[212] The Homeric conception of the Harpies is of personified storm-winds, which agrees not only with their general designation and with the name Podarge, given to one of them Il. 16. 149, but with the names given to them in later legends, Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno. In the story of Phineus they appear in the loathsome character in which they are represented here. Aeschylus, one of whose lost plays was on that subject, makes the priestess in the Eumenides name them along with the Gorgous as the most frightful monsters with which her memory supplies her for comparison with the Erinnyes.
This text is part of:
John Conington. P. Vergili Maronis opera. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. The works of Virgil, with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Late Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane. 1876.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.