Harpy

• 1. Introduction

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  Harpies appear in Homeric poems as something the Greek world already understood. Their name means "snatchers" or "swift robbers," a label that told listeners what these creatures were for. When a person vanished without explanation in the ancient world, it was said the harpies had taken them.

  Half-human and half-bird, the harpies were originally thought to personify the destructive nature of wind. They were called "the hounds of mighty Zeus" and served as his ministers. They stole food from their victims mid-meal, and they carried evildoers to the Erinyes, chthonic goddesses of vengeance. Those who had killed their own families were especially said to be taken.

  Across centuries of storytelling, different writers pictured entirely different creatures. Some versions are almost serene; others are profoundly disturbing. What begins as a wind spirit ends as a guardian of Tartarus and, centuries later, a creature haunting the pages of Dante's Inferno.

• 2. Shifting Shapes

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  Hesiod imagined two harpies: Aello and Okypete, lovely-haired and winged, flying as fast as the blowing winds. They soared and swooped high aloft, keeping pace with the swiftest birds in flight. His vision was almost serene.

  By the time of Aeschylus, the beautiful had started to turn. In The Eumenides, the Pythian priestess recalled seeing harpies in a painting, carrying off the feast of Phineus. She used that memory to describe something even more alarming. The Erinyes before her, wingless and black, were more revolting than the painted harpies she had seen.

  Virgil described them as "bird-bodied, girl-faced things" with talons for hands and faces "haggard with hunger insatiable," leaving behind abominable droppings. Hyginus gave them cocks' heads, wings, and human arms with great claws, their lower bodies female.

  Pottery art depicted them quite differently, as beautiful women with wings. Ovid described them as human-vultures. Across most written accounts, the one shared detail was faces pale with hunger and long claws on their legs.

  Their abode was described as either the Strophades islands, a place at the entrance of Orcus, or a cave in Minoan Crete.

• 3. Winds and Bloodlines

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  Hesiod named the harpies as daughters of Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, making them sisters of Iris, the rainbow goddess. Hyginus complicated matters by naming a figure called Ozomene as their mother, but he also cited Electra in the same source. Later scholars noted that Ozomene was simply another name for Electra.

  Other ancient writers gave the paternity elsewhere. Valerius said that Typhoeus, the monster also called Typhon, was their father. Servius offered two further candidates: the harpies were daughters of either Pontus and Gaea, or of Poseidon.

  The harpy Podarge, whose name means "fleet-foot," earned a role no other harpy held. Homer named her as the mother of Balius and Xanthus, the immortal horses of Achilles, fathered by the West Wind Zephyrus. Quintus Smyrnaeus also named Zephyrus as the father of the swift horse Arion, born from Podarge. According to Nonnus, Aello and the North Wind Boreas were parents of Xanthus and Podarkes, horses of the Athenian king Erechtheus. A pair called Phlogeus and Harpagos, also descended from Podarge, were given by Hermes to the Dioscuri for the chariot race at the funeral games of Pelias.

  Boreas had fathered his own children with the harpy Aello. His sons, the Boreads, would be the only figures in myth fast enough to pursue the harpies through the open sky.

• 4. The Phineus Ordeal

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  King Phineus of Thrace received the gift of prophecy from Zeus, and that gift destroyed him. When he revealed too much of the god's plan, Zeus blinded him and condemned him to live beside a feast he could never eat. Every time Phineus reached for food, the harpies descended and took it.

  Later writers specified the method: some said the harpies devoured the food themselves; others said they fouled it with a stinking substance, leaving it unfit to eat. Either way, Phineus was always starving.

  Jason and the Argonauts arrived and struck a deal. Phineus would guide them through treacherous waters if they freed him from the harpies. The Boreads, Zetes and Calais, took to the air in pursuit. An ancient prophecy governed the contest: the harpies would die at the hands of the Boreads, but the Boreads themselves would die if they could not overtake the harpies.

  One harpy fell into the river Tigris during the chase, which was afterward named Harpys in her memory. The other reached the Echinades islands, collapsed from exhaustion alongside her pursuer, and swore to leave Phineus in peace. In another version, Iris or Hermes appeared and commanded the Boreads to stand down, with the same promise given by the harpies. They returned to their cave in Minoan Crete. Phineus, grateful, told the Argonauts how to safely pass the Symplegades.

  Aeneas and the Trojans later landed on the Strophades and set out a feast; the harpies repeatedly stole it. Celaeno delivered a prophecy: before the Trojans reached their destination, hunger would drive them to eat their own tables. The Trojans fled.

  A late version of the story from the scholar Tzetzes offered a very different origin. He wrote that Phineus in his old age had two daughters named Eraseia and Harpyreia who lived recklessly, falling into poverty and famine. Two men named Zetes and Calais eventually took them away. Tzetzes argued this mundane incident was the origin of the entire myth, a reading also noted by Apollonius in his own account of the Argonauts.

  The river later called Harpys still marked the spot in ancient geography where the myth had briefly touched earth.

• 5. Medieval and Beyond

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  Dante Alighieri gave the harpies a home in the seventh ring of Hell, nesting in the wood where suicides received their punishment, as he described in the Inferno's 13th Canto. William Blake was moved by that passage to paint The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides, a pencil, ink, and watercolour work now held at the Tate Gallery in London.

  Ludovico Ariosto adapted the Phineus story for Canto XXXIII of Orlando Furioso, recasting the blinded figure as Senapo, the Christian Ethiopian Emperor also known as Prester John. God had blinded him, and harpies contaminated every meal. The paladin Astolfo, from the court of Charlemagne, delivered him from the torment.

  Shakespeare used harpies in two plays. In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel tormented Antonio, Sebastian, and Alonso by staging a banquet that recalled the scene from the Aeneid. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick spots the sharp-tongued Beatrice and tells the prince Don Pedro he would rather perform any number of arduous tasks "than hold three words conference with this harpy." That metaphorical use spread, and the term entered common speech as a name for a nasty or annoying woman.

  The harpy eagle, a real bird, took its name from the mythological creature. In German heraldry, the figure was called the Jungfrauadler, or "maiden eagle," and became especially common in East Frisia. The coats-of-arms of Rietberg, Liechtenstein, and the Cirksena family all carried it. Nuremberg's civic device used the harpy as early as 1243, when the myths behind the image were already more than two thousand years old.