Zeus relieved her grief by changing her into a nightingale, whose songs are Aedon's lamentations about her child.
The story was an ancient one; for example, Homer's listeners were expected to know the allusion, when Penelope reveals to the still-disguised Odysseus her anguish: I lie on my bed, and the sharp anxieties swarmingthick and fast on my beating heart torment my sorrowing self.As when Pandareos' daughter, the greenwood nightingaleperching in the deep of the forest foliage sings outher lovely song when springtime is just begun, she varyingthe manifold strains of her voice, pours out the melodymourning Itylos, son of the lord Zethos, her own belovedchild, whom she once killed with the bronze, when the madness was upon her;So my mind is divided, and starts one way, then another.
—Odyssey xix.519-24; Richmond Lattimore's translation).As one of only nine similes in the Odyssey that are longer than five lines, the thematic complexity of the image and its multiple points of contact with Penelope's situation has arrested the attention of many readers.
[2] In an explanatory scholium on this passage, an anonymous scholiast, echoed by Eustathius, explains that Aedon attempted to kill Amaleus, the son of her sister-in-law and rival, Niobe, but accidentally killed her own son instead: thus, the gods changed her into a nightingale to weep for eternity.
Attic authors later than Homer, including the dramatists, knew a different nightingale myth in which Procne was married to Tereus, who raped her sister Philomela.