Harpy
In Greek myth, the snatchers: storm winds that carried people off, later pictured as foul birds with women’s faces who stole the food of the blind king Phineus.
Meaning
The Harpies were first winds. Hesiod names two, Aello (Storm-swift) and Ocypetes (Swift-flier), long-haired daughters of Thaumas who keep pace “with the blasts of the winds and the birds”, and Britannica notes that in the Odyssey they are winds that carry people away. Their Greek name means “snatchers”, as Dictionary.com explains it. In the story of Jason and the Argonauts they became birds with women’s faces, and that is how Virgil, the heralds and most later writers drew them. Dictionary.com also gives the English sense, “a cruel grasping woman”.
Origin and history
Britannica points out that the early Harpies “were in no way disgusting”, and that their use as tomb figures suggests they were also thought of as ghosts. The change came with the Argonauts. Apollonius of Rhodes tells how Zeus punished the prophet Phineus with blindness, and how the Harpies, “swooping through the clouds”, snatched the food from his hands with their crooked beaks and left a stench over what remained, until Calais and Zetes, the sons of Boreas the North Wind, delivered him, as Britannica relates.
Virgil moved them to the islands of the Strophades, where they swoop down on the feast of Aeneas and his men: “winged things with maidens’ countenance, bellies dropping filth, and clawed hands and faces ever wan with hunger.” He calls their leader Celaeno.
The harpy in heraldry
John Vinycomb describes the heraldic harpy as a winged creature with the head and breasts of a woman and the body and limbs of a vulture, and gives the arms of the city of Nuremberg as a harpy displayed (shown face-on, wings spread) in gold on blue, used as the city’s device from 1243. Vinycomb also describes a favourite badge of Richard III that was very like a harpy: a falcon with a maiden’s head holding the white rose of York.
Harpy or siren?
Both are bird-women in Greek art, and Britannica says the Sirens had “affinities with the Harpies”. The difference is in what they do: the Harpies snatch and foul, the Sirens sing.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeSirenThe singers of the Odyssey whose song drew sailors to their deaths, painted by the Greeks as birds with women’s heads and later merged with the mermaid.
- The same shape in Catholic symbolsPelican in her pietyA pelican wounding her own breast to feed her young with her blood: a traditional Christian sign of Christ, who saves people by his blood.
See also
Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Pegasus, Griffin.
Sources
- Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Hesiod, Theogony; Shield of Heracles; The Homeric Hymns, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), Project Gutenberg eBook #348, Project Gutenberg, Theogony, lines 265–269
- Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica (tr. R. C. Seaton), Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica, translated by R. C. Seaton (1912), Project Gutenberg, Book II (Phineus)
- The Aeneid of Virgil (tr. J. W. Mackail), Virgil, The Aeneid, translated into English prose by J. W. Mackail (1885), Project Gutenberg, Book III (the Strophades)
- Harpy (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Harpy”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
- Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art (John Vinycomb, 1906), John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), Project Gutenberg, The Harpy, pp. 179–181
- Harpy (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Harpy” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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