The Harpies

The meal that is never eaten

Food is set before Phineus, a blind seer under punishment, and the Harpies come down on it. They take most of what is there, and what little they leave stinks so badly that nobody can touch it. Every fresh plate is another turn of the same sentence.

Why he is being punished, nobody could agree. Apollodorus gives three reasons and settles on none: the gods took his sight because he told men their future; other men blinded him after he blinded his own sons at their stepmother’s urging; or a sea god punished him for showing sailors the way home. Whichever version a reader takes, the Harpies are how the sentence is served.

When the Argonauts put in on their way east, the meal can finally be defended. Two of the crew are Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of Boreas the north wind, and because they can fly they are the only men aboard who can follow the thieves off the table and into the air.

First a word, then a creature

The oldest surviving Harpies have no wings, no table and no bodies. In the Odyssey, Telemachus has no corpse to bury and no news of his father Odysseus, so he says the Harpies swept the man away. Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, calls on them later when she wants to vanish herself. Neither passage describes a raid or a creature, because the word is doing something else there: it names a disappearance nobody can account for.

Then the Iliad gives one Harpy a body, and it is not the body anyone expects. Podarge grazes beside the river Ocean and conceives two immortal horses to the West Wind. The horses are Achilles’s, and in the lines where Homer names their mother they are being harnessed to carry Patroclus, Achilles’s closest companion, into the fight that kills him. Podarge grazes, conceives, and is somebody’s mother. Nothing in the scene touches a spoiled meal.

The family that gave them names

A genealogy arrives with Hesiod. Thaumas and Electra, one of the Oceanids born to the river Ocean, have three swift daughters: Iris, who carries messages for the gods, and the long-haired Harpies Aello and Ocypete, who keep pace with winds and birds. That makes Iris their sister.

Hesiod counts two Harpies. Other writers count three, and the surviving tradition attaches at least nine names to them. Nobody produced an agreed cast, and the descriptions move as much as the names do.

Wings are certain in one place only, and there they belong to a picture rather than to a creature. At Delphi the Pythia, the priestess who speaks Apollo’s oracles, comes out having just met the Furies, the black spirits who hunt the guilty, and reaches for something to compare them to: a painting of winged raiders carrying off Phineus’s feast. The Furies have no wings, so the comparison fails her and she has to find another name for them. Aeschylus wrote the scene in the mid-fifth century BC and expected his audience to know the painting without being shown it.

The chase ends twice

Zetes and Calais drive the Harpies west, and there the accounts separate.

Apollodorus kills them. One falls into the river Tigres in the Peloponnese, which is renamed after her. Ocypete reaches the islands off Greece’s western coast, turns at the shore and drops from exhaustion, and that turn is what gives the Strophades their name.

Apollonius lets them live. Iris comes down between her sisters and the Boreads and forbids the killing, because the Harpies are hounds of Zeus, and she swears they will trouble Phineus’s house no more. The brothers accept the oath and break off. The islands had been the Plotai, the Floating Islands, until that day; in Apollonius it is the Boreads turning for home, and not Ocypete falling, that renames them.