The Harpies

The meal Phineus cannot keep

Food is placed before the blind seer Phineus, and the Harpies drop from the sky. They carry off most of it and foul what remains so thoroughly that nobody can eat. The winged sons of Boreas, sailing with the Argonauts, take flight after them. The pursuit can end only with death or an oath.

Homer uses Harpies differently, as powers that snatch people away without leaving a body. Telemachus imagines them sweeping Odysseus from the world; Penelope invokes them when she wishes to disappear. One named Harpy has another role: Podarge mates with the West Wind and bears Achilles’s immortal horses beside Ocean. The table-raiders of Phineus belong to the fuller genealogy and story preserved by later writers.

Who gives them a family

Hesiod’s Theogony is the first surviving text to make the Harpies daughters rather than a figure of speech. Thaumas, a son of Pontus, marries the Oceanid Electra, and she bears him swift Iris and the long-haired Harpies, Aello and Ocypete (Theogony 265-267). Iris, the gods’ own messenger, is therefore the Harpies’ full sister in the earliest genealogy that names either.

How many there were, and what to call them

Ancient writers never settle on a number. Hesiod and, centuries later, Apollodorus count two Harpies, Aello and Ocypete; other writers make it three and attach further names to the group, among them Aellopos, Nicothoe, Ocythoe, Ocypode, Celaeno and Acholoe, so that between Homer’s Podarge and this later crowding, at least nine personal names survive for what is nominally a small set of sisters. The winged form is old as well as the crowd of names: in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, written in the mid-fifth century BC, the Pythia recoils from the Furies she has just seen and says she once saw something else in a painting, creatures carrying off the feast of Phineus, winged, unlike the black and wingless shapes in front of her now (Eumenides 49-52).

Whether the Boreads killed them or let them go

Apollodorus records the chase to two different endings and does not choose between them. In one, the Boreads run the Harpies down: one falls into the river Tigres in the Peloponnese, and the other, Ocypete, reaches islands off Greece’s western coast and dies there of exhaustion, “which are now called Strophades after her; for when she came to them she turned and being at the shore fell for very weariness” (Library 1.9.21). In the other, which Apollodorus attributes to Apollonius by name, “the Harpies were pursued to the Strophades Islands and suffered no harm, having sworn an oath that they would wrong Phineus no more” (Library 1.9.21). Apollonius’s own poem gives the same islands the same new name for the same reason, recording that men now call them Strophades, having before called them Plotai, the Floating Islands (Argonautica 2.295-296) — without settling, on either page, whether anyone died to earn it.

In Apollonius, Iris intervenes because the Harpies are her sisters. She makes the Boreads swear to stop, and the Harpies promise never again to torment Phineus. The messenger goddess does not deny the harm already done; she prevents her family from being destroyed for it.

The island name remembers the turn rather than selecting an ending. South of Zakynthos, the Strophades can mark the point where pursuers reversed course after an oath or where exhausted quarry fell. Apollodorus preserves both explanations in the same chapter, leaving death and reprieve beside one another.