The Harpies, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

The Harpies were daughters of the sea-god Thaumas and the cloud-nymph Electra (and so sisters of Iris the rainbow-messenger), and there were two or three of them: Aello the Storm-swift, Ocypete the Wind-swift, and Celaeno the Dark — though Hesiod knew only the first two. They were depicted as winged women with the talons of birds, and they were swift as the wind itself; their name in Greek means simply "the Snatchers," for they snatched away food and persons and disappeared into the sky.

The most famous of their visitations was at the table of Phineus, the blind prophet-king of Thrace. Phineus had offended the gods (the reasons given vary), and as his punishment the Harpies were sent against him: whenever food was set before the king, they descended upon the table, seized what they could, and befouled what remained, so that he could not eat and was wasting away. When the Argonauts came to his coast, two of their company — Calais and Zetes, the winged sons of Boreas — drove the Harpies away through the air, pursuing them as far as the Strophades islands in the Ionian Sea, where Iris descended from heaven and forbade them to slay the creatures, who were, after all, the hounds of Zeus.

Thereafter the Harpies remained in their islands, and whether they continued to trouble men depended on which poet you read. Virgil places them at the Strophades in the Aeneid, where Aeneas's company stops to sail and is driven off by them with foul cries. To call a person a harpy in the Greek manner was to accuse them of greed and uncleanness; the word has not lost this sense in our own English.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Harpies are introduced in Hesiod (Theogony 265-269), where they are two in number (Aello and Ocypete) and described as 'lovely-haired' — an interesting detail, since later iconography emphasizes their grotesqueness. Apollonius of Rhodes (Argonautica 2.178-300) gives the Phineus episode in full. Virgil's Strophades passage is at Aeneid 3.209-269, where Celaeno the third sister appears as a prophet of doom. Pseudo-Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 1.9.21) preserves the Argonautic version. Iconographically the Harpies were ambiguous in archaic art — sometimes treated as relatively benign wind-spirits — and acquired their thoroughly negative character only in the classical and later periods. The Harpy Tomb from Xanthos in Lycia (c. 480 BCE, now in the British Museum) depicts winged female figures bearing away small souls; the identification of these figures as Harpies is conventional but not certain.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Sibling ofIrisand so sisters of Iris the rainbow-messenger
Rival ofAeneaswhere Aeneas's company stops to sail and is driven off by them with foul cries

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Heroic Bestiary. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.