Son of Procne, daughter of Pandion king of Athens, by Tereus the Thracian, son of Ares. When his mother learned that Tereus had ravished and silenced her sister Philomela, she killed Itys, boiled him, and served him up for supper to his unwitting father — the act around which the whole tragedy of Tereus turns.1
Pandion of Athens gave his daughter Procne in marriage to Tereus, son of Ares, the Thracian who had brought him victory in his boundary war with Labdacus, and by him she bore a son, Itys. Tereus then conceived a passion for Procne's sister Philomela; he forced her, cut out her tongue so she could not accuse him, and gave out that Procne was dead. But Philomela wove her sorrows into a robe, and Procne, reading the woven characters, sought her out — and took her revenge through their child. She killed Itys, boiled him, and set him before his unwitting father at supper, then fled with her sister in haste.2
Ovid lingers over the killing. Itys was the firstborn of Tereus and Procne, his birthday kept each year with festival and song; but as Procne stood raving for revenge, the boy came running to call her mother, and she saw in his face the image of his father. A pang of pity stayed her, yet she steeled herself, dragged him to a far corner of the house, and ran him through while he stretched out his hands crying 'Mother!' — and Philomela cut his throat. Together they mangled the body, boiled part and roasted part, and Procne served the loathsome feast. When Tereus, gorging on his own flesh, called for Itys to join him, Philomela flung the severed head into his face. In this telling it is Procne who becomes the swallow, marked on the breast with the brand of murder, while Tereus is turned into the crested hoopoe.3
The sources part over who did the deed and which bird each became. Apollodorus has Procne alone kill Itys and gives the metamorphoses as Procne the nightingale, Philomela the swallow, Tereus the hoopoe; Hyginus too names Procne as the killer but reverses the sisters — Procne the swallow, Philomela the nightingale — and makes Tereus a hawk, adding that prodigies had warned Tereus his son would die by a kinsman's hand, so that in fear he slew his own innocent brother Dryas. Pausanias, who saw Itys with Procne 'who has already made up her mind about the boy' carved by Alcamenes on the Athenian Acropolis, rationalizes the birds: he thought the women simply wasted away weeping at Athens, and the tale of their change into nightingale and swallow grew from the plaintive, lamenting note of those birds.4
Homer knows a darker, differently-cast version of a mother who slew her own child Itylus. He likens the grieving Penelope to the daughter of Pandareus, the nightingale of the greenwood, who in spring pours out her wailing song for her dear son Itylus, the child of king Zethus, whom she had once killed unawares with the sword. The name and the slaying echo the Itys story, but the parentage is wholly other — a separate strand of the same haunting motif.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
