Philomela was the younger of two daughters of Pandion I, King of Athens, and the naiad Zeuxippe. Her sister, Procne, was the wife of King Tereus of Thrace. Philomela's other siblings were Erechtheus, Butes, and possibly Teuthras.

While the myth has several variations, the general depiction is that Philomela, after being raped and mutilated by her sister's husband, Tereus, obtains her revenge and is transformed into a bird, either a swallow in Greek versions or a nightingale, a bird renowned for its song, in Roman ones. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the song of the nightingale is often depicted or interpreted as a sorrowful lament. In nature, the female nightingale is mute, and only the male of the species sings.

Ovid and other writers made the association that the etymology of her name was "lover of song", derived from the Greek φιλο- and μέλος ("song") instead of μῆλον ("fruit" or "sheep").

The most complete and extant rendering of the story is found in Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the fifth year of Procne's marriage to Tereus, she asked to see her sister, and Tereus agreed to travel to Athens and escort Philomela to Thrace. But on first seeing her he lusted after her. He forced her into a cabin in the woods and raped her. When she grew defiant and threatened to expose him, he cut out her tongue and abandoned her in the cabin.

Unable to speak, Philomela wove a tapestry (or robe) that told her story and had it sent to Procne. In revenge, Procne killed their son Itys (or Itylus) and served him as a meal to his father Tereus. After Tereus had eaten, the sisters revealed the conspiracy by presenting him with the severed head of his son. Both sisters then fled, pursued by Tereus to Daulia in Phocis, where they prayed to the gods to be turned into birds. The gods transformed the two sisters into a swallow and a nightingale, and Tereus into a hoopoe.

Although the earlier Greek accounts make Procne the nightingale and the tongueless Philomela the silent swallow — more consistent with the facts of the myth — Roman authors tended to swap the bird metamorphosis of the two sisters, so that Philomela became the nightingale and Procne the swallow.

Numerous variations exist over which sister became which bird. Early Greek sources, such as Achilles Tatius and the Bibliotheca, make Philomela the swallow and Procne the nightingale, whereas later Latin texts reverse this, and writers such as Hyginus and Romantic poets like Keats have Philomela become the nightingale despite her mutilation. Eustathius offers an entirely different version in which the sisters' roles are reversed.

Accounts of Tereus's transformation also differ. Sophocles is reported to have made him turn into a large-beaked hawk, while Aristophanes' The Birds and other works identify him as a hoopoe; later translations by Dryden and Gower refer to a lapwing. Pausanias offers a variation in which Tereus, overcome by remorse, kills himself, while Thucydides held that Tereus was not a king of Thrace but came from Daulia in Phocis. A separate Asian cycle of myths features Philomela under the name Chelidon ("swallow") and her sister as Aëdon ("nightingale").

The scholar Jenny Marsh argues that Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus borrowed the infanticide plot element from Euripides' Medea, and suggests that the killing of Itys may not have featured in the original myth but was introduced by Sophocles as a result of this borrowing.

The myth may also reflect social and political themes, contrasting the civilized Athenians with the "barbaric" Thracians of the north.

Beginning with Homer's Odyssey, ancient dramatists and poets referenced the story of Philomela and the nightingale. Sophocles' tragedy Tereus, now lost and surviving only in fragments, was especially influential. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon the prophetess Cassandra invokes the nightingale and Itys while foreseeing her own death, and Aristotle's Poetics cites "the voice of the shuttle" from Sophocles' Tereus as a poetic device aiding recognition. Virgil compared Orpheus's mourning for Eurydice to the lament of the nightingale.

By the 12th century, the French trouvère Chrétien de Troyes adapted Ovidian myths into Old French. Geoffrey Chaucer recounted the tale in The Legend of Good Women and alluded to it in Troilus and Criseyde, while John Gower included it in his Confessio Amantis. References to the myth also appear in late 14th- and early 15th-century motets and musical works.

During the Renaissance, the image of Philomela and the nightingale incorporated elements of mourning and beauty following an act of violence. George Gascoigne's poem "The Steele Glas" (1576) cast Philomel as Poesys (poetry), her sister as satire, and Tereus as "vayne Delight". Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" cited Philomela as an example of how time heals wounds, and Sir Philip Sidney's "The Nightingale" compared his unrequited love to her plight — a comparison some modern critics have called problematic for minimizing her trauma.

William Shakespeare made frequent use of the myth, most notably in Titus Andronicus, where characters directly reference Tereus and Philomela in connection with the rape and mutilation of Lavinia. Philomela also appears in The Rape of Lucrece, Cymbeline, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Titania asks "Philomel" to sing in a lullaby. In Sonnet 102 Shakespeare compares his verse to the nightingale's song, and Emilia Lanier referenced Philomela's "sundry layes" and "mournful ditty" in "The Description of Cookeham".

Romantic poets recast the myth, adapting the nightingale and its song into an image of the poet as master of a superior art. John Keats idealized the nightingale in "Ode to a Nightingale" and employed the Philomela myth in "The Eve of St. Agnes", while Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry that "a poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds". Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale" (1798) sought to move away from associations of melancholy, and William Wordsworth depicted the bird as the voice of nature and an instance of natural poetic creation.

Other notable mentions include William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp performs charades of Philomela; Matthew Arnold's poem "Philomela" (1853); Oscar Wilde's "The Burden of Itys" (1881); Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Itylus"; Ann Yearsley's abolitionist verse invoking Philomela in solidarity with enslaved Africans; and José Rizal's "A la Juventud Filipina", which used her image to inspire Filipinos against Spanish oppression.

In the 20th century, T. S. Eliot directly referenced the myth in The Waste Land (1922) — "The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice" — using it to depict sorrow and pain and the idea that recovery comes only through revenge. His "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" likewise echoes Aeschylus's Agamemnon through the myth. Jorge Luis Borges's "To the Nightingale" compares his poetic efforts to the bird's lament, describing its song as "encrusted with mythology".

Leonard Quirino observes that the plot of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is modeled on the legend of Tereus. Ted Hughes included the tale in Tales from Ovid (1997); Joanna Laurens wrote The Three Birds and Hanoch Levin The Great Whore of Babylon from the story; James Dillon adapted it into an opera (2004); and Milton Babbitt set John Hollander's text in his 1964 vocal work Philomel. Female writers have prominently used the myth to explore rape, women's power, and feminist themes, among them Margaret Atwood, Emma Tennant, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Timberlake Wertenbaker (The Love of the Nightingale, 1989), Erin Shields (If We Were Birds, 2011), and Melissa Studdard.