The nightingale mourns incessantly for Itylos or Itys, the son whom she killed with her own hands. Night-ingale poems have appeared in an unbroken stream from Homer up until modern literature.
Burkert argues that the literary tradition of nightingale poetry perpetuates a sentimentalized misreading of an archaic myth whose true logic is sacrificial and infanticidal, rooted in ritual dissolution rather than aesthetic sorrow.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis