In Greek mythology and Roman mythology, a
harpy was a female monster in the form of
a bird with a human face.
They steal food from their victims while they
are eating and carry evildoers to the Erinyes.
They seem originally to have been wind spirits.
Their name means "snatchers".
Homer wrote that a harpy was the mother of
the two horses of Achilles sired by the West
Wind Zephyros.
Hesiod calls them two "lovely-haired" creatures,
the daughters of Thaumas and Electra, who
were sisters of the Iris.
Pottery art depicting the harpies featured
beautiful women with wings.
Harpies as ugly winged bird-women, e.g. in
Aeschylus' The Eumenides are a late development.
Roman and Byzantine writers detailed their
ugliness.
Mythology
Phineus, a king of Thrace, had the gift of
prophecy.
Zeus, angry that Phineus revealed too much,
punished him by blinding him and putting him
on an island with a buffet of food which he
could never eat.
The harpies always arrived to steal the food
out of his hands before he could satisfy his
hunger, and befouled the remains of his food.
This continued until the arrival of Jason
and the Argonauts.
The Boreads, sons of Boreas, the North Wind,
who also could fly, succeeded in driving off
the harpies, but without killing any of them,
following a request from Iris, who promised
that Phineus would not be bothered by the
harpies again.
"The dogs of great Zeus" returned to their
"cave in Minoan Crete".
Thankful for their help, Phineus told the
Argonauts how to pass the Symplegades.
In this form they were agents of punishment
who abducted people and tortured them on their
way to Tartarus.
They were vicious, cruel and violent.
They lived on the islands of the Strophades.
They were usually seen as the personifications
of the destructive nature of wind.
The harpies in this tradition, now thought
of as three sisters instead of the original
two, Hesiod's two Harpies are named Aello
and Ocypete, Virgil's added Celaeno as a third.
Homer knew of a Harpy named Podarge.
Aeneas encountered harpies on the Strophades
as they repeatedly made off with the feast
the Trojans were setting.
Celaeno cursed them, saying the Trojans will
be so hungry they will eat their tables before
they reach the end of their journey.
The Trojans fled in fear.
Harpies remained vivid in the Middle Ages.
In his Inferno, XIII, Dante envisages the
tortured wood infested with harpies, where
the suicides have their punishment in the
seventh ring of Hell:
William Blake was inspired by Dante's description
in his pencil, ink and watercolour "The Wood
of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the
Suicides".
Linguistic use and application
The American Harpy Eagle is a real bird named
after the mythological animal.
The term is often used metaphorically to refer
to a nasty or annoying woman.
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick
spots the sharp-tongued Beatrice approaching
and exclaims to the Prince, Don Pedro, that
he would do an assortment of arduous tasks
for him "rather than hold three words conference
with this harpy!"
Heraldry
In the Middle Ages, the harpy, often called
the Jungfrauenadler or "virgin eagle", became
a popular charge in heraldry, particularly
in East Frisia, seen on, among others, the
coats-of-arms of Rietburg, Liechtenstein,
and the Cirksena.
See also
Alkonost
Hybrid
Karura
Lauma
Siren
Sirin
Tantalus
Tengu
Kinnara
References
External links
Media related to Harpies at Wikimedia Commons
