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===Elements borrowed from other myths and stories===
===Elements borrowed from other myths and stories===
The story of Philomela, Procne and Tereus is largely influenced by the lost tragedy ''Tereus'' of Sophocles. Scholar Jenny Marsh claims that Sophocles borrowed certain elements of [[Euripides]] drama ''[[Medea (play)|Medea]]'' and used them in his tragedy ''Tereus''. She implies that the infanticide of Itys did not appear in the Tereus myth until Sophocles' play and that it was introduced because of what was borrowed from Euripdes.<ref name="MarshVases">Marsh, Jenny. "Vases and Tragic Drama" in Rutter, N.K. and Sparkes, B.A. (editors) ''Word and Image in Ancient Greece'' (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2000) 121-123, 133-134.</ref>
The story of Philomela, Procne and Tereus is largely influenced by the lost tragedy ''Tereus'' of Sophocles. Scholar Jenny Marsh claims that Sophocles borrowed certain elements of [[Euripides]] drama ''[[Medea (play)|Medea]]'' and used them in his tragedy ''Tereus''. She implies that the infanticide of Itys did not appear in the Tereus myth until Sophocles' play and that it was introduced because of what was borrowed from Euripdes.<ref name="MarshVases">Marsh, Jenny. "Vases and Tragic Drama" in Rutter, N.K. and Sparkes, B.A. (editors) ''Word and Image in Ancient Greece'' (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2000) 121-123, 133-134.</ref>

It is possible that social and political themes have woven their way into the story as a contrast between Athenians who believed themselves to be the hegemonic power in Greece and the more civilized of the Greek peoples, and the Thracians who were considered to be a "barbaric race."<ref name="FitzpatrickTereus" /><ref name="LloydFragments" /><ref>Burnett, A. P. ''Revenge in Attic and later tragedy'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 180-189.</ref> It is possible that these elements were woven into Sophocles' play ''Tereus'' and other works of the period.


==Appearances in the Western Canon==
==Appearances in the Western Canon==

Revision as of 21:58, 23 November 2012

The Rape of Philomela by Tereus, engraved by Virgil Solis for a 1562 edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book VI, 519-562).

Philomela or Philomel (Φιλομήλα) is a minor figure in Greek mythology and is frequently invoked as a direct and figurative symbol in literary, artistic, and musical works in the Western canon.

She is identified as being the princess of Athens as a daughter of Pandion I, King of Athens and Zeuxippe, and sister of Procne, the wife of King Tereus of Thrace. While the myth has several variations, the general depiction is that Philomela, after being raped and mutilated by her sister's husband, Tereus, obtains her revenge and is transformed into a nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), a migratory passerine bird native to Europe and southwest Asia noted for its song. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the song of the nightingale is often depicted or interpreted as a sorrowful lament. Coincidentally, in nature, the female nightingale is mute and only the male of the species sings.[1][2]

Ovid and other writers have claimed (either fancifully or mistakenly) that the etymology of her name was "lover of song" derived from the Greek Φιλος and μέλος instead of μῆλον). The name means "lover of fruit," "lover of apples,"[3] or "lover of sheep."[4]

The story of Philomela in myth

The most complete and extant rendering of the story of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus can be found in Book VI of the Metamorphoses of Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 BC - AD 17/18), where the story reaches its full development during antiquity.[5] It is likely that Ovid relied upon Greek and Latin sources that were available in his era that are no longer extant or exist today only in fragments--among these are Sophocles' tragic drama Tereus (5th Century BC)[6][7][8] and the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus (2nd Century BC).[9]

The Rape of Philomela by Tereus, Book 6, Plate 59. Engraved by Bauer, for a 1703 edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses

According to Ovid, in the fifth year of Procne's marriage to Tereus, King of Thrace and son of Ares, she asked her husband to "Let me at Athens my dear sister see / Or let her come to Thrace, and visit me."[5] Indulging his wife's request, Tereus agreed to travel to Athens and escort Philomela, his wife's sister, to Thrace.[5] King Pandion of Athens, the father of Philomela and Procne, was apprehensive about letting his only remaining daughter leave his home and protection and asks Tereus to protect her as if he were her father.[5][10] Tereus agrees. However, Tereus lusted for Philomela when he first saw her, and that lust grew during the course of the return voyage to Thrace.[5]

Arriving in Thrace, he forced her to a cabin or lodge in the woods and raped her.[5] After the assault, Tereus threatened her and advised her to keep silent.[5] Philomela was defiant and angered Tereus. In his rage, he was incited to cut out her tongue and abandon her in the cabin.[5] In Ovid's Metamorphoses Philomela's defiant speech is rendered (in an 18th Century English translation) as:

Still my revenge shall take its proper time,
And suit the baseness of your hellish crime.
My self, abandon'd, and devoid of shame,
Thro' the wide world your actions will proclaim;
Or tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
And my complainings eccho thro' the grove.
Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there,
Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r.[5]

Rendered unable to speak because of her injuries, Philomela wove a tapestry (or a robe[11]) that told her story and had it sent to Procne.[5] Procne was incensed and in revenge, she killed her son by Tereus, Itys (or Itylos), boiled him and served him as a meal to her husband.[5] After eating Itys, the sisters presented Tereus with the severed head of his son, and he became aware of their conspiracy and his cannibalistic meal.[5] He snatched up an axe and pursued them with the intent kill the sisters.[5] They fled but were almost overtaken by Tereus at Daulia in Phocis.[11] In desperation, they prayed to the gods to be turned into birds and escape Tereus' rage and vengeance.[11] The gods transformed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.[5][12] Subsequently, the gods would transform Tereus into a hoopoe[11] or hawk.

Variations on the myth

Depiction of Philomela and Procne showing the severed head of Itys to his father Tereus, engraved by Bauer for a 1703 edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book VI:621–647)

According to Thucydides, Tereus was not King of Thrace, but rather from the city of Daulia in Phocis, a city inhabited by Thracians. He cites in proof of this that poets who mention the nightingale refer to it as a "Daulian bird."[13] It is thought that Thucydides commented on the myth in his famous work on the Peloponnesian War because Sophocles' play confused the mythical Tereus with contemporary ruler Teres I of Thrace.[14]

As in many myths there are variant versions, including:

  • In an early account, Sophocles wrote that Tereus was turned into a big-beaked bird whom some say is a hawk while a number of retellings and other works (including Aristophanes' ancient comedy, The Birds) hold that Tereus was instead changed into a hoopoe.
  • Early Greek sources have it that Philomela was turned into a swallow, which has no song; Procne turns into a nightingale, singing a beautiful but sad song in remorse.
  • According to Pausanias, Tereus was so remorseful for his actions (not described) against Philomela and Itys that he kills himself. Then two birds appear as the women lament his death.[15]
  • Later sources, among them Ovid, Hyginus, and the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, and in modern literature the English romantic poets like Keats write that although she was tongueless, Philomela was turned into a nightingale, and Procne into a swallow.
  • Many later sources omit the Tereus' tongue-cutting mutilation of Philomela altogether.
  • Eustathius' version of the story has the sisters reversed, so that Philomela married Tereus and that Tereus lusted after Procne.[16]

It is salient to note that in taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, the genus name of the swallow is Progne, a latinized form of Procne.

Elements borrowed from other myths and stories

The story of Philomela, Procne and Tereus is largely influenced by the lost tragedy Tereus of Sophocles. Scholar Jenny Marsh claims that Sophocles borrowed certain elements of Euripides drama Medea and used them in his tragedy Tereus. She implies that the infanticide of Itys did not appear in the Tereus myth until Sophocles' play and that it was introduced because of what was borrowed from Euripdes.[17]

It is possible that social and political themes have woven their way into the story as a contrast between Athenians who believed themselves to be the hegemonic power in Greece and the more civilized of the Greek peoples, and the Thracians who were considered to be a "barbaric race."[18][19][20] It is possible that these elements were woven into Sophocles' play Tereus and other works of the period.

Appearances in the Western Canon

The material of the Philomela myth has been used in various creative works—artistic and literary—for the past 2,500 years.[21][22] Over the centuries, the myth has been associated with the image of the nightingale and its song described as both exceedingly beautiful and sorrowful. The continued use of the image in artistic, literary, and musical works has reinforced this association.

In Antiquity

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

Beginning with Homer's Odyssey,[23] ancient dramatists and poets evoked the story of Philomela in their works. Most notably, it was the core of the tragedy Tereus by Sophocles (lost, extant only in fragments), and in a set of plays by Philocles, the nephew of the great playwright Aeschylus. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, the prophetess Cassandra has a visionary premonition of her own death in which she mentioned the nightingale and Itys.[24] In his Poetics, Aristotle points to the ″voice of the shuttle″ in Sophocles′ tragedy Tereus as an example of a poetic device that aids in the ″recognition″ – the change from ignorance to knowledge – of what has happened earlier in the plot. Such a device, according to Aristotle, is ″contrived″ by the poet, and thus is ″inartistic.″[25]. The connection between the nightingale's song and poetry is evoked by Aristophanes in his comedy The Birds and in the poetry of Callimachus. Roman poet Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus for Eurydice to the “lament of the nightingale”.[26] These writings appeared several centuries before Ovid's account in Metamorphoses which was adapted into Old French by the trouvère (troubadour) Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century.

In the Mediaeval Era

However, Chrétien de Troyes was not alone, Geoffrey Chaucer recounted the story in his unfinished work The Legend of Good Women[27] as well as being briefly alluded to in ll. 64–70 in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde.

sweet lullaby" and in Shakespeare's Sonnet 102.

In Classical and Romantic works

Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itylus (oil on canvas, painted 1636-1638), one of the late works of Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) (Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain)
  • John Keats in "Ode to the Nightingale" and in "The Eve of St. Agnes" (the rape of Madeline by Porphyro mirrors the rape of Philomela by Tereus).[28]
  • The poem "Philomela" by English poet Matthew Arnold, makes numerous allusions to the myth, centering around a crying nightingale.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called "The Nightingale" which mentions Philomela as a contrast to the song of the Nightingale.
  • Swinburne wrote a poem called "Itylus" based on the story.
  • Ann Yearsley mentions Philomel in line 46 of her abolitionist poem "A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade" (1788)

In Modern works

  • T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" has a number of mentions and allusions to this myth.
  • Timberlake Wertenbaker wrote a play about this myth called The Love of the Nightingale; she also wrote the libretto for Richard Mills's opera of the same name.
  • Ted Leo and the Pharmacists reference Philomel in their song "2nd Ave, 11 AM", from Hearts of Oak.
  • Hanoch Levin wrote a play heavily influenced by the myth, named The Great Whore of Babylon.
  • José Rizal wrote a dedication called Felicitation, which names Philomela in a metaphor to his commitment to send salutations to his brother-in-law Antonino Lopez. In his award winning poem "A La Juventud Filipina", (To The Filipino Youth) Rizal uses Philomel as inspiration for young Filipinos to use their voices to speak of Spanish injustice.[29]
  • Jeannine Hall Gailey wrote several poems based on the myth that appear in her book Becoming the Villainess: "Remembering Philomel," "Philomel's Rape," "On Rubens' Tereus Confronted with the Head of His Son Itylus", "Case Studies in Revenge: Philomel Gives Some Advice," and "Procne and Philomel, At the End."
  • In Margaret Atwood's The Tent there's a short novel titled Nightingale, where the two sisters discuss the incident, and their names are reversed in it.
  • Milton Babbitt wrote a song called "Philomel" based on the story, with a libretto by poet John Hollander, for vocalist Bethany Beardslee accompanied by synthesizer and recorded soprano.
  • Emma Tennant wrote a story entitled "Philomela", which is a retelling of around half the story, from Procne's point of view.
  • Joanna Laurens wrote a play called The Three Birds based on the story.
  • James Dillion, Philomela, music/théâtre in 5 acts (2004).[30]

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Philomela and Procne.
  1. ^ Kaplan, Matt. "Male Nightingales Explore by Day, Seduce by Night" in National Geographic News (4 March 2009). (found online here). (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  2. ^ PHYS.ORG. "And a nightingale sang... experienced males 'show off' to protect their territories" (9 November 2011). (found online here). (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  3. ^ Defining φιλόμηλος as "fond of apples or fruit", see Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; and Jones, Henry Stuart. A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1st Ed. 1843, 9th Ed. 1925, 1996). (LSJ) found online here; citing "Doroth.Hist. ap. Ath. 7.276f." (Retrieved 7 October 2012)
  4. ^ Defining it as "lover of sheep", see White, J. T. Virgil: Georgics IV (London, 1884) (vocabulary), found online here (Retrieved 7 October 2012).
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Ovid. Metamorphoses Book VI, lines 424–674.
  6. ^ Sophocles. Tereus (translated by Lloyd-Jones, Hugh) in Sophocles Fragments (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard College, 1996), 290-299
  7. ^ Fitzpatrick, David. "Sophocles' Tereus" in The Classical Quarterly 51:1 (2001), 90-101. (found online here - Retrieved 23 November 2012.
  8. ^ Fitzpatrick, David. "Reconstructing a Fragmentary Tragedy 2: Sophocles' Tereus" in Practitioners Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1:39-45 (November 2007) (found online here (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  9. ^ Frazer, Sir James George (translator/editor). Apollodorus, Library in 2 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1921), in note 2 to section 3.14.8, citing Pearson, A. C. (editor) The Fragments of Sophocles, II:221ff. (found online here). Frazer points to several other ancient source materials regarding the myth.
  10. ^ According to the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus (Book III, chapter 14, section 8), in the translation by Sir James George Frazer, , Pandion fought a war with Labdacus, King of Thebes and married his daughter Procne to Tereus to secure and alliance and obtain his assistance in fighting Thebes.
  11. ^ a b c d Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 3.14.8; in Frazer, Sir James George (translator/editor). Apollodorus, Library in 2 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1921). (found online [1] - Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  12. ^ Note though that earlier Greek accounts say the opposite (Procne as the nightingale, the "tongueless" Philomela as the silent swallow) and are more consistent with the facts of the myth. Frazer in his translation of the Bibliotheca [Frazer, Sir James George (translator/editor). Apollodorus, Library in 2 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1921), in note 2 to section 3.14.8] comments that the Roman mythographers "somewhat absurdly inverted the transformation of the two sisters."
  13. ^ Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War 2.29. In the version translated by Thomas Hobbes (London: Bohn, 1843). (found online 2.29&lang=original here - retrieved 23 November 2012).
  14. ^ Webster, Thomas B. L. An Introduction to Sophocles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 3, 7.
  15. ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece 1:41 section 8 and 9.
  16. ^ Alexander Pope, Notes to Book XIX of the Odyssey.
  17. ^ Marsh, Jenny. "Vases and Tragic Drama" in Rutter, N.K. and Sparkes, B.A. (editors) Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2000) 121-123, 133-134.
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference FitzpatrickTereus was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference LloydFragments was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ Burnett, A. P. Revenge in Attic and later tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 180-189.
  21. ^ Salisury, Joyce E. Women in the Ancient World (ABC-CLIO, 2001), 276.
  22. ^ Chandler, Albert R. "The Nightingale in Greek and Latin Poetry," in The Classic Journal XXX:2:78-84 (The Classical Association of Middle West and South, 1934). (found online here) (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  23. ^ Homer. The Odyssey Book XIX, lines 518-523.
  24. ^ Aeschylus, Agamemnon" (found online here). (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
  25. ^ Aristotle, Poetics, 54b.
  26. ^ Doggett, Frank. "Romanticism's Singing Bird" in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 XIV:4:568 (Houston, Texas: Rice University, 1974) (found online here
  27. ^ Gila Aloni, "Palimpsestic Philomela: Reinscription in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'", in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, eds. Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, Tatjana Silec. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 157-73.
  28. ^ Fields, Beverly. "Keats and the Tongueless Nightingale: Some Unheard Melodies in 'The Eve of Saint Agnes'". Wordsworth Circle 19 (1983), 246-250.
  29. ^ Zaide, Gregorio. Jose Rizal: Life, Works, and Writings of a Genius, Writer, Scientist, and National Hero. 1994. All Nations Publishing Co. Manila, Philippines.
  30. ^ The Living Composers Project, "James Dillon".
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