Philomela. Philomela or Philomel is a minor figure in Greek mythology and is frequently invoked as a direct and figurative symbol in literary, artistic, and musical works in the Western canon. She is identified as being the princess of Athens and the younger of two daughters of Pandion I, King of Athens, and Zeuxippe. Her sister, Procne, was the wife of King Tereus of Thrace. While the myth has several variations, the general depiction is that Philomela, after being raped and mutilated by her sister's husband, Tereus, obtains her revenge and is transformed into a nightingale, a migratory passerine bird native to Europe and southwest Asia and noted for its song. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the song of the nightingale is often depicted or interpreted as a sorrowful lament. In nature, the female nightingale is actually mute and only the male of the species sings. Ovid and other writers have made the association that the etymology of her name was lover of song, derived from the Greek and instead of. The name means lover of fruit, lover of apples, or lover of sheep. The most complete and extant rendering of the story of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus can be found in Book VI of the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid, where the story reaches its full development during antiquity. It is likely that Ovid relied upon Greek and Latin sources that were available in his era such as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, or sources that are no longer extant or exist today only in fragments, especially Sophocles' tragic drama Tereus. According to Ovid, in the fifth year of Procne's marriage to Tereus, King of Thrace and son of Ares, she asked her husband to Let me at Athens my dear sister see / Or let her come to Thrace, and visit me. Tereus agreed to travel to Athens and escort her sister, Philomela, to Thrace. King Pandion of Athens, the father of Philomela and Procne, was apprehensive about letting his one remaining daughter leave his home and protection and asks Tereus to protect her as if he were her father. Tereus agrees. However, Tereus lusted for Philomela when he first saw her, and that lust grew during the course of the return voyage to Thrace. Arriving in Thrace, he forced her to a cabin or lodge in the woods and raped her. After the assault, Tereus threatened her and advised her to keep silent. Philomela was defiant and angered Tereus. In his rage, he cut out her tongue and abandoned her in the cabin. In Ovid's Metamorphoses Philomela's defiant speech is rendered as: Still my revenge shall take its proper time, And suit the baseness of your hellish crime. My self, abandon'd, and devoid of shame, Thro' the wide world your actions will proclaim; Or tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den, Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men, My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move, And my complainings echo thro' the grove. Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there, Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r. Rendered unable to speak because of her injuries, Philomela wove a tapestry that told her story and had it sent to Procne. Procne was incensed and in revenge, she killed her son by Tereus, Itys, boiled him and served him as a meal to her husband. After Tereus ate Itys, the sisters presented him with the severed head of his son, and he became aware of their conspiracy and his cannibalistic meal. He snatched up an axe and pursued them with the intent to kill the sisters. They fled but were almost overtaken by Tereus at Daulia in Phocis. In desperation, they prayed to the gods to be turned into birds and escape Tereus' rage and vengeance. The gods transformed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. Subsequently, the gods would transform Tereus into a hoopoe. It is typical for myths from antiquity to have been altered over the passage of time or for competing variations of the myth to emerge. With the story of Philomela, most of the variations concern which sister became the nightingale or the swallow, and into what type of bird Tereus was transformed. Since Ovid's Metamorphoses, it has been generally accepted that Procne was transformed into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow. The description of Tereus as an epops has generally been translated as a hoopoe. Since many of the earlier sources are no longer extant, or remain only fragments, Ovid's version of the myth has been the most lasting and influenced most later works. Early Greek sources have it that Philomela was turned into a swallow, which has no song; Procne turns into a nightingale, singing a beautiful but sad song in remorse.