Aedon was the wife of Polytechnus, an artist of Colophon.
History[]
She boasted that she lived more happily with him than Hera did with Zeus. Hera ordered Eris to control Aedon and maker her enter upon a contest with her husband. Polytechnus was then making a chair, and Aedon a piece of embroidery, and they agreed that whoever should finish the work first should receive from the other a female slave as the prize. When Aedon had conquered her husband, he went to her father Racastes, and pretending that his wife wished to see her sister Chelidonis, he took her with him.
On his way home he ravished her, dressed her in slave's attire, enjoined her to observe the strictest silence, and gave her to his wife as the promised prize.
After some time Chelidonis, believing herself unobserved, lamented her own fate, but she was overheard by Aedon, and the two sisters conspired against Polytechnus and killed his son Itys, whom they placed before him in a dish. Aedon and Chelidonis fled to her father, who, when Polytechnus came in pursuit of his wife, had him bound, smeared with honey, and thus exposed him to the insects.
Aedon now took pity upon the sufferings of her husband, and when her relations were on the point of killing her for this weakness, Zeus changed Polytechnus into a pelican, the brother of Aedon into a whoop, her father into a sea-eagle, Chelidonis into a swallow, and Aedon herself into a nightingale.