prester, that opens wide its foaming mouth; the deadly seps, that destroys the bones with the body […]

In fact Dante shows us a flying iaculus in Inferno XXIV.97–120, piercing the body of the sinner Vanni Fucci and turning him (temporarily) to ash — one-upping Lucan’s own depiction in IX.822–827.

Josephus (tr. Whiston) writes that the snakes are devoured by the ibises “as if it were done by the harts.” I didn’t understand this reference at all; but Henry St John Thackeray, in his circa-1930 translation for the Loeb Classical Library, gives a useful footnote:

I was tempted to read ὑπ᾽ ἐλάφ<ροτέρ>ων “by their nimbler adversaries”; but no emendation is needed. Bochart, Hierozoicon, i.885 f. (1675), quotes an array of classical allusions to serpent-eating stags, who, according to one scholiast, derived their very name from the habit: εἴρηται δὲ παρὰ τὸ ἑλεῖν τὰς ὄφεις, οἱονεὶ ἑλοφίς τις ὤν! See Mair’s Oppian (L.C.L.), ad Cyn. ii. 233, Hal. ii. 289.

In other words (if my computer-assisted Ancient Greek is anything to go on), the Homeric scholiast is claiming that elaphus “deer”’s full name is elein tas opheis “grasper of snakes.” (For more contrived etymologies, see Cratylus.)