Procne

Procne's mother was the naiad Zeuxippe and her siblings were Philomela, Erechtheus, Butes[1] and possibly Teuthras.[2] She married King Tereus of Thrace and became the mother of Itys (Itylos).

Procne and Philomela from Apollo's temple at Thermos, 630–625 BC

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.[9] He then returned to Procne claiming that Philomela had died during the journey; Procne greatly mourned her sister.[9]

Furies in Procne and Tereus's wedding night, engraving by Virgil Solis, 1581.

Time passed,[lower-alpha 1] and soon a Thracian festival in honour to Dionysus was held, during which it was customary for Thracian women to gather gifts and send them to their queen.[10] Philomela, unable to speak or leave, wove in letters in her tapestry, or a gown, that spoke of her fate at the hands of Tereus.[11] Once Procne got hands on her tapestry, she disguised herself, joined the festivities with the other women, and located the cabin in which Philomela was kept captive.[11] She broke in, snatched her sister, dressed her instead in the bacchic attire, and brought her into Tereus's palace.[11]

Procne rescues Philomela, 1767 engraving, Getty Research Institute.

Although Philomela was unable to fully inform Procne of her woes, Procne promised her sister to avenge the great injustice done to her.[11] As she was pondering on a fitting way to enact revenge, 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 and cooked him.[12] 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]

Attic wine cup, circa 490 BC, depicting Philomela and Procne preparing to kill Itys. (Louvre, Paris)

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,[5][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]

Variations and origins

Eustathius of Thessalonica swapped the roles of the two sisters, so that Procne was 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]

Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itylus, oil on canvas 1636–1638, by Peter Paul Rubens (Prado, Madrid).

A more or less identical tale is said of Aedon ("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 Aedon what has happened, the myth proceeds as above, with the difference that the two women manage to reach their father (here Pandareus) who has his servants beat and tie up Polytechnus, who is then smeared with honey and left to the mercy of insects.[23] Aedon, in pity, removes the flies, enraging her family. As they try to attack her, the gods intervene and change them all into birds (Aedon and Chelidon as usual, but Polytechnus becomes a woodpecker, Pandareus a sea-eagle, the mother a kingfisher, the brother 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 Aedon the daughter of Pandion who killed her son Itylus, however the context of this version differs greatly, and the name of her husband is given as Zethus, the king of Thebes.[25][lower-alpha 2]

Procne, Tereus and Philomela, 16th century, by Sebastiano Del Piombo.

The swallow genera Progne, Ptyonoprogne and Psalidoprocne and the treeswift family Hemiprocnidae derive their names from the myth of this Thracian queen.

• Gudrun
• Titus Andronicus

• Antoninus Liberalis, The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis translated by Francis Celoria (Routledge 1992). Online version at the Topos Text Project.
• Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. ISBN 0-674-99135-4. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
• Celoria, Francis (1992). The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: A Translation with Commentary. Routledge. ISBN 9780415068963.
• Fitzpatrick, David (November 2007). "Reconstructing a Fragmentary Tragedy 2: Sophocles' Tereus" (PDF). Practitioners Voices in Classical Reception Studies (1): 39–45.
• Fitzpatrick, David (2001). "Sophocles' Tereus". The Classical Quarterly. 51 (1): 90–101. doi:10.1093/cq/51.1.90. JSTOR 3556330.
• Forbes Irving, Paul M. C. (1990). Metamorphosis in Greek Myths. Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-814730-9.
• Maurus Servius Honoratus, In Vergilii carmina comentarii. Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii; recensuerunt Georgius Thilo et Hermannus Hagen. Georgius Thilo. Leipzig. B. G. Teubner. 1881. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
• Ovid (2000). Metamorphoses. Translated by Anthony S. Kline. Borders Classics. ISBN 9781587261565.
• Pausanias (1918). Description of Greece. Loeb Classical Library 93. Vol. I: Books 1-2 (Attica and Corinth). Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses. Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
• Plutarch (1961). Moralia. Loeb Classical Library 425. Vol. IX: Table-Talk, Books 7-9. Dialogue on Love. Translated by Edwin L. Minar; F. H. Sandbach; W. C. Helmbold. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Stephanus of Byzantium, Stephani Byzantii Ethnicorum quae supersunt, edited by August Meineike (1790-1870), published 1849. A few entries from this important ancient handbook of place names have been translated by Brady Kiesling. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
• Smith, William (1873). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. London: John Murray, printed by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street Square and Parliament Street.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Philomela and Procne.

• Schmitz, Leonhard (1870). "Procne" . In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.