Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ocypete (Harpies).
The gallery
Calais and Zetes Deliver Phineus from the Harpies
Bernard Picart, 1733
Picart's engraving for the Temple of the Muses stages the Argonautic rescue of the blind seer Phineus: the winged Boreads Calais and Zetes drive off the Harpies who have been snatching his food. Ocypete — 'Swift-wing' — is one of the named sisters in that flock (with Aello and Celaeno), the storm-spirits Hesiod and Apollonius send against Phineus until the sons of Boreas chase them across the sea. The print is the standard early-modern image of the Harpy episode that defines Ocypete's myth.
Harpies and a Male Figure (Ivory Relief)
Unknown (Archaic Greek), c. 570 BC
A small ivory relief of about 570 BC in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi shows bird-bodied Harpies confronting a male figure in a scene linked to the Argonaut cycle — the same narrative in which Ocypete and her sisters torment Phineus until the Boreads intervene. Archaic ivory carving here already fixes the Harpy as a winged female monster, the visual type Ocypete inherits as one of the swift daughters of Thaumas and Electra (or of Typhon and Echidna, in variant genealogies).
A Harpy
Melchior Lorck, 1582
Melchior Lorck's 1582 woodcut isolates the Harpy as a Renaissance monster study: a woman's torso fused to a raptor's body and claws. The print belongs to the early-modern bestiary tradition that kept Ocypete's kind — the bird-maidens of the Phineus episode — alive as emblems of snatching hunger and storm, independent of any single sister's name.
Harpy
Dosso Dossi, c. 1520–1526
Dosso Dossi's oil in the Museo del Prado (58.4 × 167.8 cm) presents a lone Harpy in a horizontal landscape — the Ferrarese painter's eerie take on the classical bird-woman. Without naming Ocypete, Aello, or Celaeno, the canvas belongs to the same iconographic family as the Argonautic sisters: divine punishment delivered on the wing. It is one of the finest High-Renaissance paintings of the type.
In play
Ocypete
Swift-wing among the Harpies — Ocypete outflies the Boreads until exhaustion lands her on an ocean isle.
Harpy
The bird-maiden trio remains the classical image of divine punishment delivered on the wing.
Jason and the Argonauts
Don Chaffey / Ray Harryhausen
The film's Harpies sequence keeps Ocypete's kind in the Argonaut vocabulary of modern fantasy cinema.