In Greek and Roman mythology, a harpy is a half-human, half-bird creature often understood as a personification of storm winds. The harpies appear from the Homeric poems onward as swift, snatching spirits associated with destructive natural forces and divine punishment. Their best-known myth has them tormenting the blind seer Phineus by stealing and fouling his food until the winged Boreads drove them off. According to Hesiod they are daughters of Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, and sisters of the rainbow-goddess Iris.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Harpy" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Descriptions
Ancient sources describe harpies inconsistently. They are generally depicted as birds with the heads of maidens, their faces pale with hunger and with long claws on their legs, though in pottery they sometimes appear as beautiful winged women. Ovid characterized them as human-vultures.
Hesiod imagined them as fair-locked and winged maidens who flew as fast as the wind, and named two of them: Ocypete and Aello. Even early sources such as Aeschylus portrayed harpies as ugly winged creatures, and later writers turned them into ever more disgusting monsters.
Virgil wrote of them as bird-bodied, girl-faced things, abominable in their droppings, with hands that are talons. Hyginus described them as feathered, with cocks' heads, wings, and human arms ending in great claws.
II.Functions and abodes
The harpies seem originally to have been wind spirits, personifications of the destructive nature of wind, an idea reflected in their name, which means snatchers or swift robbers.
In myth they stole food from their victims, carried evildoers off to the Erinyes, and abducted people who mysteriously disappeared. Called the hounds of mighty Zeus, they served as agents of divine punishment. Their dwelling is variously placed at the Strophades islands, at the entrance to Orcus, or in a Cretan cave.
III.Names and family
According to Hesiod, the harpies were daughters of Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, which made them sisters of Iris. Different sources give varying parentage: Hyginus named Ozomene as their mother (taken as another name for Electra); Valerius made Typhoeus (Typhon) their father; and Servius suggested Pontus and Gaea, or Poseidon, as parents.
The named harpies include Aello (storm swift), Ocypete (the swift wing), Celaeno (the dark), who was added by Virgil, and Podarge (fleet-foot), known to Homer. Homer identified Podarge as the mother of Achilles' immortal horses Balius and Xanthus, sired by the West Wind Zephyrus.
IV.Mythology
The most famous harpy narrative involves King Phineus of Thrace. Zeus punished the prophetic king by blinding him and stranding him on an island with a banquet of food he could never eat, because the harpies always arrived to snatch it from his hands.
When Jason and the Argonauts arrived, Phineus promised them guidance in exchange for deliverance. The Boreads, the winged sons of Boreas the North Wind, pursued the harpies. By one tradition the harpies were destined to die at the hands of the Boreads, while the Boreads were to die if they failed to overtake them. One harpy fell into the river Tigris (thereafter called Harpys); the other reached the Echinades, afterward named the Strophades. In the end Iris or Hermes commanded the pursuers to let the harpies go, promising that Phineus would suffer no further torment.
Tzetzes offered an alternate, rationalizing explanation: that Phineus's two lazy and impoverished daughters, Eraseia and Harpyreia, were abducted by Zetes and Calais, and that the harpy myths grew out of this episode.
In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas encountered the harpies on the Strophades, where they repeatedly disrupted the Trojans' feasts. The harpy Celaeno uttered a prophecy that the Trojans would grow so hungry that they would devour their own tables before their journey's end, causing the Trojans to flee in fear.
V.Later usage
Medieval and Renaissance writers drew on harpies extensively. Dante's Inferno (Canto XIII) set them in a tortured wood where the souls of suicides are punished in the seventh circle of Hell. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (Canto XXXIII) afflicted the emperor Senapo with harpies in circumstances mirroring Phineus's torment, until he was relieved by the paladin Astolfo. William Blake made artwork inspired by Dante's description, and Shakespeare's The Tempest used the spirit Ariel to torment his enemies in a banquet scene reminiscent of the Aeneid.
The term also became metaphorical for a nasty or annoying woman, as when Benedick calls Beatrice a harpy in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. In heraldry the harpy (called Jungfrauenadler, or maiden eagle, in German) became a popular charge, especially in East Frisia, and Nuremberg used it as early as 1243. The real bird species known as the harpy eagle was named after the mythological creature.