Aëdon

The feminine noun ἀηδών translates to 'nightingale', and has a secondary meaning of 'singer'.^[4] It shares the same root with the verb ἀείδω meaning 'to sing, to chant, to praise'.^[5] This verb in turn derives from Proto-Hellenic *awéidō, which might be from a Proto-Indo-European root *h₂weyd-.^[6]

Aëdon was the daughter of Pandareus and his wife Harmothoë,^[7] and thus sister to Chelidon, Cleothera, Merope and an unnamed brother.^[2][8] According to the geographer Pausanias, Polygnotus supplanted the names of the last two with Cameiro and Clytie instead.^[9]

Aëdon either married Zethus, king of Thebes, and bore him an only son named Itylus, or Polytechnus, a carpenter^[10] of Colophon in Lydia, and bore him an only son named Itys. In some authors she also has a daughter named Neis.

Aëdon was the wife of Zethus, king of Thebes, and accidentally she ended up killing her own son Itylus, when 'madness was upon her'.^[2] Her story is evidently a very old one, as it was referenced as early as Homer in his Odyssey, when Penelope speaks to her husband Odysseus in the lines:

I lie upon my bed, and sharp cares, crowding close about my throbbing heart, disquiet me, as I mourn. Even as when the daughter of Pandareus, the nightingale of the greenwood, sings sweetly, when spring is newly come, as she sits perched amid the thick leafage of the trees, and with many trilling notes pours forth her rich voice in wailing for her child, dear Itylus, whom she had one day slain with the sword unwittingly, Itylus, the son of king Zethus; even so my heart sways to and fro in doubt,

— Homer, Odyssey lines 19.519-24; A.T. Murray's translation.

Eustathius of Thessalonica and other scholiasts explain that Aëdon was envious of her sister-in-law, Amphion's wife Niobe, who had fourteen children (seven sons and seven daughters) opposed to her single one (or two, as some authors also mention a daughter named Neis).^[11] Itylus however got along with his cousins, and often slept with them, in particular with Amaleus, Amphion and Niobe's firstborn. One day, Aëdon instructed Itylus to sleep in the innermost position of the bed that night.^[12] However Itylus forgot his mother's words, and so when Aëdon entered the bedroom with a knife at hand intending to kill Amaleus in his sleep, she killed her own son.^[13][14] Alternatively Aëdon could not tell who was which in the darkness.^[15] Another version states that she did manage to kill Amaleus as she wished, but then in fear of Niobe's reaction to the murder she knowingly killed her own child as well.^[13][16]

Aëdon mourned her only son greatly, and thus Zeus, the father of Amphion and Zethus, transformed her into a nightingale when Zethus began to hunt her down following Itylus's murder.^[17] A Homeric scholiast attributed the story of Aëdon killing her son in her effort to murder Niobe's to Pherecydes, a historian who lived during the fifth century BC.^[18][19] In this story Aëdon becomes Niobe's rival in the same way Leto does in the more known story concerning Niobe, both mothers of two children, boy and girl, who are threatened by Niobe's vast progeny. Aëdon thus occupies the same position as the goddess, but unlike Leto, she has not the power to smite Niobe, and instead her efforts end in grief.^[11]

In yet another version, Aëdon was married to Zetes, one of the sons of the north wind god Boreas (perhaps a mixing up of the names Zethus and Zetes, as Zetes is otherwise unrelated to the story). Aëdon began suspecting (perhaps correctly) that Zetes had fallen in love with a hamadryad nymph, and further suspected that their son Aëtylus knew and was helping his father carry out the affair and covering up for him.^[12] In anger, Aëdon killed her son after he returned one day from hunting.^[20] In pity, Aphrodite changed the mother into a nightingale, which to this day mourns for her child.^[21]

It has been argued that Penelope chooses to mention Aëdon's story is because she is indirectly indicating her own desire to protect her son Telemachus, himself an only child who must hold his own against numerous male rivals and now as a grown-up acts independently of her like Itylus ignored his mother's orders, against danger.^[22]

 

According to a later tradition preserved in Antoninus Liberalis,^[8] Aëdon is instead the daughter of Pandareus and the wife of Polytechnus, an artist from Colophon. The couple boasted that they loved each other more than Hera and Zeus did. Hera sent Eris to cause trouble between the two of them. Polytechnus was then making a chair, and Aëdon a piece of embroidery, and they agreed that whoever should finish the work first should receive from the other a female slave as the prize. Polytechnos was furious when Aëdon (with Hera's help) won.^[23]

Obligated to find his wife a slave, he went to Aëdon's father, and pretending that his wife wished to see her sister Chelidon, he took her with him. On his way home he raped her, dressed her in slave's attire, commanded her into silence, and gave her to his wife as the promised prize. After some time Chelidon, believing herself unobserved, lamented her own fate, but she was overheard by Aëdon, and the two sisters conspired against Polytechnus for revenge. They murdered Polytechnos' son Itys and served him up as a meal to his father.^[24]

Aëdon then fled with Chelidon to her father, who, when Polytechnus came in pursuit of his wife, had him bound, smeared with honey, and exposed to the insects. Aëdon now took pity upon the sufferings of her husband, and when her relations were on the point of killing her for this weakness, Zeus changed Polytechnus into a woodpecker, the brother of Aëdon into a whoop, her father into a sea-eagle, her mother into a kingfisher, Chelidon into a swallow, and Aëdon herself into a nightingale.^[25]

All versions of the story provide an aetion for the nightingale's song, as the mournful Aëdon (and Procne) spends her new life lamenting the death of her child. In reality however when it comes to nightingales the female of the species does not sing, only the male.^[26][27]

The Anatolian variation seems to have originated in mere etymologies, and is of the same class as that about Philomela and Procne;^[25] Procne was an Athenian princess who married Tereus, the king of Thrace, and had a son named Itys with him. Tereus then raped and mutilated Procne's sister Philomela, who informed her sister of the deed with a tapestry. Procne and Philomela then slew Itys and served him to his father, who chased down the two sisters until all three were changed into birds.^[28]

 

Joseph Fontenrose identified five versions of Aëdon's legend, dubbing them F, G, H, J and K (A through E cover the different versions of Athamas's myth, which have structural similarities with Aëdon's); F is the version with Aëtylus and the hamadryad, G the version with Niobe and Amaleus, H the one with Polytechnus and Chelidon set in Asia Minor, J is the most well-known one starring Procne and Philomela, with K as a variation of J in which Tereus lies about Procne dying in order to marry Philomela whom he later gives to another king named Lynceus.^[29]

Fontenrose noted the similarities of the Aëdon group with the Athamas group, namely the themes of polygamy, the birth and death of multiple children, the concealment or disguise of another woman, a rivalry of a wife and a mistress figure, and a woman killing her own child by mistake, which end in bird metamorphosis.^[30]

Homer knew about Pandareus's daughter the Nightingale (Aëdon) who married to Zethus and killed her son Itys, but makes no mention of the Swallow (Chelidon); Hesiod and Sappho both say that the Swallow is the daughter of Pandion I (Athenian king, the father of Philomela).^[31] Moreover, a sixth-century BC metope from Apollo's temple at Thermos depicts the Nightingale and the Swallow plotting together over something that has been broken off.^[32] It is thus likely that the version Pherecydes and Homer were familiar with was a form of version G, though the metope and Hesiod hint to an early story of the H-J-K type.^[33] The name Tereus is first attested in Aeschylus, as the husband of Aëdon/the Nightingale who killed her own son.^[34]

So while there is precedent for the child murder, it seems that the rape and mutilation of the sister were introduced by Sophocles in his lost Tereus play, where he likely also introduced 'Procne' and 'Philomela' as the names for the Nightingale and the Swallow, as well as the Thracian setting.^[33][35] The myth can thus be interpreted as F with the names from J-K and a sister-in-law in place of the hamadryad. Fontenrose suggests that Homer knew of a story of two rival wives, one of which plotted against the other's child; the story then deviated in two ways; the second wife, which was identified with the swallow, became either a sister-in-law (husband's brother's wife) or a sister and a mistress to the husband.^[36]

Aëdon is traditionally the daughter of Pandareus, himself associated with Crete or the western coast of Asia Minor, while Procne's father is the Athenian Pandion. It is possible that when Aëdon's story crossed the Aegean, Pandareus became confused with Pandion due to their names' similarity, and thus the nightingale and the swallow joined the Athenian mythos, as foreign intruders; Philomela and Procne are otherwise detached from the rest of the traditions surrounding the Athenian royal family.^[36] Furthermore, in the Theban setting, Aëdon's husband Zethus and rival Niobe also seem like an interpolation; Zethus and Amphion act as a parenthesis in the bloodline of Cadmus, and Niobe usually has a home at Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor.^[36]

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• Ino
• Lamia
• Medea
• Antiphera

  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1870). "Aedon". Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.