Philomela

[2] 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 (Luscinia megarhynchos), a bird renowned for its song.

[7] In Ovid's Metamorphoses Philomela's defiant speech is rendered (in an 18th-century English translation) as: Still my revenge shall take its proper time, And suit the baseness of your hellish crime.

[18][19] Since many of the earlier sources are no longer extant, or remain only in fragments, Ovid's version of the myth has been the most lasting and influential upon later works.

[14] Later sources, among them Hyginus and in modern literature the English romantic poets like Keats write that although she was tongueless, Philomela was turned into a nightingale, and Procne into a swallow.

[21] It is salient to note that in taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, the genus name of the martins (the larger-bodied among swallow genera) is Progne, a Latinized form of Procne.

[18][19] Various later translations of Ovid state that Tereus was transformed into other birds than the hawk and hoopoe, including references by Dryden and Gower to the lapwing.

[27] It is thought that Thucydides commented on the myth in his famous work on the Peloponnesian War because Sophocles' play confused the mythical Tereus with contemporary ruler Teres I of Thrace.

Scholar Jenny Marsh claims Sophocles borrowed certain plot elements from Euripides' drama Medea—notably a wife killing her child in an act of revenge against her husband—and incorporated them in his tragedy Tereus.

[30] It is possible that social and political themes have woven their way into the story as a contrast between Athenians who believed themselves to be the hegemonic power in Greece and the more civilized of the Greek peoples, and the Thracians who were considered to be a "barbaric race".

[33] Most notably, it was the core of the tragedy Tereus by Sophocles (lost, extant only in fragments) and later in a set of plays by Philocles, the nephew of the great playwright Aeschylus.

[37] While Ovid's retelling of the myth is the more famous version of the story, he had several ancient sources on which to rely before he finished the Metamorphoses in A.D.

Geoffrey Chaucer recounted the story in his unfinished work The Legend of Good Women[38] and briefly alluded to the myth in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde.

[41] Throughout the late Renaissance and Elizabethan eras, the image of Philomela and the nightingale incorporated elements of mourning and beauty after being subjected to an act of violence.

In his long poem "The Steele Glas" (1576), poet George Gascoigne (1535–1577) depicts "Philomel" as the representative of poetry (Poesys), her sister Progne as satire (Satyra), and Tereus as "vayne Delight".

Critics have pointed to Gascoigne's use of the Philomela myth as a personal appeal and that he was fighting in verse a battle with his enemies who violently opposed his poems.

[45] In "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) relays consolation regarding the nymph's harsh rejection of the shepherd's romantic advances in the spirit of "time heals all wounds" by citing in the second stanza (among several examples) that eventually, with the passage of time, Philomel would become "dumb" to her own pain and that her attention would be drawn away from the pain by the events of life to come.

[20] Keats' contemporary, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) invoked a similar image of the nightingale, writing in his A Defence of Poetry that "a poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

[63] At the poem's conclusion, Coleridge writes of a father taking his crying son outside in the night: And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once, Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,' Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam!

Leonard Quirino notes that the plot of Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire "is modeled on the legend of Tereus".

Both Israeli dramatist Hanoch Levin (in The Great Whore of Babylon) and English playwright Joanna Laurens (in The Three Birds) wrote plays based on the story.

[74] The reference to Philomela also exists in the name of a Bengali music troupe in Calcutta, India, called Nagar Philomel[75] (The city that loves song), formed in 1983.

[76] Several female writers have used the Philomela myth in exploring the subject of rape, women and power (empowerment) and feminist themes, including novelist Margaret Atwood in her novella "Nightingale" published in The Tent (2006), Emma Tennant in her story "Philomela", Jeannine Hall Gailey who uses the myth in several poems published in Becoming the Villainess (2006)[citation needed], and Timberlake Wertenbaker in her play The Love of the Nightingale (1989) (later adapted into an opera of the same name composed by Richard Mills).

Canadian playwright Erin Shields adapted the myth in her play If We Were Birds (2011), which won the 2011 Governor General's Award for Drama.

[citation needed] More recently, poet and author Melissa Studdard brought new life to the myth in her poem "Philomela's tongue says" (2019), published in Poetry magazine's May 2019 edition.