The Harpies were the “snatchers” — foul, winged spirits with the bodies of birds and the faces of women who swooped down to seize food, people, and the souls of the dead, leaving a stench and a mess behind them. Storm-winds given a body, they are the personification of sudden, violent loss: the things that vanish without explanation, snatched away on the wind.
The Spirits of the Snatching Wind
Daughters of the sea-god Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, the Harpies (their name means “snatchers”) were originally personifications of storm winds — which is why, when something disappeared without a trace, the Greeks said the Harpies had carried it off. They were swift as the wind, filthy, and ever-hungry, and they served as agents of divine punishment, sent to torment the wicked.
The Torment of Phineus
Their most famous victim was the blind prophet Phineus, punished by the gods for revealing too much of the future. Every time food was set before him, the Harpies would swoop down, snatch most of it away, and befoul the rest with their stench, so that he could never eat and was slowly starving in torment. He was saved only by the Argonauts: the winged sons of the North Wind, Zetes and Calais, chased the Harpies across the sky and drove them off forever, freeing the starving prophet.
The Face of Sudden Loss
The Harpies endure as the embodiment of things taken cruelly and without warning — theft from the sky, the food snatched from the mouth, the loved one gone in a storm. In later imagination they became ever more monstrous and vulture-like (Dante set them in his Inferno, nesting in the wood of the suicides). A “harpy” remains a byword for a grasping, tormenting force.
When something is gone in an instant and you cannot say where — the old Greeks knew exactly who to blame.