The Harpies

Winged spirits with the body of a bird and the face of a maiden — Aello ('Storm-Swift') and Ocypete ('Swift-Wing') in Hesiod, with Celaeno added in the later tradition. Daughters of Thaumas (the sea-wonder) and Electra (an Oceanid), they were originally personifications of the snatching gust — when a person vanished without trace the Greeks said 'the Harpies have taken them'. The canonical episode is the torment of the blind seer Phineus in Thrace: the Harpies snatched food from his table and befouled what they could not carry off, until the Argonauts Zetes and Calais (the Boread brothers, themselves winged) chased them across the Aegean to the Strophades and were stopped only by Iris with a divine command not to kill them (Apollonius *Argon.* 2.234-300).