In the introduction to his Cligès, Chrétien lists “The Metamorphosis of the Hoopoe, the Swallow, and the Nightingale” among his works. The poem to which he refers is Philomena. This text came to light only in 1885, when Gaston Paris found it embedded in a fourteenth-century work called L’Ovide moralisé, with an allegorical interpretation attached.

Jean Frappier’s Chrétien de Troyes devotes to Philomena only a very few pages.^[27] These, however, emphatically attribute the work to Chrétien, despite the doubts of other critics. The question of authorship was the topic of most interest in studies of the poem until the 1980s, when feminist readers began to examine the importance of the legend itself, from its earliest literary expressions in ancient Greece.

Book 6 of the Metamorphoses begins with Arachne and ends with Philomela. Ovid writes of Arachne with considerable sympathy. She was foolish to enter into a weaving competition with Athena, but in fact she won the contest. Dante includes Arachne among his symbols of pride,^[28] and indeed it is her presumptuousness that is said to have evoked the goddess’s rage. But Athena’s violence seems entirely out of proportion. She destroys Arachne’s weaving, beats her until she hangs herself—or is lynched^[29]—and finally turns her into a spider. Ovid tells us without comment what was depicted on Arachne’s loom: women being raped by gods disguised as beasts. Feminist critics have been more inclined to speculate on the connection between Arachne’s subject and the goddess’s wrath, Athena being, as Patricia Joplin reminds us, “an extension of Zeus.” As Joplin puts it, “For Arachne to tell the most famous tales of women raped by the gods is for her to begin to demystify the gods (the sacred) as the beasts (the violent).”^[30] But the subject matter of the weaving was presumably Ovid’s contribution. Arachne had assumed that the standards of craftsmanship applied equally to gods and to humans; what she depicts would suggest that her standards of morality should also apply to the acts of divinities. Europa and the other victims do not appear to be flattered by the attentions of the rapists—another cause, perhaps, of Athena’s wrath.

Weaving in the story of Philomela is much more obviously a means of communication;^[31] nevertheless, Ovid gives the weaver only the plainest materials and does not elaborate on the pictorial representation of her rape and mutilation. When Chrétien rewrites Ovid’s text, taking full advantage of the freedom given translators in his day, he makes us aware of Philomena’s extraordinary skill, both in his initial description of her and later on, when her weaving involves many colors and an intricate design.

The critic Geoffrey Hartman understands Philomena’s victory as “a triumph of Art itself.” Joplin would reclaim for “the voice of the shuttle” its own specific occasion:^[32] the woman reduced to silence when she would most desire to speak, and finding in her art a source of power. We can only speculate about why Chrétien was attracted to this story, but considering the changes he made in Ovid’s text and the treatment of women in his subsequent works, it would seem that both these views of Philomena were part of his intention. He may also have been interested in the story as a corrective to the contemporary enthusiasm for Love.

In Ovid’s version, Philomela is simply a beautiful girl—like a naiad, but much better dressed. Chrétien describes her beauty in a long formal portrait, omitting Ovid’s humorous remark, and gives equal space to an enumeration of all that Philomena knew. Her savoir includes games and amusements, falconry, embroidery, the literary arts—reading and writing both verse and prose—music, and effective speech.^[33] Her conversations with Tereus, which similarly have no equivalent in Ovid, show her as self-possessed and intelligent. Pandion’s speeches in praise of his daughter are certainly to her honor, although he himself may appear self-indulgent and even improper in his attachment to her.^[34]

Tereus sees Philomena as an object of desire; for him her savoir has not the slightest importance. But he selects as a guard an old woman whose savoir will be the tyrant’s undoing. Not only is she skilled in embroidery, thus providing both incentive and materials, she is also compassionate, obeying the letter of Tereus’s requirements but increasingly sympathetic to his prisoner, about whom she had asked many questions.^[35] Tereus, says the author, had foolishly answered them, no doubt assuming the old woman would be indifferent. To include this conversation, Chrétien had to sacrifice plausibility: if Tereus had indeed told her the truth, the old woman should have recognized what was pictured in Philomena’s weaving.

Tereus becomes obsessed with Philomena the instant he sees her. Ovid explains that Tereus is a barbarian from Thrace, and therefore passionate by nature. Several of Chrétien’s additions to Ovid’s text seem similarly intended to make Tereus appear less reprehensible. When Philomena first appears, Chrétien tells us that she did not look like a “veiled nun,” which seems to suggest that she would have done better to make herself less attractive, more inclined toward piety. Even more striking is the passage that evokes an imaginary pagan law, not found in Ovid: Tereus’s seduction of his sister-in-law would have been within his rights had she been his sister instead (219–33). His transgression, then, is only a kind of technicality.^[36] The irresistible power of love, lengthily described in Ovidian terms, sweeps Tereus away into madness; he is, from that point of view, a victim.^[37]

But one has the impression that in the very act of articulating this doctrine, Chrétien loses faith. He contradicts himself, complaining that there is in love itself a lack of wisdom (419–48) and then stating that love is not insanity (491–92).^[38] Tereus shows that he can still listen to Reason by giving up his plan to abduct Philomena. When she is entirely in his power, he tries, briefly, to persuade her to grant him her love freely. But once the rape occurs, and the subsequent mutilation, both Love and Reason vanish from Chrétien’s story.

Ovid tells us that Tereus had intervened to save Athens at a time when Pandion had no other allies, having failed to offer help to the neighboring kingdoms in their time of need. Procne was a kind of return gift, and no one, of course, asked whether she was pleased to marry a barbarian. Ovid has her flirting with her husband, but Chrétien shows her as simply deferential, and concerned lest he be distressed by her desire to visit her sister. Chrétien gives us no indication that Procne has a capacity for violence. She says nothing whatsoever when Tereus insists, without explanation, on going to Greece himself. We might, of course, imagine that her silence conceals many thoughts.

But when Tereus returns without Philomena, Procne turns his lying words to Pandion (530–536) into a self-fulfilling prophecy: she will indeed have nothing further to do with him, and he will indeed lose his son. The funeral rites she performs strangely combine Christian and pagan beliefs, but her intensity in observing them does not hint at the murderous rage she later displays. Chrétien rejects Ovid’s portrayal of Procne disguised as a bacchante, a scene that connects her subsequent acts with ritual frenzy. Ovid’s Procne is concerned only with revenge, debating the choice of means. In Chrétien’s version she realizes that she has no means and prays that God will provide some (1288–91). It is at this instant that Itis, looking so much like his father, comes into the room. Even the act of murder is less gruesome than in Ovid; Procne is not compared to a tigress with a fawn, and Philomena does not wield a knife herself, although she does share in the preparation of the meat.

The transformation of Tereus and the sisters into birds comes from the Greek tradition. Ovid’s Tereus becomes a warlike hoopoe; the other two birds are identified only by their habitat and united in a lurid description: “Such birds have stains of murder on their breasts / In flickering drops of blood among their feathers.”^[39] Chrétien states without comment that Procne became a swallow, but he gives to Philomena fifteen lines that restore her voice and define her particular way of bearing witness, of seeking revenge. Like the artfully woven tapestry that reveals a hidden wrong but is not in itself an instrument of justice, the nightingale sings that traitors deserve shame and death. She grieves for the betrayal of innocent women but sings as sweetly (doucemant) as she can, luring us closer to unbearable truths.

In Greek legend it is Procne who becomes the nightingale, and her song is “Itys, Itys.”^[40] “Oci, oci,” which became the traditional cry of the nightingale in Old French, seems to have originated with Chrétien.^[41]Oci has been uniformly understood as the imperative “kill,” but it also may be a past participle, suggesting Philomena’s cry of regret or lamentation.