In Greek mythology, Itys was a minor Thracian figure, the son of Tereus, a king of Thrace, by his Athenian wife Procne. After Tereus raped and mutilated Procne's sister Philomela, Itys was murdered by his own mother and aunt and served as food to his father in a revenge plot. Following these events his family were transformed into birds, and in some versions Itys joined them. The myth survives in several accounts, most famously in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and has been known since at least the sixth century BC.
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I.Family
Itys was the son of Procne, a princess of Athens, and Tereus, a Thracian king, making him a nephew to Philomela. Through his father he was a grandson of the god of war, Ares.
II.Mythology
Standard tale — Itys was born and raised in Thrace. While he was still a child, his father Tereus raped Philomela as he was escorting her to visit her sister Procne. Tereus then cut out Philomela's tongue so that she could never tell anyone her story, and abandoned her away from his palace. Philomela wove an account of what had happened into a tapestry and sent it to Procne.
Upon receiving the tapestry, Procne rescued her sister and planned her revenge. In her rage she slew Itys, seeing in him only the image of his father, then boiled him and served him as a meal to Tereus. After the meal the sisters presented Tereus with his son's severed head. All three were subsequently transformed into birds, with Philomela or Procne becoming either a swallow or a nightingale. "Itys" was also the name for the plaintive cry of the nightingale.
Other versions — Pausanias writes instead that Tereus was so remorseful for his actions against Philomela, and for Itys's fate at the hands of the women, that he killed himself. Eustathius's version reverses the sisters, so that Philomela married Tereus and became the mother of Itys. In some versions Itys himself was transformed into a bird like the rest of his family, specifically a pheasant, to be admired for its fine plumage. In some texts Itys is called Itylus instead, the name of another mythological figure who was killed by his mother Aëdon, who then transformed into a nightingale.
III.Development
The fullest surviving account of Itys's tale comes via the Roman poet Ovid and his narrative poem the Metamorphoses; however, the myth itself is much older, and Ovid's telling was largely influenced by Sophocles's now-lost tragedy Tereus. The scholar Jenny Marsh theorized that Sophocles must have borrowed certain elements of the plot from Euripides's drama Medea. She argues that the element of the enraged wife killing her own child in an act of revenge against her husband's actions was taken directly from Euripides, suggesting this component may not have appeared in earlier versions of the Procne and Philomela myth.