Itys

Itys ( Greek  Ἴτυς ) is a figure in Greek mythology . His parents were Prokne and Tereus .

myth

His father Tereus once kidnapped Philomela , the sister of his wife Prokne - Itys' aunt - and raped her. To prevent her from betraying him, he cut out her tongue and kept her trapped in the forest. Philomela was able to inform Prokne anyway: She sent her a dress in which she had woven the pictures of her story of suffering.

The prisoner was freed and the sisters retaliated cruelly. They chopped up Itys, boiled its limbs and put them before Tereus for dinner; the king did not realize what he had eaten until Philomela threw him his son's head. With his sword drawn he pursued the sisters. To put a stop to the killing, Zeus turned them all into birds: Philomela into a swallow, Prokne into a nightingale, and Tereus into a hoopoe.

In later traditions the assignment of the birds was changed: Tereus is said to have become a hawk and Philomela to have become a nightingale, who complains of the victim with the cry "ityn, ityn" . The latter variant probably comes from the story of Aëdon , who killed her son Itylos .

literature

• Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher: Itys . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 2.1, Leipzig 1894, Col. 569-573 ( digitized version ).
• Karl Kerényi : The Mythology of the Greeks . Vol. II: The Heroes Stories. 7th edition. dtv, Munich 1984, p. 227, ISBN 3-423-01346-X .