Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/229

 PANDION.- PROKNE. -TEREU3. l'J7 by a trusty messenger. Prokne, overwhelmed with sorrow and an- ger, took advantage of the free egress enjoyed by women during the Bacchanalian festival to go and release her sister : the two sis- ters then revenged themselves upon Tereus by killing the boy Itys, and serving him up for his father to eat : after the meal had been finished, the horrid truth was revealed to him. Tereus snatched a hatchet to put Prokne to death : she fled, along with Philomela, and all the three were changed into birds Prokne became a swal- low, Philomela a nightingale, and Tereus an hoopoe. 1 This tale, so popular with the poets, and so illustrative of the general char- acter of Grecian legend, is not less remarkable in another point of view that the great historian Thucydides seems to allude to it as an historical fact, 2 not however directly mentioning the final metamorphosis. After the death of Pandion, Erechtheus succeeded to the king- dom, and his brother, Butes, became priest of Poseidon Erich- thonius, a function which his descendants ever afterwards exer- cised, the Butadae or Eteobutadae. Erechtheus seems to appear in three characters in the fabulous history of Athens as a god, 1 Apollod. iii. 14, 8 ; JEsch. Supplic. 61; Soph. Elektr. 107 ; Ovid, Meta- morph. vi. 425670. Hyginus gives the fable with some additional circum stances, fab. 45. Antoninus Liberalis (Narr. 11), or Bceus, from whom he copies, has composed a new narrative by combining together the names of Pandareos and Aedon, as given in the Odyssey, xix. 523, and the adven- tures of the old Attic fable. The hoopoe still continued the habit of chasing the nightingale ; it was to the Athenians a present fact. See Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 212. 8 Thucyd, ii. 29. He makes express mention of the nightingale in con- nection with the story, though not of the metamorphosis. See below, chap, xvi. p. 544, note 2. So also does Pausanias mention and reason upon it as a real incident : he founds upon it several moral reflections (i. 5, 4 ; x. 4, 5) : the author of the Aoyoj- 'ETrtra^tof, ascribed to Demosthenes, treats it in the same manner, as a fact ennobling the tribe Pandionis, of which Pandion was the eponymus. The same author, in touching upon Kekrops, the eponymus of the Kekropis tribe, cannot believe literally the story of his being half man and half serpent : he rationalizes it by saying that Kekrops was so called be- cause in wisdom he was like a man, in strength like a serpent (Demosth, p. 1397, 1398, Eeiske). Hcsiod glances at the fable (Opp. Di. 566), optfpoyoij Uavdiovlf upro ^cAidwv ; see also jElian., V. H. xii. 20. The subject wai handled by Sophokles in his lost Tereus.