HARPIES, or Harpyiae, a word from the root seen in αρπάζω, to snatch, are in Homer merely the embodiment of the rapacious power of violent winds. · When a man has disappeared in a sudden and inexplicable fashion, it is said that the Harpies have carried him off; and the words dp7τυιαι and θυeλλaι are used indifferently (ef. Od. xiv. 371 with 727, and xx. 66 with 77) to indicate the agent in his sudden disappearance. But Od. xx. 63-5 shows that the winds were conceived as carrying the man away to the banks of Oceanus, in other words, to the sky. So it is said (ZZ. Ven., 208; Schol. II. xx. 244) that a θ<iσπts acλλa carried off Ganymede to heaven. There can be no doubt that the wind was by the primitive Indo-Germanic people considered to be the agent that carried off the souls of the dead to dwell with their fathers in heaven, and that this idea appears in the Odyssey (also II. vi. 345) in a more fanciful form. As messengers of Zeus the Harpies are called ∆ιoς κυv∈ς (Ap. Rh., ii. 289). In some accounts a Harpy is said to have become by Poseidon the mother of the horse Arion, and another form of the same union appears in II. xvi. 148, when the harpy Podarge, grazing in a meadow by the stream of Oceanus, bears to Zephyrus (the fruitful generative wind) the two horses of Achilles. This myth, which occurs in numberless forms, has been explained in article Gorgons; from which it is clear that ultimately Harpy is another epithet, like Gorgo and Erinys, of the swift, sudden, violent thunder-storm of a southern country. It is therefore with good ground that the three forms are compared by Aeschylus {Eum., 48). The function of snatching away mortals to the other world leads up to the duty which the Greeks came to assign to the Erinyes of pursuing and ...