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.