Virgil and Dante ascribe women's faces to the Harpies—
"Ali hanno late e colli e visi umani
Piè con artigli e pennuto il gran ventre."
Rutilius[326] says that their claws are glutinous—
"Quæ pede glutineo, quod tetigere trahunt."
Others give them vultures' bodies, bears' ears, arms and feet of men, and the white breasts of women. Servius, speaking of the name they bear of canes Jovis, notes that this epithet was given them because they are the Furies in person, "Unde etiam epulas apud Virgilium abripiunt, quod Furiarum est." Ministers of the vengeance of Zeus, they contaminate the harvests of the king-seer Phineus, inspired by Apollo, whom some consider to be a form of Prometheus, the revealer of the secret of Zeus to mankind, and others, the blinder of his own sons.
The bird of prey, the evening solar bird, becomes a strix, or witch, during the night. We have already noticed the popular belief that the cat, at seven years of age, becomes a witch. An ancient superstition given by Aldrovandi also recognises witches in cats, and adds that, in this form, they suck the blood of children. The same is done by the witches of popular stories,[327] and by the striges. During the night they suck the blood of children; that is to say, the night takes away the colour, the red, the blood of the sun. Ovid, in the sixth book of the Fasti, represents the maleficent striges as follows:
"Nocte volant, puerosque petunt nutricis egentes,
Et vitiant cunis corpora rapta suis.
Carpere dicuntur lactentia viscera rostris,
Et plenum poto sanguine guttur habent."
Festus derives the word strix à stringendo, from the received opinion that they strangle children. The striges, in the book of the Fasti, previously quoted, attack the child Proca, who is only five days old—
"Pectoraque exhorbent avidis infantia linguis."
The nurse invokes the help of Crane, the friend of Janus, who has the faculty of hunting good and evil away from the doorsteps of houses. Crane hunts the witches away with a magical rod, and cures the child thus—