Greek astronomer, who flourished about 480 B.C., corrected the cycle of eight years invented by Cleostratus; and proposed a new one of nine years, in which he imagined the sun and moon returned to the same point. But Harpalus's cycle was afterwards altered by Meton, who added ten full years to it. See Chronology, no 27.

Harpies (Ἀρπιτιαι, Ἀρπυιαι), in antiquity, a rapacious impure sort of monsters of the bird kind, mentioned among the poets. They are represented with wings, ears like bears, bodies like vultures, faces like women, and feet and hands hooked like the talons of birds of prey.

The ancients looked on the harpies as a sort of genii or demons. Some make them the daughters of Tellus and Oceanus, the earth and ocean; whence, says Servius, it is, that they inhabit an island, half on land and half in water. Valerius Flaccus makes them the daughters of Typhon.

There were three harpies, Aello, Ocypete, and Celaeno, which last Homer calls Podarge. Hesiod, in his Theogony, ver. 267, only reckons two, Aello and Ocypete, and makes them the daughters of Thaumas and Electra, affirming that they had wings, and went with the rapidity of the wind. Zephyrus begat of them Ballus and Xanthus, Achilles's horses. Pherecydes relates, that the Boreades expelled them from the Aegean and Sicilian seas, and pursued them as far as the islands which he calls Ploce and Homer Calynx; and which have since been called the Strophades.

Vossius, De Idolol. lib. iii. cap. 99. p. 63. thinks, that what the ancients have related of the harpies, agrees to no other birds so well as the bats found in the territories of Darien in South America. These animals kill not only birds, but dogs and cats, and prove very troublesome to men by their peckings. But the ancients, as the same Vossius observes, knew nothing of these birds. By the harpies, therefore, he thinks, they could mean nothing else but the winds; and that it was on this account they were made daughters of Electra, the daughter of Oceanus. Such is the opinion of the scholiasts of Apollonius, Hesiod, and Eustathius. Their names, Aello, Ocypete, Celaeno, are supposed to suggest a farther argument of this.

Mr Bryant supposes that the harpies were a college of priests in Bithynia, who on account of their repeated acts of violence and cruelty, were driven out of the country; their temple was called Arpi, and the environs Arpiæ, whence the Grecians formed Αρπιαι; and he observes farther, that Harpya, Αρπυιαι, was certainly of old the name of a place.

Harping Iron. See Harpoon.