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The Harpys, three in number, were creatures employed, according to the belief of the Greeks and Romans, by the higher gods as the instruments for the punishment of the crimes of men. Their bodies were those of vultures, their
heads those of women, and it was their evil property to contaminate everything they touched. They are not infrequently represented in classic art ; several examples of their introduction may be seen on vases in the British Museum, and notably on some bas-reliefs from a monument brought from Xanthus, in Lycia, and commonly, from the subjects of these sculptures, called the Harpy Tomb-a monument dating probably from about the sixth century before the Christian era. Homer mentions but one harpy, Hesiod gives two, but all later writers mention three. Milton refers to these creatures in his " Paradise Lost," Book II., in the lines :
" Thither by harpy-footed Furies hal'd At certain revolutions all the damn'd are brought." Shakespeare, too, in his " Much Ado About Nothing," Act ii. scene r, mentions the creature, though in a more indirect way, using the word, as we from time to time find it employed elsewhere, as typical of one who wants to seize on everything and get people into his own power-" a regular harpy." Another reference will be found in the third scene in the third act of the L0 Tempest," where Ariel in the midst of thunder and lightning enters as a harpy and addresses those before him as follows :-" I have made you mad. . . . I and my fellows are ministers of fate." In " Pericles," again, Act iv. scene 4, we find Cleon exclaiming " Thou art like the harpy, Which, to betray, dost with thine angel's face Seize with thine eagle's talons." In the " Monstrorum Historia" of Aldrovandus we find figured a medival rendering of the creature, and Guillim in his " Heraldry " seems to frankly accept the harpy as a real thing, while the lines he quotes in support from Virgil are powerfully descriptive : " Of Monsters all, most Monstrous this no greater Wrath God sends 'mongst Men : it comes from depth of pitchy Hell : With Virgin's Face, but Womb like Gulf unsatiate hath, Her Hands are Griping claws, her Colour pale and fell." Virgil, it will be noticed, makes the creature wholly fearful, while Shakespeare makes the horror yet more weird by giving the implacable and destroying monster a face of angelic sweetness. Upton, another old writer on heraldry, says that in blazoning arms "the Harpy should be given to such persons as have committed Manslaughter, to the End that by the often view of their Ensigns they might be moved to bewail the Foulness of their Offence." This we should imagine, is more simple in theory than in practice, and Upton must have been very simple himself to fancy that any one could thus be induced to blazon their misdoings abroad like that. In the earlier days of heraldry the monarch had two powerful means of rewarding or punishing.' his nobles in what were termed respectively marks of ugmentation and of abatement in their armorial beari gs, but in the later times in which Upton lived n such compulsory stigma was possible. We fancy, to , that in the earlier days a good deal of what a mode a judge and jury would call manslaughter went on, and was not by any means considered a foul offence to be bewailed over. |