Harpy
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Harpy. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
har'py, a fabulous creature of Greek mythology. It had the body, legs, and talons of a vulture and the head and breast of a woman. The harpies are described as hideously fierce and filthy, with the habit of swooping down upon an outdoor feast, devouring the choicest viands, and defiling everything they could not eat. A descent of this sort is depicted in Virgil's Aeneid. Aeneas and his followers, after leaving Crete for Hesperia, make their first landing on the Strophades, the island of the harpies. They prepare a feast, having slain wild cattle for that purpose. They invoke the blessing of the gods and begin their feast, When from the mountain-tops, with hideous cry, And clatt'ring wings the hungry Harpies fly. The feast is defiled. Aeneas orders new meats to be prepared, but with the same result. This time they do battle with the harpies. While it is impossible to kill them they are at last driven away, but one Celaeno seats herself upon a "craggy cliff," curses Aeneas, and prophesies dire famine and other dread misfortune in Italy, foretelling that the Trojans will be reduced to such hunger that they will consume the very plates in their distress. Virgil tells in the seventh book of the Aeneid how this prophecy was fulfilled when the hungry men used pieces of bread for plates and then devoured the bread. Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said. See! we devour the plates on which we fed.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
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 mai 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.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries describe a myth, and the myth has not moved. Everything Aiton's set down in 1910 about the Strophades episode, and Collier's 1921 catalogue of the conflicting parentages in Homer and Hesiod, would still pass in a classics classroom today. The one thing that has shifted is emphasis: modern classicists stress that the Harpies began as personified snatching storm-winds (from Greek harpazein, to seize) and that the hideous bird-woman of Virgil is a late development from the "fair-haired and winged maidens" Collier's notes in Hesiod. Outside mythology the word has led two lives Collier's only hints at: as a heraldic charge, and as an insult aimed at women, a usage now often flagged as sexist in dictionaries.
Written for this edition, 2026.