In Greek mythology, Chelidon (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Χελιδών|Khelidṓn|swallow) is a minor figure, a noblewoman from either the city of Miletus or Colophon in an Anatolian variant of the story of Philomela,[1] though she might have had an independent origin in Attica.
According to Antoninus Liberalis, Chelidon was the daughter of Pandareus by his (unnamed) wife and sister to Aëdon and an unnamed brother. Eustathius of Thessalonica wrote that the name of Pandareus's wife was Harmothoë, although he does not list Chelidon among their daughters, Aëdon, Cleodora (or Cleothera), and Merope, and mentions no brother.[2] According to Pausanias, the last two were called Cameiro and Clytia.[3]
Both Hesiod and Sappho wrote that the swallow (Chelidon) is the daughter of the Athenian king Pandion I, the father of Philomela.
After her sister Aëdon won a bet against her husband Polytechnus, Polytechnus was forced to find his wife a female slave as promised. He went to his wife's father Pandareus, claiming that Aëdon wanted to see her sister. Chelidon thus left with Polytechnus to visit Aëdon, but on the way there he forced himself on the maiden while she cried and prayed to Artemis for help. He then cut her hair short, dressed her up as a slave, and terrorized her against telling anyone what had happened. He then gave her to Aëdon as a slave. Aëdon did not suspect anything and for a time Chelidon suffered in silence, until one day she overheard Chelidon lamenting her cruel fate.
Enraged at the treatment of her sister, Aëdon decided to avenge her. The two sisters then killed Itys, Aëdon's son by Polytechnus, and fed him to his unwitting father while they ran back to their own. Polytechnus was not slow in figuring out what had happened and was soon hunting them down, but Pandareus protected his daughters and had Polytechnus tied up, smeared with honey and left to the mercy of flocks of flies. But Aëdon, feeling sorry for her husband, kept the flies off of him. Angered over what they perceived as her betrayal, Pandareus, his unnamed wife and son attacked her, so Zeus decided to turn them all into birds. Chelidon, like Philomela, became a swallow, a singing bird. Artemis bid that Chelidon would always dwell near humans in her new avian life.[4]
The story of Chelidon seems to be an Anatolian variety of the myth of Procne and Philomela, in which Chelidon supplants Philomela, the unmarried sister abused by her brother-in-law. Unlike Chelidon, Philomela had her tongue cut by Tereus (Polytechnus) so she had to weave a tapestry in order to inform her sister.
However, both Chelidon and Aëdon appear to individually predate the myth of Procne and Philomela, which seems to have been shaped to its current form by the Athenian playwright Sophocles in his lost play Tereus. Chelidon is said by both earlier writers Hesiod and Sappho to be the daughter of Pandion (Procne and Philomela's father) instead of Pandareus, while earlier mentions of Aëdon have her kill her son unknowingly rather than wittingly in a doomed effort to hurt a rival. Those stories concerning Aëdon however do not include a sister or swallows, which must have joined the myth of the nightingale later. It has been suggested the story crossed the Aegean from Asia Minor, Pandareus was mixed up with Pandion, and thus the myths of the nightingale and the swallow were combined and joined the Athenian mythos. The figure of the sister who is sexually linked to the husband might have evolved from the original Aëdon's rival.
A sixth-century BC metope from Apollo's temple at Thermos depicts Chelidon and Aëdon plotting together over something that has been broken off. Some vases, although with much less certainty, also seem to depict the scene of Itys's murder by Aëdon-Procne and Philomela-Chelidon.