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Mythology
The literal translation of the osprey's genus name, "Pandion haliaetus" is "Pandion's sea eagle," but it seems that the scientist who named it thus—one Marie Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny—was somewhat confused. You see, Pandion was the king of Athens in Greek mythology. Pandion had two daughters, Philomela and Procne. Procne married Tereus. Theirs is a lengthy and bloody story, but suffice it to say that in the end Philomela, Procne and Tereus are changed—as was the convention of Greek mythology—into, respectively, a nightingale, a swallow, and a hawk. If anything, the osprey should have been named after Tereus, as he was the only raptor among them.
The osprey should, in all honesty, have been named in its genus, for King Nisus of Alcathous, whose daughter, Scylla, sacrifices him to his attacking enemy, Minos, whom Scylla loves. But Minos rebukes her, disgusted by her betrayal of her father, and he quits the land she offers him. Scylla, mad with despair, jumps into the ocean to follow Minos' retreating ship, and is followed by her father—now turned into an osprey—who plucks her from the water as such a bird of prey is wont to do. Regard:
Her father saw her as he hovered near
(changed to an osprey now with tawny wings)
And swooped to seize and tear her, as she clung,
With his hooked beak.
--(A.D. Melville, trans., "Scylla and Minos," Ovid's Metamorphoses, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986.)
Would that the early ornithologists had more closely read their Ovid.
--Dr. Edgar Hamilton, PhD, "How Our Island Was (Mis)Named," Island Times, March 4, 1987.
Tereus, Procne and Philomela:
A.D. Melville's (and my personal favorite) translation:
http://english.sxu.edu/boyer/304_rdg_qst/tit_nor_qst.htm#ovid
Dryden's rhymed translation:
http://members1.chello.nl/~a.vanarum8/EliotProject/Waste_notes/Tereus_OM.htm
Brookes More's translation:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Ov.+Met.+6.412
Scylla, Minos and Nisus:
Brookes More:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Ov.+Met.+8.1
Bullfinch's Age of Fable:
http://www.bartleby.com/181/131.html
Dryden's rhymed translation:
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.8.eighth.html
Melville translation:
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