Procne

Tereus and Philomela

Procne was given to wife to Tereus, a king of Thrace, in some versions because he assisted king Pandion in a war against the Laconians, so Pandion gave him a daughter in marriage.^[3][4][5] During their marriage they had a son named Itys. As years passed, Procne began to feel homesick, and asked her husband to fetch her her younger sister Philomela, so Tereus travelled to Athens in order to escort Philomela to her sister.^[3] Pandion was unsuspecting and Philomela excited, Tereus however conceived a great passion for the beautiful Philomela, which only grew and grew during the journey back home.^[6] In one version, Tereus lied about Procne having died, and asked Pandion for Philomela's hand in marriage.^[7] When they reached the shore, he dragged her into the woods (and, as Ovid introduced, a cabin) and raped her in spite of her protests and pleading.^[8] Philomela then threatened to tell everyone, so he in fear cut her tongue off, and put guards to prevent her from escaping. He then returned to Procne claiming that Philomela had died during the journey; Procne greatly mourned her sister.^[9]

Procne finds out

Some time passed,^{[lower-alpha 1]} and soon a Thracian festival in honour to Dionysus was held, during which it was customary for the Thracian women to gather gifts and send them to their queen.^[10] Philomela, unable to speak or escape her prison, wove in letters in her tapestry or a gown, that spoke of her fate at the hands of Tereus, and sent it to Procne. Once Procne got hands on her tapestry, she disguised herself in bacchic attire, joined the festivities with the other women, and located the cabin in which Philomela was kept captive. She broke in, snatched her sister, dressed her instead in her clothes, and sneaked her into Tereus's palace without anyone seeing them.^[11]

Although Philomela was unable to fully inform Procne of her woes due to no longer possessing a tongue, Procne neverthless promised her sister to avenge the great injustice done to her.^[11] As she was pondering on a fitting way to enact revenge against her husband, her young son Itys entered the chamber in search of his mother. Procne, wanting revenge against Tereus and seeing their son as nothing but an extension of his father, slew him as he screamed and cooked him. Then she invited Tereus for dinner, with the excuse that according to an Athenian custom, the wife had to prepare dinner for her husband away from everyone else.^[12] Tereus ate his son, and when he asked where the child was, the two women presented him with the head of Itys.^[13]

Tereus eats by himself, seated in his tall ancestral chair, and fills his belly with his own child. And in the darkness of his understanding cries ‘Fetch Ithys here’. Procne cannot hide her cruel exultation, and now, eager to be, herself, the messenger of destruction, she cries ‘You have him there, inside, the one you ask for.’ He looks around and questions where the boy is. And then while he is calling out and seeking him, Philomela, springs forward, her hair wet with the dew of that frenzied murder, and hurls the bloodstained head of Itys in his father’s face. Nor was there a time when she wished more strongly to have the power of speech, and to declare her exultation in fitting words.^[12]

Tereus's revenge

Enraged, Tereus grabbed his sword and began to hunt down his wife and her sister with the intention to kill them. The two women ran, but he caught up to them in Daulia, in Phocis,^[14] for which they were later called 'ladies of Daulia'.^[15] The gods, taking notice, transformed them all into birds.^[16] Tereus became a hoopoe, and the women into a nightingale and a swallow. While Greek sources traditionally held that Procne became the singing nightingale and Philomela the silent swallow, Roman authors tended to swap the birds, so that Procne became the swallow, and Philomela the nightingale.^[17] This pattern is only broken by a Hellenistic Greek writer named Agatharchides, who refers to Philomela as a nightingale.^[18] A late antiquity scholiast, Pseudo-Nonnus, names Zeus specifically as the god who put an end to the chase by transforming them all into birds.^[4] As a bird, Procne continued to mourn the death of her child for all time.^[19]

Other versions

The Byzantine scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica swapped the roles of the two sisters, so that Procne is the unmarried woman who was raped and mutilated by Tereus.^[20] One author has Tereus succeed in murdering both Procne and Philomela before they are all transformed into birds, but hoopoes continued to chase swallows and nightingales.^[21]

A more or less identical tale is said of Aëdon ("nightingale", supplanting Procne), Chelidon ("swallow", supplanting Philomela) and Polytechnus (supplanting Tereus); in this version, which takes place in Asia Minor rather than Thrace, Polytechnus loses a bet against his wife and has to find her a female slave, so he rapes (but does not maim) her sister Chelidon.^[22][23] Once Chelidon reveals to Aëdon what has happened, the myth proceeds as above, with the difference that the two women manage to reach their father (who is Pandareus here) who has his servants beat and tie up Polytechnus, and then smeared with honey and left to the mercy of insects.^[23] Aëdon, in pity, scares the flies away from her husband, enraging her family. As her father, mother and brother try to attack her, the gods intervene at last and change them all into birds (Aëdon and Chelidon as per usual, but Polytechnus becomes a woodpecker, Pandareus a sea-eagle, the mother a kingfisher, and it is the brother who becomes a hoopoe).^[22][24]

The first traces of the myth come early, as both Hesiod and Sappho refer to the swallow as Pandionis, or "daughter of Pandion".^[25] Homer also mentions Aëdon the daughter of Pandareus who killed her son Itylus, however he makes no mention of a swallow, and the context of this version differs greatly while the name of her husband is given as Zethus, the king of Thebes.^[25] As later authors on Homer would clarify and expand, Aëdon the wife of King Zethus killed her son accidentally while trying to kill another boy, Amaleus, the son of her sister-in-law Niobe (the wife of Zethus's twin brother Amphion), envious of Niobe's vast progeny when she had born only one child.^[26] This version with Niobe and Amaleus is also attributed to Pherecydes of Athens, a fifth-century BC mythographer; it has been suggested that the earliest myth concerned a woman trying to harm her rival's child; it is possible that the Anatolian Pandareus (Aëdon's father) was confused with the Athenian Pandion (king of Athens) due to their names' similarity, and thus the nightingale and the swallow joined the Athenian mythological traditions, as both Procne and Philomela are in a sense intrusive to the legendary Athenian royal line.^[27]

The tragic poets

One of the earliest full accounts was given by Sophocles, in his now lost play Tereus, of which only brief fragments and a synopsis remain as means for reconstruction. According to Fitzpatrick, the play apparently began with Tereus arriving in Thrace and lying to Procne about Philomela being dead, while bringing with him a female slave, who is in truth Philomela in forced disguise.^[28] Procne would have a soliloquy where she laments her isolation and the social position of married women, and in particular her position as a Greek woman married to a barbarian (a foreigner),^[29] before discovering the truth thanks to the tapestry.^[28] The recognition of Philomela would have taken place on stage, followed by Procne's gruesome revenge and Tereus's realization of his own cannibalism.^[28] A messenger then would announce the transformation of the three into birds by a deus-ex-machina, who in this play most likely was Apollo.^[28]

Jennifer Marsh has argued that Sophocles was inspired by Euripides's play Medea, a work where a woman murders her children in order to enact revenge against her husband, and subsequently it was him who introduced the element of infanticide and child-eating in Procne's story.^[30] The chorus from Medea claim to know only one other woman who killed her child besides Medea herself, Ino, apparently knowing nothing of Procne.^[30] The reverse however, that Euripides was inspired by Sophocles's portrayal of Procne for his depiction of Medea, could also be true.^[30] At the same time, it is also possible that the pedophagy was part of the earlier telling Sophocles used as source, and rather it is the Thracian setting that is a Sophoclean addition.^[31] However, the rape and the mutilation of Philomela does not have a clear precedent before Sophocles.^[31] It is also likely that it was Sophocles who introduced the names 'Procne' and 'Philomela' to the Nightingale and Swallow known to Homer and Hesiod.^[32]

Earlier than Sophocles, a seventh century BC metope from a temple of Apollo seem to attest to the notion of the nightingale and the swallow being partners of Itys/Itylus's^{[lower-alpha 2]} murder, with Aëdon/Procne as the main culprit.^[33] Some vases, although much less certainly, might depict the scene of the murder.^[33]