The Harpies

The meal that is never eaten

Phineus is a blind seer, a man who can see the future, and he is under punishment. Each time food is set before him, the Harpies swoop down on it. They take most of it, and what little they leave smells so foul that nobody can touch it. Every new plate brings the same sentence round again.

The sources do not agree on why he is punished. Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths, gives three reasons and chooses none. In one, the gods blind Phineus because he tells people their future. In another, men blind him after he blinds his own sons when their stepmother urges him to. In the third, a sea god punishes him for showing sailors the way home. Whichever reason a reader takes, the Harpies carry out the sentence.

The sons of the north wind

Help comes with the Argonauts, the crew of the ship Argo, when they stop on their way east. Now the meal can at last be defended. Two of the crew are Zetes and Calais, known as the Boreads. They are the winged sons of Boreas, the north wind, and the only men on board who can fly. So they alone can follow the thieves off the table and up into the air.

The brothers chase the Harpies west, and there the accounts part.

In Apollodorus, the Harpies die. One falls into the river Tigres in the Peloponnese, in southern Greece, and the river takes her name. Ocypete reaches the islands off the western coast of Greece. She turns at the shore and drops from exhaustion. That turn gives the islands their name, the Strophades.

An oath instead of a death

Apollonius, whose poem the Argonautica tells the story of the voyage, lets the Harpies live. Iris, their sister and the messenger of the gods, comes down between them and the two brothers. She forbids the killing, because the Harpies are the hounds of Zeus. She swears that they will not trouble the house of Phineus again. The brothers accept her oath and stop the chase.

In this version, too, the islands get a new name that day. Before then they were the Plotai, the Floating Islands. For Apollonius, it is the Boreads turning for home, and not Ocypete falling, that gives the Strophades their name.

First a word, then a creature

The oldest surviving Harpies have no wings, no table and no bodies. They appear in the Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus and his journey home. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, has no body to bury and no news of his father. So he says the Harpies have swept him away. Later Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, calls on the Harpies when she wishes she could vanish herself. Neither passage describes a raid or a creature. There, the word names a disappearance that nobody can explain.

The Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, then gives one Harpy a body, and an unexpected one. Her name is Podarge. She grazes beside the river Ocean and conceives two immortal horses with the West Wind. The horses belong to Achilles. In the lines that name their mother, they are being harnessed to carry Patroclus, the closest companion of Achilles, into the fight that kills him. Podarge grazes, conceives and becomes a mother. Nothing in the scene touches a spoiled meal.

Names, numbers and a painting

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives the Harpies a family. His poem traces the descent of the gods. In it, Thaumas and Electra, one of the daughters of the river Ocean, have three swift daughters. One is Iris, who carries messages for the gods. The other two are the long-haired Harpies, Aello and Ocypete, who keep pace with the winds and the birds. Iris is therefore their sister.

Hesiod counts two Harpies. Other writers count three, and the surviving stories give them at least nine names between them. No fixed cast ever settled, and the descriptions shift as much as the names.

Only one source makes the wings certain, and there they belong to a picture. In a play by the playwright Aeschylus, the Pythia, the priestess who speaks for the god Apollo at Delphi, has just met the Furies, dark spirits who hunt the guilty. She looks for something to compare them to and recalls a painting of winged raiders carrying off the feast of Phineus. The Furies have no wings, so the comparison fails her, and she looks for another. Aeschylus wrote the scene in the mid-fifth century BC and expected his audience to know the painting without seeing it.