Harpy (mythology)

The Harpy is 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 clattering 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.