"They exist already," continued St. Antony, who would listen to nothing.
"They are called harpies, and they are the most obscene animals in
creation. One day as I was having supper in the desert with the Abbot
St. Paul, I placed the table outside my cabin under an old sycamore
tree. The harpies came and sat in its branches; they deafened us with
their shrill cries and cast their excrement over all our food. The
clamour of the monsters prevented me from listening to the teaching of
the Abbot St. Paul, and we ate birds' dung with our bread and lettuces.
Lord, it is impossible to believe that harpies could give thee worthy
praise.

"Truly in my temptations I have seen many hybrid beings, not only
women-serpents and women-fishes, but beings still more confusedly formed
such as men whose bodies were made out of a pot, a bell, a clock, a
cupboard full of food and crockery, or even out of a house with doors
and windows through which people engaged in their domestic tasks could
be seen. Eternity would not suffice were I to describe all the monsters
that assailed me in my solitude, from whales rigged like ships to a
shower of red insects which changed the water of my fountain into blood.
But none were as disgusting as the harpies whose offal polluted the
leaves of my sycamore."

"Harpies," observed Lactantius, "are female Monsters with birds'
bodies. They have a woman's head and breast. Their forwardness, their
shamelessness, and their obscenity proceed from their female nature as
the poet Virgil demonstrated in his 'Aeneid.' They share the curse of
Eve."

"Let us not speak of the curse of Eve," said the Lord. "The second Eve
has redeemed the first."