hArPiEs
The harpies were the blonde daughters of Taumante and Electra, daughter of the sea and an oceanic nymph. They had swift wings that they used at the hour of abducting criminals, sometimes taking them- later- to the secret caves were they were properly punished by the Erinias.
The Harpies lived together in a cave in Crete and were three traditionally, but some authors assure that they were not three- Iris, Aelo and Ocipete or Alope, Aqueloe and Oestoe/Ocipete (literally "that who flies fast") - but five or only one, giving different names to them (Virgil, for example, tells us of one, Seleno, the obscurity).
Among their deeds we can mention the opportunity when, apparently after an order given by Zeus, they kidnapped the daughters of Palidareo- Merope and Cleotera- who, beautiful and wise as they were, had been adopted by the Olympic goddesses.
Zeus had suspected that the goddesses were growing them up because they were responsible of making their parents steal the 'golden hound' and, thus, be killed by the highest deities, so- while Aphrodite was trying to make Zeus change his mind and help the orphans, the harpies, instructed by the king of the gods, abducted the girls. After that, they took them with the Erinias, who made them pay for their father's sins.
The harpies were also believed to have stolen the food from Fineo's table, a king that had been blinded by the gods owing to his brilliant predictions. The king offered the Argonauts his counsel in their quest if they could only kill those two monsters.
In spite of this, a later legend tells about how the food was stolen- not by harpies, but by the queen, who made her servants throw the food away and dirty the remaining food in so that the king would die of starvation.
For this second myth, the furies begun to be described as old women with beaks that stole and contaminated food and that also caused hunger. They were confused with scavengers, birds of pray and even with locusts causing hunger and death in a whole region that were later taken to sea by the wind. This situation created a variant of the myth praying that the harpies has been defeated by the sons of Boreas (the wind).
This second legend varied the perceptions of these creatures even in arts: they started being a good symbol of the capital sins, starting with the anger that followed them wherever they went, the importance of food in their lives and the envy that could make them ruin the things they could not take with them.
In spite of this, their justice was as feared and their anger, revenge and hunger, and that made people never mention their names aloud in public nor to insult them in any way.