Daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, by Zeuxippe, and sister of Philomela, Erechtheus, and Butes. Given in marriage to the Thracian Tereus, son of Ares, she bore him a son, Itys; when Tereus raped her sister and cut out her tongue, the two women avenged the outrage by killing Itys and serving him to his father, and the gods turned them all to birds.1
Pandion married Zeuxippe, his mother's sister, and begat two daughters, Procne and Philomela, and twin sons, Erechtheus and Butes. When war broke out with Labdacus over a question of boundaries, Pandion called in Tereus, son of Ares, from Thrace; and having with his help brought the war to a successful close, he gave Tereus his own daughter Procne in marriage. Tereus had by her a son, Itys.2
Ovid tells the marriage as an alliance of arms turned to ruin. No barbarian horde gathered from distant seas had alarmed the Athenian walls when Tereus, mighty king of Thrace and son of Gradivus, came to the city's defense and won glory in war; in payment Pandion bound him to his daughter Procne in wedlock. But the omens were black: neither Juno who guards the marriage rites nor Hymenaeus nor any Grace attended; the Furies held torches snatched from a funeral pyre, and a boding owl settled on the roof of the bridal chamber.3
Having fallen in love with Philomela, Tereus seduced her, told her Procne was dead, and cut out her tongue so she could not speak the crime. Philomela wove the truth into a robe and so revealed her sorrows to her sister. Procne sought her out, and the two together killed her son Itys and, having boiled him, set the flesh before Tereus for his supper. Then they fled in haste. When Tereus learned what had been done, he snatched up an axe and pursued them; overtaken at Daulia in Phocis, all three prayed to be turned into birds, and Procne became a nightingale, Philomela a swallow, and Tereus a hoopoe.4
Hyginus reverses the marriage and the birds alike. Tereus, son of Mars, already wed to Progne, came to Athens and asked Pandion for his other daughter, claiming Progne had died; Pandion granted the favor and sent Philomela. After Tereus violated her, his wife, learning the crime, joined her in vengeance, and as he pursued the fleeing sisters the gods in pity changed Progne into a swallow, Philomela into a nightingale, and Tereus, they say, into a hawk.5
Pausanias treats the tale as cult and monument rather than fable. Pandion made the Thracian marriage alliance for power's sake, but no mortal may overstep what the gods send; Tereus, though wedded to Procne, dishonored Philomela and mangled the girl, so that the women avenged her. On the Athenian Acropolis stood a group, dedicated by Alcamenes, of Procne already resolved upon the boy with Itys beside her. At Daulis the women served Tereus his own son, the first pollution of the dining-table among men; Tereus killed himself at Megara, where the Megarians raised him a barrow, and the Daulians said Procne carried Athena's ancient wooden image there from Athens. The metamorphosis into nightingale and swallow, Pausanias reasons, springs only from the plaintive, lamenting note of those birds.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
