[5] Harpies were generally depicted as birds with the heads of maidens, faces pale with hunger and long claws on their hands.

Once before I saw some creatures in a painting [i.e. harpies], carrying off the feast of Phineus; but these [i.e. the Erinyes] are wingless in appearance, black, altogether disgusting; they snore with repulsive breaths, they drip from their eyes hateful drops; their attire is not fit to bring either before the statues of the gods or into the homes of men.

[9]Bird-bodied, girl-faced things they (Harpies) are; abominable their droppings, their hands are talons, their faces haggard with hunger insatiable.

Their name means 'snatchers' or 'swift robbers',[13] and they were said to steal food from their victims while they were eating and carry evildoers (especially those who have killed their families) to the Erinyes.

[16] Later writers listed the harpies among the guardians of the underworld among other monstrosities including the Centaurs, Scylla, Briareus, Lernaean Hydra, Chimera, Gorgons and Geryon.

According to Valerius, Typhoeus (Typhon) was said to be the father of these monsters[16] while a different version by Servius told that the harpies were daughters of Pontus and Gaea or of Poseidon.

[30] Other progeny of Podarge were Phlogeus and Harpagos, horses given by Hermes to the Dioscuri, who competed for the chariot-race in celebration of the funeral games of Pelias.

[31] The swift horse Arion was also said to begotten by loud-piping Zephyrus on a harpy (probably Podarge), as attested by Quintus Smyrnaeus.

Later writers add that they either devoured the food themselves, or that they dirtied it by dropping upon it some stinking substance, so as to render it unfit to be eaten.

But being worn out with fatigue, she fell down simultaneously with her pursuer; and, as they promised no further to molest Phineus, the two harpies were not deprived of their lives.

They have broad wings, with razor sharp talons and a human neck and face, Clawed feet and swollen, feathered bellies; they caw Their lamentations in the eerie trees.

[37] In Canto XXXIII of Orlando Furioso, author Ludovico Ariosto has the Christian Ethiopian Emperor Senapo (Prester John) afflicted with harpies under circumstances nearly identical to those in the myth of Phineus.

[38] William Blake was inspired by Dante's description in his pencil, ink, and watercolour The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides (Tate Gallery, London).

In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick spots the sharp-tongued Beatrice approaching and exclaims to the prince, Don Pedro, that he would do an assortment of arduous tasks for him "rather than hold three words conference with this harpy!"