77-645: Philomel is another name for Philomela , a character from Greek mythology. It may refer to: Nature [ edit ] A nightingale Arts and Letters [ edit ] An abbreviated form of the name Philomela , a figure in Greek mythology often invoked as a symbol in literature. Philomel (musical instrument) , similar to the violin Philomel Books , an American publishing imprint of Penguin Group "Philomel Cottage",
154-537: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
231-479: A "barbaric race". It is possible that these elements were woven into Sophocles' play Tereus and other works of the period. The material of the Philomela myth has been used in various creative works—artistic and literary—for the past 2,500 years. Over the centuries, the myth has been associated with the image of the nightingale and its song described as both exceedingly beautiful and sorrowful. The continued use of
308-449: A 10-gun Cherokee -class brig-sloop launched in 1823 and sold in 1833 HMS Philomel (1842) , an 8-gun brig launched in 1842 HMS Philomel (1860) , a Philomel -class gunvessel launched in 1860 and sold in 1865 HMS Philomel (1867) , a wooden screw gun vessel launched in 1867 and sold in 1886 HMS Philomel (1890) , a Pearl -class cruiser launched in 1890 HMNZS Philomel ,
385-450: A battle with his enemies who violently opposed his poems. In Gascoigne's poem "The complaynt of Philomene" (1576), the myth is employed to depict punishment and control. 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
462-463: A direct reference to the murder of Agamemnon in the tragedy by Aeschylus—wherein the Greek dramatist directly evoked the Philomela myth. The poem describes Sweeney as a brute and that two women in the poem are conspiring against him for his mistreatment of them. This mirrors not only the elements of Agamemnon's death in Aeschylus' play but the sister's revenge against Tereus in the myth. In the poem "To
539-472: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and
616-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in
693-453: A poet and "master of a superior art that could inspire the human poet". For some romantic poets, the nightingale even began to take on qualities of the muse. John Keats (1795–1821), in " Ode to a Nightingale " (1819) idealizes the nightingale as a poet who has achieved the poetry that Keats himself longs to write. Keats directly employs the Philomel myth in " The Eve of St. Agnes " (1820) where
770-713: A poet would "hold his tongue" (line 13) in deference to the more beautiful nightingale's song so that he "not dull you with my song" (line 14). Emilia Lanier (1569–1645), a poet who is considered by some scholars to be the woman referred to in the poetry of William Shakespeare as " Dark Lady ", makes several references to Philomela in her patronage poem "The Description of Cookeham" in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lanier's poem, dedicated to Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and her daughter Lady Anne Clifford refers to Philomela's "sundry layes"(line 31) and later to her "mournful ditty" (line 189). The image of
847-399: A poetic device that aids in the "recognition"—the change from ignorance to knowledge—of what has happened earlier in the plot. Such a device, according to Aristotle, is ″contrived″ by the poet, and thus is "inartistic". The connection between the nightingale's song and poetry is evoked by Aristophanes in his comedy The Birds and in the poetry of Callimachus . Roman poet Virgil compares
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#1732852390836924-495: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
1001-671: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek , and Koine may be classified as Ancient Greek in a wider sense. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek
1078-609: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as
1155-410: A successful short story written by Agatha Christie, part of The Listerdale Mystery collection, subject of a number of adaptions Philomèle , a lost opera written in 1690 by French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier Philomèle , an opera written in 1705 by French composer Louis de La Coste Philomel (Babbitt) , a 1964 musical composition by American composer Milton Babbitt Philomel ,
1232-524: A variation of the myth set in Asia Minor , Philomela is called Chelidon ("swallow") and her sister Aëdon ("nightingale"). The story of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus is largely influenced by Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus . 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 . She implies that
1309-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
1386-556: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of
1463-463: Is a minor figure in Greek mythology who is frequently invoked as a direct and figurative symbol in literary and artistic works in the Western canon . Philomela was the younger of two daughters of Pandion I , King of Athens , and the naiad Zeuxippe . Her sister, Procne , was the wife of King Tereus of Thrace . Philomela's other siblings were Erechtheus , Butes and possibly Teuthras . While
1540-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
1617-644: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to
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#17328523908361694-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
1771-419: Is nothing melancholy", (line 15) expressing hope "we may not thus profane / Nature's sweet voices, always full of love / And joyance!" (lines 40–42). 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
1848-420: Is perpetuated largely through its appearance as a powerful device in poetry. In the 20th century, American-British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) directly referenced the myth in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), where he describes, The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still
1925-498: 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. Other related genera named after the myth include the Crag Martins Ptyonoprogne , and Saw-wings Psalidoprocne . Coincidentally, although most of the depictions of the nightingale and its song in art and literature are of female nightingales,
2002-469: Is the most complete, lasting version of the myth, it is the basis for many later works. In the 12th century, French trouvère (troubadour) Chrétien de Troyes , adapted many of the myths recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses into Old French . However, de Troyes was not alone in adapting Ovid's material. Geoffrey Chaucer recounted the story in his unfinished work The Legend of Good Women and briefly alluded to
2079-434: Is the nightingale and Procne is the swallow. The description of Tereus as an "epops" has generally been translated as a hoopoe (scientific name: Upupa epops ). 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. Early Greek sources have it that Philomela was turned into a swallow, which has no song; Procne
2156-639: The Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 BC – 17/18 AD), where the story reaches its full development during antiquity. It is likely that Ovid relied upon Greek and Latin sources that were available in his era such as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus (2nd century BC), or sources that are no longer extant or exist today only in fragments—especially Sophocles ' tragic drama Tereus (5th century BC). According to Ovid, in
2233-698: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
2310-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
2387-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
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2464-490: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
2541-463: The Nightingale", Argentine poet and fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), compares his efforts as a poet to the bird's lament though never having heard it. He describes its song as "encrusted with mythology" and that the evolution of the myth has distorted it—that the opinions of other poets and writers have kept both poet and reader from actually hearing the original sound and knowing the essence of
2618-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
2695-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
2772-413: The baseness of your hellish crime. My self, abandon'd, and devoid of shame, Thro' the wide world your actions will proclaim; Or tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den, Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men, My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move, And my complainings echo thro' the grove. Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there, Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r. Philomela
2849-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West
2926-533: The course of the return voyage to Thrace. Arriving in Thrace, he forced her to a cabin or lodge in the woods and raped her. After the assault, Tereus threatened her and advised her to keep silent. Philomela was defiant and angered Tereus. In his rage, he cut out her tongue and abandoned her in the cabin. 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
3003-570: The depiction of Lucrece in The Rape of Lucrece , in the depiction of Imogen in Cymbeline , and in Titania 's lullaby in A Midsummer Night's Dream where she asks Philomel to "sing in our sweet lullaby". In Sonnet 102 , Shakespeare addresses his lover (the "fair youth") and compares his love poetry to the song of the nightingale, noting that "her mournful hymns did hush the night" (line 10), and that as
3080-611: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
3157-515: The female nightingale is mute, and only the male of the species sings. Ovid and other writers have made the association that the etymology of her name was "lover of song", derived from the Greek φιλο- and μέλος ("song") instead of μῆλον ("fruit" or "sheep"), which means "lover of fruit", "lover of apples", or "lover of sheep". The most complete and extant rendering of the story of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus can be found in Book VI of
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3234-448: The female of the species does not sing—it is the male of the species who sings its characteristic song. In an early account, Sophocles wrote that Tereus was turned into a large-beaked bird whom some scholars translate as a hawk while a number of retellings and other works (including Aristophanes ' ancient comedy The Birds ) hold that Tereus was instead changed into a hoopoe. Various later translations of Ovid state that Tereus
3311-583: The fifth year of Procne's marriage to Tereus , King of Thrace and son of Ares , she asked her husband to "Let me at Athens my dear sister see / Or let her come to Thrace, and visit me." Tereus agreed to travel to Athens and escort her sister, Philomela, to Thrace. King Pandion of Athens, the father of Philomela and Procne, was apprehensive about letting his one remaining daughter leave his home and protection and asks Tereus to protect her as if he were her father. Tereus agrees. However, Tereus lusted for Philomela when he first saw her, and that lust grew during
3388-663: The forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been
3465-556: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from
3542-472: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to
3619-446: The image in artistic, literary, and musical works has reinforced this association. Beginning with Homer 's Odyssey , ancient dramatists and poets evoked the story of Philomela and the nightingale in their works. 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 . In Aeschylus's Agamemnon ,
3696-569: The infanticide of Itys did not appear in the Tereus myth until Sophocles' play and that it was introduced because of what was borrowed from Euripides. 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
3773-540: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philomel&oldid=1092889370 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Philomela Philomela ( / ˌ f ɪ l ə ˈ m iː l ə / ) or Philomel ( / ˈ f ɪ l ə ˌ m ɛ l / ; Ancient Greek : Φιλομήλη , Philomēlē ; Φιλομήλα Philomḗla )
3850-632: The literary magazine of the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania Military [ edit ] Philomel -class gunvessel , a class of wooden-hulled ships built for the Royal Navy between 1859 and 1867 HMS Philomel , the name bestowed on six Royal Navy (UK) ships, including: HMS Philomel (1806) , an 18-gun Cruizer -class brig-sloop launched in 1806 and sold in 1817 HMS Philomel (1823) ,
3927-474: The main administrative naval base of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Miscellaneous [ edit ] Jessica Philomele/Philomel Hartung, character in the video game Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Philomel . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
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#17328523908364004-542: The mourning of Orpheus for Eurydice to the "lament of the nightingale". 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. 8. Many of these sources were doubtless available to Ovid during his lifetime but have been lost or come to us at present only in fragments. In his version, Ovid recast and combined many elements from these ancient sources. Because his
4081-404: 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. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the song of the nightingale is often depicted or interpreted as a sorrowful lament . In nature,
4158-577: The myth in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde . John Gower included the tale in his Confessio Amantis . References to Philomela are common in the motets of the ars nova , ars subtilior , and ars mutandi musical eras of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. 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
4235-470: The nightingale appears frequently in poetry of the period with it and its song described by poets as an example of "joyance" and gaiety or as an example of melancholy, sad, sorrowful, and mourning. However, many use the nightingale as a symbol of sorrow but without a direct reference to the Philomela myth. Poets in the Romantic Era recast the myth and adapted the image of the nightingale with its song to be
4312-499: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
4389-516: The passage of time or for competing variations of the myth to emerge. With the story of Philomela, most of the variations concern which sister became the nightingale or the swallow, and into what type of bird Tereus was transformed. In Greek texts like Achilles Tatius and the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Philomela is transformed into a swallow and Procne into a nightingale, but in Latin texts Philomela
4466-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
4543-468: The prophetess Cassandra has a visionary premonition of her own death in which she mentioned the nightingale and Itys, lamenting: Ah for thy fate, O shrill-voiced nightingale! Some solace for thy woes did Heaven afford, Clothed thee with soft brown plumes, and life apart from wail(ing)— In his Poetics , Aristotle points to the "voice of the shuttle" in Sophocles ′ tragedy Tereus as an example of
4620-493: The rape of Madeline by Porphyro mirrors the rape of Philomela by Tereus. 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." In France, Philomèle
4697-411: The representative of poetry (Poesys), her sister Progne as satire (Satyra), and Tereus as "vayne Delight". The characterization of Philomela and the nightingale was that of a woman choosing to exercise her will in recovering her voice and resisting those forces which attempts to silence her. Critics have pointed to Gascoigne's use of the Philomela myth as a personal appeal and that he was fighting in verse
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#17328523908364774-589: 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 . 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. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes
4851-577: 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. In Sir Philip Sidney 's (1554–1586) courtly love poem "The Nightingale", the narrator, who is in love with a woman he cannot have, compares his own romantic situation to that of Philomela's plight and claims that he has more reason to be sad. However, recent literary criticism has labelled this claim as sexist and an unfortunate marginalization of
4928-470: The sisters intending to kill them. They fled but were almost overtaken by Tereus at Daulia in Phocis. The sisters desperately prayed to the gods to be turned into birds and escape Tereus' rage and vengeance. The gods transformed Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale . Subsequently, the gods transformed Tereus into a hoopoe . It is typical for myths from antiquity to have been altered over
5005-724: The song. Several artists have applied Ovid's account to new translations or reworkings, or adapted the story for the stage. Leonard Quirino notes that the plot of Tennessee Williams 's play A Streetcar Named Desire "is modeled on the legend of Tereus". British poet Ted Hughes (1930–1998) used the myth in his 1997 work Tales from Ovid (1997) which was a loose translation and retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses . Both Israeli dramatist Hanoch Levin (in The Great Whore of Babylon ) and English playwright Joanna Laurens (in The Three Birds ) wrote plays based on
5082-481: The story. The story was adapted into an opera by Scottish composer James Dillon in 2004, and a 1964 vocal composition by American composer Milton Babbitt with text by John Hollander . The reference to Philomela also exists in the name of a Bengali music troupe in Calcutta, India, called Nagar Philomel (The city that loves song), formed in 1983. Several female writers have used the Philomela myth in exploring
5159-590: 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) , and Timberlake Wertenbaker in her play The Love of the Nightingale (1989) (later adapted into an opera of
5236-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
5313-551: The traumatic rape of Philomela. Sidney argues that the rape was an "excess of love" and less severe than being deprived of love as attested by the line, "Since wanting is more woe than too much having." Playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564–1616) makes frequent use of the Philomela myth—most notably in his tragedy Titus Andronicus (c. 1588–1593) where characters directly reference Tereus and Philomela in commenting on rape and mutilation of Lavinia by Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius. Prominent allusions to Philomela also occur in
5390-456: The world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. Eliot employs the myth to depict themes of sorrow, pain, and that the only recovery or regeneration possible is through revenge. Several of these mentions reference other poets' renderings of the myth, including those of Ovid and Gascoigne. Eliot's references to the nightingales singing by the convent in "Sweeney and the Nightingales" (1919–1920) is
5467-444: The yellow moon-beam! Well!— It is a father's tale: But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Familiar with these songs, that with the night He may associate joy.— Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who called the nightingale a "fiery heart", depicted it "as an instance of natural poetic creation", and the "voice of nature". Other notable mentions include: The Philomela myth
5544-475: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
5621-414: Was an operatic stage production of the story, produced by Louis Lacoste during the reign of Louis XIV . First published in the collection Lyrical Ballads , "The Nightingale" (1798) is an effort by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) to move away from associations that the nightingale's song was one of melancholy and identified it with the joyous experience of nature. He remarked that "in nature there
5698-508: Was not King of Thrace, but rather from Daulia in Phocis , a city inhabited by Thracians. Thucydides cites as proof of this that poets who mention the nightingale refer to it as a "Daulian bird". 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. In
5775-504: Was transformed into other birds than the hawk and hoopoe, including references by Dryden and Gower to the lapwing . Several writers omit key details of the story. According to Pausanias , Tereus was so remorseful for his actions against Philomela and Itys (the nature of the actions is not described) that he kills himself. Then two birds appear as the women lament his death. Many later sources omit Tereus' tongue-cutting mutilation of Philomela altogether. According to Thucydides , Tereus
5852-474: Was turned into a nightingale, singing a beautiful but sad song in remorse. 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. Eustathius ' version of the story has the sisters reversed, so that Philomela married Tereus and that Tereus lusted after Procne. It
5929-431: Was unable to speak because of her injuries, and so she wove a tapestry (or a robe ) that told her story and sent it to Procne. Procne was incensed by her husband's actions and killed their son Itys (or "Itylos") in revenge. She boiled Itys and served him as a meal for Tereus. After Tereus ate Itys, the sisters presented Tereus with the severed head of his son, revealing the conspiracy. Tereus grabbed an axe and chased
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