Harpies

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The Harpies make their nest in the wood of the suicides, as attested by the verse in Inferno XIII that defines them as "brutte" and places them among the trees of the forest. The notes to the same canto specify that they are "mythological monsters, with feminine faces and the bodies of birds of prey, characterized by their loathsomeness," and that the adjective "brutte" means "sozze," in reference to the Virgilian scene of the Strophades, where they befoul the tables of the Trojans with their excrement. In the Commedia they dwell in the second ring of the seventh circle, the zone reserved for the violent against themselves, where they continually torment the souls of the suicides transformed into trees, perpetrating that torment which Dante's gesture had carried out in a single moment.