Pausanias Description of Greece 1.5.4

As we read in Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.401–674, Procne and Philomela are women who become transformed respectively into the prototypical Nightingale and the prototypical Swallow in the course of their tragic interaction with the king of Thrace, a man named Tereus. In some versions of the myth, the names of the two women are more overt: *Aēdōn *and *Khelidōn*, that is, Nightingale and Swallow (for more such versions, I cite Levaniouk 2011:215n6). As for the man, King Tereus, he becomes transformed into a bird known in Greek as *epops*. To say it in English, Tereus becomes the prototypical Hoopoe. The myth about these three doomed humans who are turned into birds is a story of an Eternal Triangle. Tereus marries Procne and then violates her sister Philomela, only to be punished for his crime when Procne takes revenge on her husband by killing their own son and then serving up the child’s cooked body to an unsuspecting Tereus, who thinks he is eating the meat of an animal. That is the *dikē *or ‘retribution’ to which the narrative of Pausanias is referring here. Once Tereus discovers that his stomach has become the tomb of his own son, Tereus experiences a grief that matches the grief of the two sisters. The combined grief becomes too much for all three to bear, and the gods take pity by transforming them all into birds. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6.576–578, we read that Philomela the would-be Swallow weaves into a web the story of her violation by Tereus. She cannot express the sad story in words, since Tereus had cut out her tongue and now keeps her imprisoned in a fortress, hidden away from her sister. For Philomela, the act of weaving a web becomes a substitute for the act of singing a lament in expressing her grief.