A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(Ἀηδών).

1. A daughter of Pandareus of Ephesus. According to Homer (Hom. Od. 19.517, &c.) she was the wife of Zethus, king of Thebes, and the mother of Itylus. Envious of Niobe, the wife of her brother Amphion, who had six sons and six daughters, she formed the plan of killing the eldest of Niobe's sons, but by mistake slew her own son Itylus. Zeus relieved her grief by changing her into a nightingale, whose melancholy tunes are represented by the poet as Aedon's lamentations about her child. (Compare Pherecydes, Fragm. p. 138, ed. Sturz; Apollod. 3.5.5.) According to a later tradition preserved in Antoninus Liberalis (c. 11), Aedon was the wife of Polytechnus, an artist of Colophon, and boasted that she lived more happily with him than Hera with Zeus. Hera to revenge herself ordered Eris to induce Aedon to enter upon a contest with her husband. Polytechnus was then making a chair, and Aedon a piece of embroidery, and they agreed that whoever should finish the work first should receive from the other a female slave as the prize. When Aedon had conquered her husband, he went to her father, and pretending that his wife wished to see her sister Chelidonis, he took her with him. On his way home he ravished her, dressed her in slave's attire, enjoined her to observe the strictest silence, and gave her to his wife as the promised prize. After some time Chelidonis, believing herself unobserved, lamented her own fate, but she was overheard by Aedon, and the two sistrs conspired against Polytechnus and killed his son Itys, whom they placed before him in a dish. Aedon fled with Chelidonis to her

father, who, when Polytechnus came in pursuit of his wife, had him bound, smeared with honey, and thus exposed him to the insects. Aedon now took pity upon the sufferings of her husband, and when her relations were on the point of killing her for this weakness, Zeus changed Polytechnus into a pelican, the brother of Aedon into a whoop, her father into a sea-eagle, Chelidonis into a swallow, and Aedon herself into a nightingale. This mythus seems to have originated in mere etymologies, and is of the same class as that about Philomele and Procne.

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