Itys

Itys was the son of Tereus, a king in Thrace, and Procne, the daughter of the Athenian king Pandion. He is the victim in one of the most terrible stories of Greek myth: his mother killed him and served him to his father to avenge the wrong Tereus had done to her sister Philomela. The story explains the cry of the nightingale, which the Greek poets heard as the name “Itys, Itys”.

Family

Procne, daughter of Pandion, was given in marriage to Tereus, son of Ares, as a reward for his help in a war over boundaries (Apollodorus, Library 3.14.8). In Ovid’s account the marriage had no good omens, but when the child Itys was born the Thracians thanked the gods and ordered the day of his birth, like the day of the wedding, to be kept as a festival (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.428–437).

The Story of Itys

Tereus and Philomela

In Apollodorus, Tereus had Itys by Procne, then fell in love with Philomela. He told her that Procne was dead, hid Procne in the country, took Philomela as a wife, and cut out her tongue. Philomela wove letters into a robe to tell her sister her troubles (Apollodorus, Library 3.14.8). In Ovid, Tereus brings Philomela to Thrace on the pretext of a visit asked for by Procne, assaults her in a hut in the woods, and cuts out her tongue with a sword when she threatens to tell. She weaves purple marks on a white web and sends it to Procne by a servant (Metamorphoses 6.438–582).

The Killing of Itys

Procne finds her sister and, in Ovid, brings her back to the palace dressed as a Bacchante during the biennial festival of Dionysus, when the women of Thrace rush through the night (Metamorphoses 6.587–600). When the boy Itys comes to her, she sees his father in him. She hesitates, but drags him away like a tigress with a fawn, and at the back of the house strikes him with a sword as he calls “mother, mother”; Philomela cuts his throat. The sisters then cut up the body; part is boiled in bronze pots and part roasted on spits (Metamorphoses 6.620–646). Apollodorus gives the same outline briefly: Procne killed Itys, boiled him, served him to Tereus without his knowledge, and fled with her sister (Library 3.14.8).

The Banquet and the Pursuit

Procne tells Tereus that the feast is a rite of their country that no one else may attend, and he eats alone. When he asks for Itys to be brought, Procne says “You have inside you the one you ask for”, and Philomela throws the bloody head of Itys in his face. Tereus overturns the table and calls on the Furies, and then chases the sisters with a drawn sword (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.647–666). In Apollodorus he snatches up an axe instead (Library 3.14.8). Pausanias calls the serving of Itys to his father the first pollution of the dinner table among men (Pausanias 10.4.8).

Where the Story Is Set

Ovid places the story in Thrace. Thucydides says that this Tereus is not the Thracian king Teres, father of Sitalces, but a man who lived at Daulis, in what is now Phocis, a land then inhabited by Thracians; there the women did what they did to Itys, and the poets call the nightingale the Daulian bird (Thucydides 2.29.3). Pausanias agrees that Tereus ruled Daulis, though the people of Megara said he was king at Pagae and showed his grave (Pausanias 1.41.8; 10.4.8).

Transformation into Birds

The story ends with all three turned into birds. In Apollodorus, the sisters are overtaken at Daulia in Phocis and pray to the gods to be turned into birds: Procne becomes a nightingale and Philomela a swallow, and Tereus is changed into a hoopoe (Library 3.14.8). Ovid says that one sister flew to the woods and the other to the roof, with the marks of the murder still on their breasts, and that Tereus became the hoopoe, with a crest and a long beak (Metamorphoses 6.667–674); he does not say which bird each sister became, and writers differ. The lament of the nightingale for Itys is already known to Aeschylus, who compares Cassandra to the bird that moans “Itys, Itys” through her whole life of sorrow (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1140–1145).

A Different Itylus

In the Odyssey the nightingale is the daughter of Pandareus, who mourns her son Itylus, son of King Zethus, whom she once killed with the bronze through folly (Homer, Odyssey 19.518–523). This is a related but different version, and Homer does not mention Tereus or Philomela.

Itys Sources

Homer, Odyssey 19.518–523; Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1140–1145; Thucydides 2.29.3; Apollodorus, Library 3.14.8; Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.426–674; Pausanias 1.41.8 and 10.4.8.

See Also: Tereus, Procne, Philomela, Pandion