Grouping Legendary creature Similar creatures Siren, sphinx, centaur | Sub grouping Hybrid Mythology Greek and Roman | |
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Similar Sphinx, Centaur, Werewolf | ||
In Greek mythology and Roman mythology, a harpy (plural harpies, Greek: ἅρπυια, harpyia, [hárpyi̯a]; Latin: harpȳia) was a female monster in the form of a bird with a human face. They steal food from their victims while they are eating and carry evildoers (especially those who have killed their family) to the Erinyes. They seem originally to have been wind spirits. Their name means "snatchers".
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Homer wrote that a harpy was the mother of the two horses of Achilles sired by the West Wind Zephyrus.
Hesiod calls them two "lovely-haired" creatures, the daughters of Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra (not to be confused with Electra, daughter of King Agamemnon), who were sisters of Iris. Pottery art depicting the harpies featured beautiful women with wings. Roman and Byzantine writers detailed their ugliness.
Mythology
King Phineus of Thrace was given the gift of prophecy by Zeus. Angry that Phineus gave away the god's secret plan, Zeus punished him by blinding him and putting him on an island with a buffet of food which he could never eat because the harpies always arrived to steal the food out of his hands before he could satisfy his hunger, and befouled the remains of his food. This continued until the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts. The Boreads, sons of Boreas, the North Wind, who also could fly, succeeded in driving off the harpies, but without killing any of them, following a request from Iris, who promised that Phineus would not be bothered by the harpies again. "The dogs of great Zeus" returned to their "cave in Minoan Crete". Thankful for their help, Phineus told the Argonauts how to pass the Symplegades.
In this form they were agents of punishment who abducted people and tortured them on their way to Tartarus. They were vicious, cruel and violent. They lived on the islands of the Strophades. They were usually seen as the personifications of the destructive nature of wind. The harpies in this tradition are now thought of as three sisters instead of the original two. Hesiod's two Harpies are named Aello ("storm swift") and Ocypete ("the swift wing"), and Virgil added Celaeno ("the dark") as a third. Homer knew of a Harpy named Podarge ("fleet-foot").
Aeneas encountered harpies on the Strophades as they repeatedly made off with the feast the Trojans were setting. Celaeno utters a prophecy: the Trojans will be so hungry they will eat their tables before they reach the end of their journey. The Trojans fled in fear.
Harpies remained vivid in the Middle Ages. In Canto XIII of his Inferno, Dante Alighieri envisages the tortured wood infested with harpies, where the suicides have their punishment in the seventh ring of Hell:
William Blake was inspired by Dante's description in his pencil, ink and watercolour "The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides" (Tate Gallery, London).
Linguistic use and application
The harpy eagle is a real bird named after the mythological animal.
The term is often used metaphorically to refer to a nasty or annoying woman. In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick spots the sharp-tongued Beatrice approaching and exclaims to the prince, Don Pedro, that he would do an assortment of arduous tasks for him "rather than hold three words conference with this harpy!"
Heraldry
In the Middle Ages, the harpy, often called the Jungfrauenadler or "virgin eagle" (although it may not have been modeled after the original harpy of Greek mythology) (al, became a popular charge in heraldry, particularly in East Frisia, seen on, among others, the coats-of-arms of Rietburg, Liechtenstein, and the Cirksena.
In popular culture
Harpies are referenced in present-day culture, especially in fiction and fantasy.
Examples include: