Harpy
a fabulous creature in Greek mythology, considered as a minister of the vengeance of the gods. Various accounts are given of the numbers and parentage of the Harpies. Homer mentions but one, Podarge; Hesiod enumerates two, Aëllo and Okypete, daughters of Thaumas by the Oceanid Electra, fair-haired and winged maidens, very swift of flight. Three are sometimes recognized by later writers, who call them variously daughters of Poseidon or of Typhon, and describe them as hideous monsters with wings, of fierce and loathsome aspect, with their faces pale with hunger, living in an atmosphere of filth and stench, and contaminating everything that they approached. Vergil locates them in the Strophades. A harpy in heraldry is represented as a vulture, with the head and breast of a woman. lish novelist, daughter of an East India