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Philomela () or Philomel (; , ; Φιλομήλα ) is a minor figure in Greek mythology who is frequently invoked as a direct and figurative symbol in literary and artistic works in the Western canon.
Ovid and other writers have made the association that the etymology of her name was "lover of song", derived from the Greek Language φιλο- and μέλος ("song") instead of μῆλον ("fruit" or "sheep"), which means "lover of fruit", "lover of apples",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) or "lover of sheep".
The most complete and extant rendering of the story of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus can be found in Book VI of the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 BC – 17/18 AD), where the story reaches its full development during antiquity.Ovid. Metamorphoses Book VI, lines 424–674. (Line numbers vary among translations.) It is likely that Ovid relied upon Greek and Latin sources that were available in his era such as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus (2nd century BC),Frazer, Sir James George (translator/editor). Apollodorus, Library in 2 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1921). See note 2 to section 3.14.8, citing Pearson, A. C. (editor) The Fragments of Sophocles, II:221ff. (found online here – retrieved 23 November 2012), where Frazer points to several other ancient source materials regarding the myth. or sources that are no longer extant or exist today only in fragments—especially Sophocles' tragic drama Tereus (5th century BC).Sophocles. Tereus (translated by Lloyd-Jones, Hugh) in Sophocles Fragments (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard College, 1996), 290–299Fitzpatrick, David. "Reconstructing a Fragmentary Tragedy 2: Sophocles' Tereus" in Practitioners Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1:39–45 (November 2007) – retrieved 23 November 2012).
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." Tereus agreed to travel to Athens and escort her sister, Philomela, to Thrace. King Pandion of Athens, the father of Philomela and Procne, was apprehensive about letting his one remaining daughter leave his home and protection and asks Tereus to protect her as if he were her father.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. Tereus agrees. However, Tereus for Philomela when he first saw her, and that lust grew during the course of the return voyage to Thrace.
Arriving in Thrace, he forced her to a cabin or lodge in the woods and her. After the assault, Tereus threatened her and advised her to keep silent. Philomela was defiant and angered Tereus. In his rage, he cut out her tongue and abandoned her in the cabin. In Ovid's Metamorphoses Philomela's defiant speech is rendered (in an 18th-century English translation) as:
Philomela was unable to speak because of her injuries, and so she weaving a tapestry (or a robe)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. Retrieved 23 November 2012). Notes on this passage include references several variations on the myth. that told her story and sent it to Procne. Procne was incensed by her husband's actions and killed their son Itys (or "Itylos") in revenge. She boiled Itys and served him as a meal for Tereus. After Tereus ate Itys, the sisters presented Tereus with the severed head of his son, revealing the conspiracy. Tereus grabbed an axe and chased the sisters intending to kill them. They fled but were almost overtaken by Tereus at Daulia in Phocis. The sisters desperately prayed to the gods to be turned into birds and escape Tereus' rage and vengeance. The gods transformed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.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, comments that the Roman mythographers "somewhat absurdly inverted the transformation of the two sisters". Subsequently, the gods transformed Tereus into a hoopoe.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 echo thro' the grove. Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there, Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r.Dryden, John; Addison, Joseph; Eusden, Laurence; Garth, Sir Samuel (translators). Ovid. Ovid's Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books, translated by the most eminent hands (London: Jacob Tonson, 1717) Volume II, p. 201.
Early Greek sources have it that Philomela was turned into a swallow, which has no song; Procne was turned into a nightingale, singing a beautiful but sad song in remorse. Later sources, among them Hyginus and in modern literature the English romantic poets like John Keats write that although she was tongueless, Philomela was turned into a nightingale, and Procne into a swallow.Fields, Beverly. "Keats and the Tongueless Nightingale: Some Unheard Melodies in 'The Eve of Saint Agnes'". Wordsworth Circle 19 (1983), 246–250. Eustathius' version of the story has the sisters reversed, so that Philomela married Tereus and that Tereus lusted after Procne.For the comparison between Homer's version and Eusthathius' version of the myth, see: Notes to Book XIX (regarding line 605&c.) in Pope, Alexander. The Odyssey of Homer, translated by A. Pope, Volume V. (London: F. J. DuRoveray, 1806), 139–140.
It is salient to note that in taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, the genus name of the martins (the larger-bodied among swallow genera) is Progne, a Latinized form of Procne. Other related genera named after the myth include the Crag Martins Ptyonoprogne, and Saw-wings Psalidoprocne. Coincidentally, although most of the depictions of the nightingale and its song in art and literature are of female nightingales, the female of the species does not sing—it is the male of the species who sings its characteristic song.
In an early account, Sophocles wrote that Tereus was turned into a large-beaked bird whom some scholars translate as a hawkHalmamann, Carolin. "Sophoclean Fragments" in Ormand, Kirk (editor). A Companion to Sophocles. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 175.compare with the "hawk" in Hyginus (Gaius Julius Hyginus ). Fabulae, 45. Hyginus based his interpretation on Aesch.Supp.60 from Smyth, Herbert Weir (translator); Aeschylus. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, PhD in two volumes. in Volume 2. Suppliant Women. (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1926). while a number of retellings and other works (including Aristophanes' ancient comedy The Birds) hold that Tereus was instead changed into a hoopoe. Various later translations of Ovid state that Tereus was transformed into other birds than the hawk and hoopoe, including references by Dryden and Gower to the lapwing.Gower, John. Confessio Amantis Book V, Lines 6041–6046, refer to a "lappewincke" or "lappewinge"
Several writers omit key details of the story. According to Pausanias, Tereus was so remorseful for his actions against Philomela and Itys (the nature of the actions is not described) that he kills himself. Then two birds appear as the women lament his death.Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1:41 sections 8 and 9. Many later sources omit Tereus' tongue-cutting mutilation of Philomela altogether.According to Delany, Chaucer barely mentions it and the Chretien de Troyes omits the "grotesquerie" entirely. Delany, Sheila. The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 216–217, and passim.
According to Thucydides, Tereus was not King of Thrace, but rather from Daulia in Phocis, a city inhabited by Thracians. Thucydides cites as proof of this that poets who mention the nightingale refer to it as a "Daulian bird".Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. 2.29. In the version translated by Thomas Hobbes (London: Bohn, 1843). (found online here – retrieved 23 November 2012). 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.Webster, Thomas B. L. An Introduction to Sophocles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 3, 7.
In a variation of the myth set in Asia Minor, Philomela is called Chelidon ("swallow") and her sister Aëdon ("nightingale").Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 11
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".Burnett, A. P. Revenge in Attic and later tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 180–189. It is possible that these elements were woven into Sophocles' play Tereus and other works of the period.
Ah for thy fate, O shrill-voiced nightingale! Some solace for thy woes did Heaven afford, Clothed thee with soft brown plumes, and life apart from wail(ing)—Aeschylus, Agamemnon (found online here ). (Retrieved 23 November 2012).
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".Aristotle, Poetics, 54b. 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".Doggett, Frank. "Romanticism's Singing Bird" in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 XIV:4:568 (Houston, Texas: Rice University, 1974)
While Ovid's retelling of the myth is the more famous version of the story, he had several ancient sources on which to rely before he finished the Metamorphoses in A.D. 8. Many of these sources were doubtless available to Ovid during his lifetime but have been lost or come to us at present only in fragments. In his version, Ovid recast and combined many elements from these ancient sources. Because his is the most complete, lasting version of the myth, it is the basis for many later works.
In the 12th century, French trouvère (troubadour) Chrétien de Troyes, adapted many of the myths recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses into Old French. However, de Troyes was not alone in adapting Ovid's material. Geoffrey Chaucer recounted the story in his unfinished work The Legend of Good WomenGila Aloni, "Palimpsestic Philomela: Reinscription in Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'", in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, eds. , Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, Tatjana Silec. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 157–173. and briefly alluded to the myth in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde.Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde Book II, lines 64–70. John Gower included the tale in his Confessio Amantis.Gower, John. Confessio Amantis Book VIII, lines 5545–6075. References to Philomela are common in the of the ars nova, ars subtilior, and ars mutandi musical eras of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York: Cornell, 2006)
In "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) relays consolation regarding the nymph's harsh rejection of the shepherd's romantic advances in the spirit of "time heals all wounds" by citing in the second stanza (among several examples) that eventually, with the passage of time, Philomel would become "dumb" to her own pain and that her attention would be drawn away from the pain by the events of life to come.Lourenco, Alexander. Poetry analysis: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, by William Raleigh ( sic). Retrieved 9 January 2013.Raleigh, Sir Walter "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (1600), lines 5–8: "Time drives the flocks from field to fold / When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, / And Philomel becometh dumb; / The rest complains of cares to come."
In Sir Philip Sidney's (1554–1586) courtly love poem "The Nightingale", the narrator, who is in love with a woman he cannot have, compares his own romantic situation to that of Philomela's plight and claims that he has more reason to be sad. However, recent literary criticism has labelled this claim as Sexism and an unfortunate marginalization of the traumatic rape of Philomela. Sidney argues that the rape was an "excess of love" and less severe than being deprived of love as attested by the line, "Since wanting is more woe than too much having."
Playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564–1616) makes frequent use of the Philomela myth—most notably in his tragedy Titus Andronicus (c. 1588–1593) where characters directly reference Tereus and Philomela in commenting on rape and mutilation of Lavinia by Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius.Oakley-Brown, Liz. Ovid And the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 26–32. Prominent allusions to Philomela also occur in the depiction of Lucrece in The Rape of Lucrece,See Newman, Jane O. "'And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness': Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece" Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 45, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 304–326.Cheney, Patrick (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 94–95, 105 and 191. in the depiction of Imogen in Cymbeline,Shakespeare, William. "Cymbeline", Act II, Scene ii, and Act III, Scene iv.Kemp, Theresa D. Women in the Age of Shakespeare (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2010), pp. 98–99. and in Titania's lullaby in A Midsummer Night's Dream where she asks Philomel to "sing in our sweet lullaby". In Sonnet 102, Shakespeare addresses his lover (the "fair youth") and compares his love poetry to the song of the nightingale, noting that "her mournful hymns did hush the night" (line 10), and that as a poet would "hold his tongue" (line 13) in deference to the more beautiful nightingale's song so that he "not dull you with my song" (line 14).Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 235–236.Luckyj, Christina. "A Moving Rhetoricke": Gender and Silence in Early Modern England. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 169.Parker, Patricia A. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 97. Emilia Lanier (1569–1645), a poet who is considered by some scholars to be the woman referred to in the poetry of William Shakespeare as "Dark Lady", makes several references to Philomela in her patronage poem "The Description of Cookeham" in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lanier's poem, dedicated to Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and her daughter Lady Anne Clifford refers to Philomela's "sundry layes"(line 31) and later to her "mournful ditty" (line 189).Lanyer, Emilia. "The Description of Cookeham" in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).
The image of the nightingale appears frequently in poetry of the period with it and its song described by poets as an example of "joyance" and gaiety or as an example of melancholy, sad, sorrowful, and mourning. However, many use the nightingale as a symbol of sorrow but without a direct reference to the Philomela myth. cites examples including William Drummond of Hawthornden, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey, Mary Robinson. However, he cites later examples like Robert Bridges where an indirect reference to the myth may be called a "dark nocturnal secret".
In France, Philomèle was an French opera stage production of the story, produced by Louis Lacoste during the reign of Louis XIV.
First published in the collection Lyrical Ballads, "The Nightingale" (1798) is an effort by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) to move away from associations that the nightingale's song was one of melancholy and identified it with the joyous experience of nature. He remarked that "in nature there is nothing melancholy", (line 15) expressing hope "we may not thus profane / Nature's sweet voices, always full of love / And joyance!" (lines 40–42).Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 136–139; Mays, J. C. C. (editor). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I (Volume I, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 518.
At the poem's conclusion, Coleridge writes of a father taking his crying son outside in the night:
Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who called the nightingale a "fiery heart",Wordsworth, William. "O Nightingale, thou surely art" (1807), line 2. depicted it "as an instance of natural poetic creation", and the "voice of nature".Rana, Sujata; Dhankhar, Pooja. "Bird Imagery in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' and Yeats's 'The Wild Swans at Coole': A Comparative Study" in Language in India, vol. 11 (12 December 2011).And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once, Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,' Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well!— It is a father's tale: But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Familiar with these songs, that with the night He may associate joy.—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Philomela" (1798), lines 102–109 in Volume I of Lyrical Ballads with a few other poems (with William Wordsworth) (London: J. & A. Arch, 1798)
Other notable mentions include:
Eliot employs the myth to depict themes of sorrow, pain, and that the only recovery or regeneration possible is through revenge.Donnell, Sean M. Notes on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (retrieved 24 November 2012). Several of these mentions reference other poets' renderings of the myth, including those of Ovid and Gascoigne. Eliot's references to the nightingales singing by the convent in "Sweeney and the Nightingales" (1919–1920) is a direct reference to the murder of Agamemnon in the tragedy by Aeschylus—wherein the Greek dramatist directly evoked the Philomela myth. The poem describes Sweeney as a brute and that two women in the poem are conspiring against him for his mistreatment of them. This mirrors not only the elements of Agamemnon's death in Aeschylus' play but the sister's revenge against Tereus in the myth.The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears.Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns). "The Waste Land" (New York: Horace Liveright, 1922), lines 98–103. See also lines 203–206, 428.
In the poem "To the Nightingale", Argentine poet and fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), compares his efforts as a poet to the bird's lament though never having heard it. He describes its song as "encrusted with mythology" and that the evolution of the myth has distorted it—that the opinions of other poets and writers have kept both poet and reader from actually hearing the original sound and knowing the essence of the song.
Several artists have applied Ovid's account to new translations or reworkings, or adapted the story for the stage. Leonard Quirino notes that the plot of Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire "is modeled on the legend of Tereus"., originally published in
British poet Ted Hughes (1930–1998) used the myth in his 1997 work Tales from Ovid (1997) which was a loose translation and retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Both Israeli dramatist Hanoch Levin (in The Great Whore of Babylon) and English playwright Joanna Laurens (in The Three Birds) wrote plays based on the story. The story was adapted into an opera by Scottish composer James Dillon in 2004,Stating that it was adapted from Sophocles, Thales, Eva Hesse, R. Buckminster Fuller, see The Living Composers Project: James Dillon. (Retrieved 22 December 2012). and a 1964 vocal composition by American composer Milton BabbittHair, Graham, and Stephen Arnold. "Some Works of Milton Babbitt, Reviewed", Tempo new series, no. 90 (1969): 33–34. with text by John Hollander.Hollander, John. "A Poem for Music: Remarks on the Composition of Philomel", pp. 289–306 in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)
The reference to Philomela also exists in the name of a Bengali music troupe in Calcutta, India, called Nagar Philomel (The city that loves song), formed in 1983.
Several female writers have used the Philomela myth in exploring the subject of rape, women and power (empowerment) and Feminism themes, , and Timberlake Wertenbaker in her play The Love of the Nightingale (1989) (later adapted into an opera of the same name composed by Richard Mills). More recently, poet and author Melissa Studdard brought new life to the myth in her poem "Philomela's tongue says" (2019), published in Poetry magazine's May 2019 edition.
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