Harpe

Also Known As: Greek harpē, “sickle”, “reaping hook”; the sickle of Cronus, the sickle of Perseus; Latin poets call it a hooked or curved sword
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: It is a curved blade of adamant, the hardest substance the Greeks could imagine, made for cutting through flesh no ordinary weapon could finish.
Role in Mythos: It is the weapon of the great severings in Greek myth, from the maiming of Uranus that split earth from sky to the beheading of Medusa.
Relation to Humans: Mortal heroes receive it from the gods and use it against monsters, and from the late sixth century BCE Greek painters made it the mark of Perseus. Several places claimed the first sickle lay buried under their soil, and named themselves after it.

The first weapon in Greek myth was a farm tool. Before there were swords for heroes or thunderbolts for kings, there was a sickle, grey and heavy, forged by the Earth herself in the dark and handed to a son who was willing to use it.

Hesiod tells the story in the Theogony. Uranus, the sky, lay over Gaia, the earth, every night, and pushed each child she bore back down inside her, where they could not see the light. Gaia groaned under the weight. Out of her own body she produced grey adamant, the unconquerable metal, shaped it into a great sickle with jagged teeth along its edge, and asked her children which of them would act. Only the youngest Titan, Cronus, answered. She hid him in ambush and put the blade in his hand. When Uranus came at nightfall and spread himself over the earth, Cronus reached out with his left hand and cut off his father’s genitals, and threw them away behind him.

Nothing in that scene was wasted. Where the drops of blood struck the ground, Gaia conceived the Erinyes, the Giants and the ash-tree nymphs called the Meliae. The severed flesh fell into the sea and drifted, and out of the white foam around it Aphrodite was born. Sky and earth were parted for good. One sickle stroke made room for the world.

A harpe was a humble thing. The word means sickle, the curved hook a reaper swings through standing grain. The scholar M. L. West thought Hesiod pictured an ordinary farm blade, nothing exotic, and that is part of the horror: the god of the harvest season reaped his own father. The sound of the thing in use is the dry hiss of stalks parting.

The sickle did not stay with Cronus. Later Greeks argued over where it ended up, and the arguing was half the fun. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, says it lay buried beneath an island off the Ionian coast called Drepane, the Sickle, which is the island later called Corcyra and now Corfu. He also reports a rival version in which the buried blade was the reaping hook of Demeter. Either way the Phaeacians who lived there could claim descent from the blood of Uranus. Hellenistic writers, among them Lycophron and Callimachus, moved the sickle to Sicily instead. The town of Zancle, later Messina, already had a name that the historian Thucydides explained as the local word for a sickle, from the curve of its harbour spit. A shape on the map became a relic in the ground.

A second kind of harpe belongs to heroes. When Perseus set out to kill the Gorgon, the gods equipped him. In the account preserved by Apollodorus, the nymphs gave him winged sandals, a pouch called the kibisis and the cap of Hades that made him unseen, and Hermes gave him a sickle of adamant. Aeschylus, in a lost play, credited the blade to Hephaestus instead, and the Roman poet Lucan gave it back to Hermes. He found the three Gorgons asleep by the edge of the world, and he looked only at their reflection in Athena’s polished shield as he closed in. One hooked stroke took Medusa’s head. From the stump sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor. Perseus pushed the head into the pouch, still dripping, and flew.

The harpe went on to the coast of Ethiopia with him, where he fought the sea monster Cetus to free Andromeda. From the late sixth century BCE Greek painters gave Perseus this weapon almost every time they showed him, at first a short sickle, later a stranger tool with a straight blade and a hook side by side, as if the artists wanted a sword and a sickle in one hand. Roman wall painters kept it. The image stuck so well that in the second century CE the prophet Alexander of Abonoteichus, a showman Lucian despised, carried a harpe in public to advertise that he was descended from Perseus.

Hermes, the giver, used one himself. In some tellings, Ovid’s among them, he killed the hundred-eyed watchman Argus with a curved blade after lulling every eye to sleep. And Zeus once lost one. Apollodorus says that in the war against Typhon, the storm-giant with serpents for legs, Zeus struck at him with an adamantine sickle and chased him to Mount Casius in Syria. At close quarters Typhon wrapped the god in his coils, wrenched the sickle out of his grip and used it to cut the sinews from Zeus’s hands and feet. He hid the king of the gods in the Corycian cave in Cilicia, with the sinews wrapped in a bearskin under the guard of the she-dragon Delphyne, until Hermes and Aegipan stole them back.

The same blade turns up against the Lernaean Hydra. In Euripides’ Ion, the visitors to Delphi admire a temple carving in which the son of Zeus cuts at the Hydra with a golden sickle, and Greek artists showed both Heracles and his nephew Iolaus wielding one. In those pictures the many necks of the Hydra are drawn like a crop of tall stalks, ready for reaping. The scholar Daniel Ogden calls the harpe the standard tool for cutting up monsters in Greek myth, and especially the ones shaped like snakes. Medusa had snakes for hair. Typhon and the Hydra were serpent-bodied. The sickle that once reaped grain became the thing you brought to a fight with something coiled.

What the harpe gives its holder is a cut that cannot be refused. Adamant, the Greek word for a metal that does not yield, would not blunt on scales or on a god’s hide, and the hooked inner edge catches and draws rather than glancing off. It ends things that would otherwise go on growing: a sky that will not lift, a Gorgon whose stare kills, a monster with too many heads. Its weakness is that it belongs to whoever holds it. It changes sides with a twist of the wrist. Cronus used it on his father and was overthrown by his own son anyway. Zeus carried it into battle and had his own sinews cut with it. A blade forged by the Earth to free her children never stayed with any one of them for long.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the harpe in Greek mythology?

The harpe is a sickle or sickle-sword in Greek mythology, the weapon used for the most famous cuts in the myths. Cronus used it to castrate his father Uranus, and Perseus used it to behead Medusa. Its name simply means sickle in Greek.

Who made the harpe?

In Hesiod’s Theogony the first harpe was made by Gaia, the earth, out of grey adamant, and given to Cronus. The sickle Perseus carried is credited to Hermes by Apollodorus and Lucan, and to Hephaestus by Aeschylus.

What did Perseus use to kill Medusa?

Perseus beheaded Medusa with a harpe, an adamantine sickle given to him by Hermes in Apollodorus’s account. He approached while the Gorgons slept and watched Medusa only in the reflection of Athena’s shield. Pegasus and Chrysaor sprang from her neck after the blow.

What happened to the sickle of Cronus?

Ancient writers disagreed about where the sickle of Cronus ended up. Apollonius of Rhodes says it was buried under the island of Drepane, later called Corcyra, while Hellenistic writers such as Lycophron and Callimachus placed it in Sicily. The Sicilian town of Zancle, later Messina, had a name that Thucydides explained as meaning sickle.

How did Typhon use the harpe against Zeus?

According to Apollodorus, Zeus attacked Typhon with an adamantine sickle, but Typhon wrapped him in his coils on Mount Casius and took it from him. Typhon then used the harpe to cut the sinews from Zeus’s hands and feet. Hermes and Aegipan later stole the sinews back from the Corycian cave.