Harpy

The Harpies were born to Thaumas, a sea god of wonder and the deep, and Electra, an Oceanid nymph of the vast river Oceanus that encircled the world. Their sister was Iris, the rainbow goddess who carried messages between heaven and earth on wings of many colours. In the earliest account, the poet Hesiod described the Harpies as lovely-haired maidens with wings so swift they outpaced the winds themselves. He named two of them: Aello, whose name means "Storm-Wind," and Ocypete, whose name means "Swift-Wing." Later poets added more names -- Podarge, "Fleet-Foot," who grazed beside the swirling waters of Oceanus; and Celaeno, "The Dark," a storm-cloud given form. They were not born evil, but they were born to serve the will of the gods, and their nature was as changeable and destructive as the gales they personified.

The most famous tale of the Harpies is their torment of King Phineus of Thrace, a seer who had been granted the gift of prophecy by the gods but had used it to reveal too much of the divine plan to mortal ears. As punishment, Zeus struck him blind and sent the Harpies to plague him for the rest of his days. Whenever a meal was set before the king, the creatures would descend from the sky with a shriek like tearing metal, snatching the food from his hands and befouling what little they left behind with a stinking substance that rendered it inedible. Phineus wasted away, his belly hollow, his fingers grasping at empty air. When the hero Jason and his crew of Argonauts -- the band of adventurers who sailed aboard the ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece -- came to Thrace, they found the king emaciated and desperate. Phineus promised to guide them through the perilous seas ahead if they would free him from his curse. Two of the Argonauts, Zetes and Calais, were the Boreads, winged sons of Boreas the North Wind. They rose into the air and pursued the Harpies with swords drawn, chasing them across the sky until the goddess Iris, their own sister, intervened. She swore by the River Styx, the oath by which even the gods themselves are bound, that the Harpies would never trouble Phineus again. The creatures turned and fled to the Strophades Islands in the Ionian Sea, where they made their nests in strange trees and continued to haunt the dreams of sailors.

In another tale, the Harpies served as agents of divine vengeance against the daughters of Pandareus, a king who had dared to steal the golden dog that Rhea, the mother of Zeus, had set to guard the infant god on the island of Crete. For this theft, Pandareus was struck dead, but his daughters -- Merope, Cleothera, and Aerope -- were left orphaned. The goddess Aphrodite took pity on them and raised them with her own hands, intending to find them worthy husbands when they came of age. But while Aphrodite was away on Olympus, the Harpies swept down and snatched the girls from their beds, carrying them off through the air to serve as handmaidens to the Erinnyes, the three goddesses of vengeance who pursued sinners with whips and serpents. The girls were lost to the world of the living, their fate a warning that the punishment of the gods extended beyond the guilty to those they loved.

The Harpies also appear in the Roman epic of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who led the survivors of fallen Troy across the sea to find a new homeland in Italy. When Aeneas and his crew landed on the Strophades Islands, they found cattle and sheep grazing in the meadows and slaughtered them for a feast, not knowing the animals belonged to the Harpies. The creatures descended upon the Trojans with shrieks of fury, tearing at the meat and spoiling the rest with their droppings. Aeneas and his men drew their swords and fought back, but the Harpies were protected by their feathers and could not be harmed. Celaeno, the eldest and darkest of the sisters, perched upon a high rock and pronounced a terrible prophecy: Aeneas would reach Italy, she said, but not before dread hunger forced him and his followers to gnaw at their own tables with their teeth. The Trojans fled in terror, and the prophecy came true years later when they were so starved upon the shores of Italy that they ate the thin bread-crusts they used as plates -- thus fulfilling the curse of the Harpy.

The image of the Harpy shifted across the ages. In the oldest Greek songs she was a winged woman of terrible beauty, swift as the storm winds she commanded. But by the time of the tragedian Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE, she had become a creature of ugliness and filth, her face twisted with hunger, her hands ending in long claws, her body a grotesque mixture of woman and bird. The Roman poet Virgil described her as bird-bodied and girl-faced, with talons for hands and a belly swollen with feathers, her droppings so foul they poisoned whatever they touched. In Dante's Inferno, written over a thousand years later, the Harpies nested in the twisted trees of the Wood of the Suicides, their claws tearing at the branches that held the souls of those who had taken their own lives. In medieval heraldry, the Harpy became a symbol of ferocity and greed, her image emblazoned upon the shields of knights from East Frisia to the edges of the known world. Yet through all these transformations, her essence remained the same: she was the sudden disappearance, the snatching wind, the divine punishment that fell from the sky without warning.