Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
Jane Ellen Harrison
1903

CHAPTER V.

THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPEITES AND BOGEYS.

Ker as Evil Sprite | Ker as Bacillus | Ker as Evil Sprite | Keres Of Old Age And Death | Ker of Death | Ker As Harpy And Wind-Demon | Ker as Wind-Demoms | Ker as Fate | Ker as Gorgon | Ker as Sirens | Ker as Sphinx | Ker as Erinys | Erinyes of Aeschylus | Curse of Blood | Tragic Erinyes | Erinys As Snake | Semnai Theai | Eumenides

IN the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been discussed. The main conclusion that has emerged is that this ritual in its earlier phases was mainly characterized by a tendency to what the Greeks called airorpoirri, i.e. the turning away, the aversion of evil. This tendency was however rarely quite untouched by an impulse more akin to our modern notion of worship, the impulse of induction, the fostering of good influences.

Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the nature of the objects of worship. When the ritual was not an attempt at the direct impulsion of nature, we have had brief uncertain glimpses of sprites and ghosts and underworld divinities. It now remains to trace with more precision these vague theological or demonological or mythological outlines, to determine the character of the beings worshipped and something of the order of their development.

In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual. Ritual, i.e. what men did, is either known or not known; what they meant by what they did the connecting link between ritual and theology can sometimes be certainly known, more often precariously inferred. Still more hazardous is the attempt to determine how man thought of the objects or beings to whom his ritual was addressed, in a word what was his theology, or, if we prefer the term, his mythology.

At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact essential to our study that there were no gods at all, that what we have to investigate is not so many actual facts and existences but only conceptions of the human mind, shifting and changing colour with every human mind that conceived them. Art which makes the image, literature which crystallizes attributes and functions, arrest and fix this shifting kaleidoscope; but, until the coming of art and literature and to some extent after, the formulary of theology is'all things are in flux' (trdvra pel).

Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the human mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived things in a fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to that realizing of mythology which is the first condition of its being understood, than our modern habit of clear analytic thought. The very terms we use are sharpened to an over nice discrimination. The first necessity is that by an effort of the sympathetic imagination we should think back the'many'we have so sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of the primitive 'one.'

Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a deleterious mental fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It is not confusion or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a protoplasmic fulness and forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse forms of its ultimate births. It may even happen, as in the case of the Olympian divinities, that articulation and discrimination sound the note of approaching decadence. As Maeterlinck beautifully puts it, la clarte parfaite nest-elle pas d ordinaire le signe de la lassitude des idees?

There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind this primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a number of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, i.e. resumes the many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly seen, mutatis mutandis, a late philosophizing author is often great use in illustrating a primitive conception: the multiform divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer to the primitive mind than the clear-cut outlines of Homers Olympians.

In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found underlying the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the Anthesteria the revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmophoria we found magical ceremonies for the promotion of fertility addressed as it would seem directly to the earth itself: in the Thargelia we had ceremonies of purification not primarily addressed to any one. In the Diasia and Anthesteria only was there clear evidence of some sort of definite being or beings as the object of worship. The meaning of snake-worship will come up for discussion later, for the present we must confine ourselves to the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological shapes into which they are developed and discriminated.

The Ker as Evil Sprite

That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria'worshipped'is of course too modern a word were primarily ghosts, admits, in the face of the evidence previously adduced, of no doubt. That in the fifth century B.C. they were thought of as little winged sprites the vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it might be added the evidence of countless other Athenian white lekythi where the eidolon or ghost, is shown fluttering about the grave. But to the ancients Keres a word of far larger and vaguer connotation than our modern ghosts, and we must grasp this wider connotation if we would understand the later developments of the term.

Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotropaic precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the doors to catch them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them; they were dreaded as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil spirits, certainly spirits that brought evil: else why these precautions? Plato has this in his mind when he says 'There are many fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent Keres which pollute and disfigure them.' Here we have not merely a philosophical notion, that there is a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence surely of an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a sort of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution. To such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon in telling the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus says that when it was found by the fisherman'it was still singing, nor had it suffered any change from the sea nor any other of the outrages that human Keres inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming and bleeding with fresh blood.'Conon is of course a late writer, and full of borrowed poetical phrases, but the expression human Keres is not equivalent to the Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption inherent in man.

In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless Keres, the souls fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately ancient art has also left us a representation of a baleful Ker. The picture in fig. 17 is from a pelike found at Thisbe and now in the Berlin Museum. Heracles, known by his lion skin and quiver, swings his rudely hewn club against a tiny winged figure with shrivelled body and distorted ugly face. We might have been at a loss to give a name to his feeble though repulsive antagonist but for an Orphic Hymn to Heracles which ends with the prayer:

'Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments
Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club,
Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
Banish the noisome Keres far away.'

The Ker as Bacillus

The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e. the fact that disease is caused by little live things^ germs bacilli we call them, he used the word Keres. A fragment of the early comic poet Sophrori speaks of Herakles throttling Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of nightmare, well known to us from other sources and under various confused names as Ephialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The Etymologicon Magnum explains 'Hepialos' as a shivering fever and'a daimon that comes upon those that are asleep.' It has been proposed to regard the little winged figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the throat as Hepiales, demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. The question can scarcely be decided, but the doubt is as instructive as any certainty. Hepiales is a disease caused by a Ker; i.e. it is a special form of Ker, the nightmare bacillus. Blindness also was caused by a Ker, as was madness; hence the expression casting a black Ker on their eyes.' Blindness and madness, blindness of body and spirit are scarcely distinguished, as in the blindness of Oedipus; both come of the Keres-Erinyes.

To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather are, bad spirits. Porphyry tells us that blisters are caused by evil spirits which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on our bodies. He goes to the very heart of ancient religious 'aversion' when he adds that it is on account of this that purifications are practised, not in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, but that these wretched things may keep off. He might have added, it is on account of these bad spirits that we fast; indeed ayveLa, the word he uses, means abstinence as well as purity. Eating is highly dangerous because you have your mouth open and a Ker may get in. If a Ker should get in when you are about to partake of specially holy food there will naturally be difficulties. So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that these bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally and they 'creep into people who make use of such things.' If you kept about you holy plants with strong scents and purging properties, like rue and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, or, if they got in, might speedily and safely eject them.

The physical character of the Keres, their connection with 'the lusts of the flesh' comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising poem preserved by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals with the dangers of Keres and the necessity for meeting them by'purification.'Its ascetic tone and its attribution to Linos probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as follows:

'Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me your hearing
To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous
Keres, they who destroy the herd of the vulgar and fetter
All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful
Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit,
Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification
That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification
(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres),
And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful,
For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of madness.'

It is commonly said that diseases are 'personified' by the Greeks. This is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It is not that a disease is realized as a power and then turned into a person, it is that primitive man seems unable to conceive of any force except as resulting from some person or being or sprite, something a little like himself. Such is the state of mind of the modern Greek peasant who writes XoXepa with a capital letter. Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a sprite behind them; are all sprites.

The Ker as Evil Sprite

Of course, as Hesiod knew, there were ancient golden days when these sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up safe in a cask and

'Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth
Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men.'

But alas !

'The woman with her hands took the great lid
From off the cask and scattered them, and thus
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone
Kemained therein, safe held beneath the rim,
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid.'

Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be considered later; for the moment we have only to note what manner of things came out of it. The account is strange and significant. She shut the cask too late:

'For other myriad evils wandered forth
To man, the earth was full, and full the sea.
Diseases, that all round by day and night
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled,
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice
Had taken away.'

Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things are Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in commenting on the passage, 'Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) bodily form making them approach without sound, showing that even of these things spirits are the guardians, sending invisibly the diseases decreed by fate and scattering the Keres in the cask.' After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres were presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits, but primitive man believes the Keres are the spirits, are the diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora, and that the Keres were ghosts. 'Earth,'says Hesiod,'was full and full the sea.' This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly emphasized in a fragment by an anonymous poet:

'Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill,
And round about us Keres crowding still;
No chink of opening
Is left for entering.'

This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about men haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality to their vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos seems to echo Hesiod when he says 'hope feeds all men' but hope is all in vain because of the imminent demon host that work for man's undoing, disease and death and war and shipwreck suicide.

'No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold
Mortals attend, woes and calamities
That none may scape.'

Here and elsewhere to translate 'Keres' by fates is to make a premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things not impersonations. So when Aeschylus puts into the mouth of his Danaid women the prayer

'Nor may diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our citizens,'

the 'noisome swarm' is no mere 'poetical' figure but the reflection of a real primitive conviction of live pests.

The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of for the most part in the plural, but in the Philoctetes of Sophocles the festering sore of the hero is called 'an ancient Ker'; here again the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the Keres 'as little inherent physical pests,' we are not surprised to learn from Theognis that

'For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.'

Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In that storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic Lithica*, we hear of Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best remedy is the Lychnis stone, which was also good to keep off a hailstorm.

'Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield,
Keep off the Keres who attack each field.'

And Theophrastus tells us that each locality has its own Keres dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the air, some from both. Fire also, it would seem, might be infested by Keres. A commentator on Philo says that it is important that no profane fire, i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch an altar because it may be contaminated by myriads of Keresy Instructive too is the statement of Stesichorus, who according to tradition 'called the Keres by the name Telchines.' Eustathius in quoting the statement of Stesichorus adds as explanatory of Keres tas crcotwcret: the word ovcorcocret is late and probably a gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical and spiritual. Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with Telchines is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the world of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of antiquity, and Strabo tells us that one of their magic arts was to 'besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and sulphur mixed with it, with a view to destroy them.'

Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent and almost automatic, became exalted and personified into actual magicians. Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus allows us to see how this happened. He is commenting on the ancient tribe of the Kouretes: these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan and also called Thelgines (sic), and they were sorcerers and magicians.' Of these there were two sorts: one sort craftsmen and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious to all good things; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they used to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the former sort) invented statuary and discovered metals, and they were amphibious and of strange varieties of shape, some were like demons, some like men, some like fishes, some like serpents; - and the story went that some had no hands, some no feet, and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.' Finally comes the significant statement that they perished struck down by the thunder of Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo. The old order is slain by the new. To the imagination of the conqueror the conquered are at once barbarians and magicians, monstrous and magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and medicine men, demons, beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a word Keres- Telchines. When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent side of the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember this fact that we see them through the medium of a conquering civilization.

The Keres Of Old Age And Death

THE KERES OF OLD AGE AND DEATH.

By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already been noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, the making of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at bay; but there were two who waited relentless, who might not be averted, and these were Old Age and Death. It is the thought that these two Keres are waiting that with the lyric poets most of all overshadows the brightness of life. Theognis prays to Zeus:

'Keep far the evil Keres, me defend
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.'

These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death Mimnermus can never forget:

'We blossom like the leaves that come in spring, What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth's gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know,
But always at the goal black Keres stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand.

And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun
Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die
Not live is best, for evils many a one
Are born within the soul. And Poverty
Has wasted one man's house with niggard care,
And one has lost his children. Desolate
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare
To Hades. And another for his fate
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban.

Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All things are beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of Mimnermus are of interest at this point because they show the emergence of the two most dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty, disease and desolation are no longer definitely figured as Keres.

The vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora (fig. 18) in the Louvre Herakles is represented lifting his club to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on a stick the figure obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is inscribed yrjpas. It is not an old man, but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is a close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of Old Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate. It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into an impersonation. The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle of the 5th century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, to an amphora in the British Museum bearing the love-name Charmides.

Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, to the great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a flitting remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. This is the usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. Homer's phraseology is rarely primitive often fossilized and the regularly recurring 'Ker of death' is heir to a long ancestry. In Homer we catch the word Ker at a moment of transition; it is half death, half death-spirit. Odysseus says

'Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,'

where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: they are both death and the sprite of death, or as we might say now-a-days death and the angel of death. Homer's conception so dominates our minds that the custom has obtained of uniformly translating 'Ker' by fate, a custom that has led to much confusion of thought.

The Ker of Death

Two things with respect to Homer's usage must be borne in mind. First, his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far more abstract and literary than the usage we have already noted. It is impossible to say that Homer has in his mind anything of the nature of a tiny winged bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost always defined and limited by the genitive Oavaroio, and this looks as though, behind the expression, there lay the half-conscious knowledge that there were Keres of other things than death. Ker itself is not death, but the two have become well-nigh inseparable.

Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems to survive in the expression two-fold Keres. Achilles says:

'My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis
Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on
To the term of death.'

It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but there is strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The English language has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for Ker, because it has no word weighted with the like associations.

In one passage only in the Iliad, i.e. the description of the shield of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the battlefield:

'And in the thick of battle there was Strife
And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker.
She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound,
Another still unwounded, and one dead
She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red
Her raiment on her shoulders with men's blood.'

A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the feeling is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case not a fate but a horrible she-demon of slaughter.

The Ker As Harpy And Wind-Demon

In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they have another function, they actually carry off the souls to Hades. Odysseus says:

'Howbeit him Death - Keres carried off
To Hades'house.'

It is impossible here to translate Keres by 'fates' the word is too abstract: the Keres are angels, messengers, death-demons, souls that carry off souls.

The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary emerges clearly when we come to consider those analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies betray their nature clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form anbqriim,' which appears on the vase-painting in fig. 19; they are the Snatchers, winged women-demons, hurrying along like the storm wind and carrying all things to destruction.

The vase-painting in fig. 19 from a large black-figured vessel in the Berlin Museum is specially instructive because, though the winged demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form part, i.e. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are Gorgons; so near akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two conceptions. On another vase (fig. 20), also in the Berlin Museum,

we see an actual Gorgon with the typical Gorgon's head and protruding tongue performing the function of a Harpy, i.e. of a Snatcher.

We say 'an actual Gorgon,' but it is not a Gorgon of the usual form but a bird-woman with a Gorgon's head. The bird-woman is currently and rightly associated with the Siren, a creature to be discussed later, a creature malign though seductive in Homer, but gradually softened by the Athenian imagination into a sorrowful death angel.

The tender bird-women of the so-called'Harpy tomb'from Lycia (fig. 21), now in the British Museum, perform the functions of a Harpy, but very gently. They are at least near akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athenian tombs. We can scarcely call them by the harsh name of the 'Snatchers.' And yet, standing as it did in Lycia, this 'Harpy tomb' may be the outcome of the same stratum of mythological conceptions as the familiar story of the daughters of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope in her desolation cries aloud:

'Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way
And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour'd with ebbing spray,
As when Pandareos' daughters the storm winds bore away,'

and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the fair nurture of the princesses and how Aphrodite went to high Olympus to plan for them a goodly marriage. But whom the gods love die young:

Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o'er
To the hateful ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore.'

'Early death was figured by the primitive Greek as a snatching away by evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he called Harpies, the modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer's lines we seem to catch the winds as snatchers, half-way to their full impersonation as Harpies. To give them a capital letter is to crystallize their personality prematurely. Even when they become fully persons, their name carried to the Greek its adjectival sense now partly lost to us.

Another function of the Harpies links them very closely with the Keres, and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic habit of ancient thought. The Harpies not only snatch away souls to death but they give life, bringing things to birth. A Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of the horses of Achilles. Both parents are in a sense winds, only the Harpy wind halts between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us mares became pregnant.

The Ker as Wind-demon

As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa is represented on a curious Boeotian vase (fig. 22) of very archaic style now in the Louvre. The representation is instructive, it shows how in art as in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy were for a time in flux; a particular artist could please his own fancy. The horse Medusa was apparently not a success, for she did not survive.

It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as Snatchers, death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give life? It is not, I think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes are spoken of as 'life-begetting' and 'soul-rearing'. It is not because they are in our sense life-giving and refreshing as well as destructive: the truth lies deeper down. Only life can give life, only a soul gives birth to a soul; the winds are souls as well as breaths. Here as so often we get at the real truth through an ancient Athenian cultus practice. When an Athenian was about to be married he prayed and sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores. The statement is quoted from Phanodemus who wrote a book on Attic Matters.

Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They were, as we might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree, fore-fathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Demon in his Atthis said they were winds. To the winds, it has already been seen, are offered such expiatory sacrifices (crcfxiyia) as are due to the spirits of the underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as ghosts was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are'lords of the winds'and the Orphics make them 'gate-keepers and guardians of the winds.' From ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates tells us, came nurture and growth and seeds, and the author of the Geoponica says that winds give life not only to plants but to all things. It was natural enough that the winds should be divided into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it depends where you live whether a wind from a particular quarter will do you good or ill.

In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 23, found at Naukratis and now in the British Museum, a local nymph is depicted: only hair and her feet, but she must be the nymph Gyrene beloved of Apollo, for close to her and probably held in her hand is a great branch of the silphium plant. To right of her approaching to minister or to worship are winged genii. It is the very image of oepateia, tendance, ministration, fostering care, worship, all in one. The genii tend the nymph who is the land itself, her and her products. The figures to the right are bearded: they can scarcely be other than the spirits of the North wind, the Boreadae, the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the South wind, to Africa the wind coming across the desert and bringing heat and blight and pestilence.

It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of another vase-painting on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 24), also, happily for comparison, in the British Museum. On the one side, not figured here, is a winged bearded figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas: such a snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias on the chest of Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. There is nothing harsh in the snake tail for Boreas, for the winds, as has already been noted, were regarded as earth-born.

Behind Boreas is a plant in blossom rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation nourished by the North wind. On the reverse (fig. 25) is a winged figure closely like the left hand genii of the Gyrene cylix, and this figure drives in front of it destructive creatures, a locust, the pest of the South, two birds of prey attacking a hare, and a third that is obviously a vulture.

The two representations taken together justify us in regarding the left hand genii as destructive. Taking these two representations together with a third vase-painting, the celebrated Phineus cylix, we are further justified in calling these destructive wind-demons Harpies.

On this vase the Boreadae, Zetes and Kalais, show their true antagonism. The Harpies have fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they were, and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase.

It is seldom that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of the duality of things.

On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give a name. In fig. 26 we have such a representation Europa seated on the bull passes in rapid flight over the sea which is indicated by fishes and dolphins. In front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a winged figure holding two wreaths.

Is she Nike, bringing good success to the lover? Is she a favouring wind speeding the flight? I incline to think the vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. She is a sort of good Ker, a fostering favouring influence. In all these cases of early genii it is important to bear in mind that the sharp distinction between moral and physical influence, so natural to the modern mind, is not yet established.

We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang.

The Ker as Fate

One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be examined. When Achilles had the fourth time chased Hector round the walls of Troy, Zeus was wearied and

'Hung up his golden scales and in them set
Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.'

This weighing of Keres, this 'Kerostasia,' is a weighing of death fates, but it is interesting to find that it reappears under another name, i.e. the 'Psychostasia,' the weighing of souls. We know from Plutarch that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The subject was the weighing of the souls or lives not of Hector and Achilles, but Achilles and Memnon. This is certain because, Plutarch says, he placed at either side of the scales the mothers Thetis and Eos praying for their sons. Pollux adds that Zeus and his attendants were suspended from a crane. In the scene of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus, a scene which probably goes back to the earlier tradition of 'Arctinos, 'it is noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anticipate the white and black Erinyes.

The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously called, appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the British Museum is reproduced in fig. 27. Hermes holds the scales, in either scale is the Ker or eidolon of one of the combatants; the lekythos is black-figured, and is our earliest source for the Kerostasia. The Keres are represented as miniature men, it is the lives rather than the fates that are weighed. So the notion shifts.

In Hesiod, as has already been noted, the Keres are more primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they are also little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so we get the 'black Ker,' own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros (Doom) and Sleep and the tribes of Dreams. We get also the dawnings of an Erinys, of an avenging fate, though the lines look like an interpolation:

'Night bore
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.'

Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the Fates, Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they

'To mortals at their birth
Give good and evil both.'

Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both because it gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the Erinyes, and also because with a reminiscence of earlier thought it makes them the source of good and of evil. It is probably this last idea that is at the back of the curious Hesiodic epithet Krjpi,Tpptfs, which occurs in the Works and Days':

'Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day
For a brief space over the heads of men
Ker-nourished.'

'Men nourished for death'assuredly is not the meaning; the idea seems to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that nourishes him, keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which his life depends. The epithet might come to signify something like mortal, subject to, depending on fate. If this be the meaning it looks back to an early stage of things when the Ker had not been specialized down to death and was not wholly'black,'when it was more a man's luck than his fate, a sort of embryo Genius.

Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of 'slain by Keres,' which Hesychius explains as those who died of disease; and would look back to a primitive doubleness of functions when the Keres were demons of all work. In vague and fitful fashion they begin where the Semnae magnificently end, as Moirae with control over all human weal and woe.

'These for their guerdon hold dominion
O'er all things mortal.'

In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology.

But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most impressive to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of death, almost a personified death, it was fitting and natural that it should be tricked out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, or the writer of the Shield, with his rude peasant imagination was ready for the task. The Keres of Pandora's jar are purely primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at all: the Keres of the Shield are a literary effort and much too horrid to be frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted hands for their fighting children stood

'The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth,
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable;
They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh
A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass
To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus.'

Pausanias in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells of the figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. The scene is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; Polyneikes has fallen on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at him.' Behind Polyneikes is a woman-figure with teeth, as cruel as a wild beast's, and her finger-nails are hooked. An inscription near her says that she is a Ker, as though Polyneikes were carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles were in accordance with justice.' Pausanias regards the word Ker as the equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception so abstract on the primitive artist who decorated the chest.

We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged bacilli, but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts who in the Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), and a forecast of the Erinyes the 'blue-black' Keres are near akin to the horrid Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi. Pausanias says, 'Above the figures I have mentioned (i.e. the sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eurynomos; the guides of Delphi say that Eurynomos is one of the demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of the dead bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer's poem about Odysseus, and those called the Minyas and the Nostoi, though they all make mention of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. I will therefore say this much, I will describe what sort of a person Eurynomos is and in what fashion he appears in the painting. The colour is blue-black like the colour of the flies that settle on meat; he is showing his teeth and is seated on the skin of a vulture.'The Keres of the Shield are human vultures; Eurynomos is the sarcophagus incarnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld, the flesh-eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly sits upon a vulture's skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes, are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when he sees a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is'a Ker.' We are in the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, Empusa, Lamia and Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem of Siren.

To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead too far afield, but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren and Sphinx both in art and literature is so instructive that at the risk of digression each of these forms must be examined somewhat in detail.

The Ker as Gorgon

The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom one, most evil of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her lovely terrible face had power to turn men into stone.

The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a general tendency, to be discussed later a tendency which makes of each woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, the Charites, the Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is immediately obvious that the triple Gorgons are not really three but one - two. The two unslain sisters are mere superfluous appendages due to convention; the real Gorgon is Medusa. It is equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his ritual a horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. How did this Gorgoneion come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its head. Though many other associations gathered round it, the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then the hero is supplied. to account for the slaying of the monster.

Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive cults. They are the natural agents of a religion of fear and 'riddance.'Most anthropological museums contain specimens of 'Gorgoneia' still in use among savages, Gorgoneia which are veritable Medusa heads in every detail, glaring eyes, pendent tongue, protruding tusks. The function of such masks is permanently to 'make an ugly face,' at you if you are doing wrong, breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in battle; for you if you are doing right.

Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the apparatus of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we learn from the lexicographers, a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of Vengeance, whose images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. By the time of Pausanias this head or mask goddess had, like the Erinys, taken on a multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in Boeotia he saw in the open air'a sanctuary of the goddesses whom they call Praxidikae. Here the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not one that they take lightly.' In like manner at ancient Pheneus, there was a thing called the Petroma which contained a mask of Demeter with the surname of Cidaria: by this Petroma most of the people of Pheneus swore on the most important matters. If the mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask may well have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess: the priest put it on when he performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with rods.

The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, and would persist only in remote regions, but the common people were slow to lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an 'ugly face.' Fire was a natural terror to primitive man and all operations of baking beset by possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he thought it well to set a Gorgon mask.

In fig. 28, a portable oven now in the museum at Athens, the mask is outside guarding the entrance.

In fig. 29 the upper part of a similar oven is shown, and inside, where the fire flames up, are set three masks. These ovens are not very early, but they are essentially primitive.

The face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig. 30 we have a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair, the image of fright set to frighten the frightful.

It might be the picture of Phobos himself.

In fig. 31 we have neither Gorgon nor Satyr but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. He wears the typical workman's cap, and to either side are set the thunderbolts it is his business to forge.

The craftsman is regarded as an uncanny bogey himself, cunning over-much, often deformed, and so he is good to frighten other bogeys.

The Cyclops was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus in his charming way tells how

'Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright;
If one of them will not be good, up in Olympos'height,
Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace,
And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face,
And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother's lap,
And shuts her eyes tight in her hands for fear of dire mishap.'

This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset every action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown in the Hymn 'The Oven, or the Potters,'which shows clearly the order of beings against which the 'ugly face' was efficacious:

If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command.
Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand
Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well;
Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall they sell,

Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price,
Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice
Mischievous imps one and all, Crusher and Crasher by name,
Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with-Unquenchable-Flame,
They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to nought.
Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.'

How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to avert them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment of early Corinthian pottery now in the Berlin Museum reproduced in fig. 32.

Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at work, but he is afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the Smasher and the rest. He has done what he can; a great owl is perched on the oven to protect it, and in front he has put a little ugly comic man, a charm to keep off evil spirits: he might have put a Satyr-head or a Gorgoneion; he often did put both; it is all the same. Pollux tells us it was the custom to put such comic figures before bronze-foundries; they could be either hung up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was 'the aversion of ill-will'. These little images were also called ftacncavia or by the unlearned trpoffaarcavia, charms against the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aristophanes they formed part of the furniture of most people's chimney corners at Athens. Of such ftaa-Kavia the Gorgon mask was one and perhaps the most common shape.

In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and this Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus in Hades would fain have held further converse with dead heroes, but Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful monster is; all that is clear is that the head only is feared as an atrorpotraiov, a bogey to keep you off. Whether he knew of an actual monster called a Gorgon is uncertain. The nameless horror may be the head of either man or beast, or monster compounded of both.

In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the human Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast is good as a protective charm. Prof. Ridge way has conclusively shown that the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head of the slain beast whose skin was the raiment of the primitive goddess; the head is worn on the breast, and serves to protect the wearer and to frighten his foe; it is a primitive half-magical shield. The natural head is later tricked out into an artificial bogey.

We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the Gorgoneion on tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis in fig. 33 the Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two delicate feet remain. On two sides of the triangular statue we have the Gorgon head; on the third, serving a like protective purpose, a ram's head. The statue, dedicated in the precinct of Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself, but we need seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and Apollo; Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis has a further interest in that the inscription dates the Gorgon-type represented with some precision. The form of the letters shows it to have been the work and the dedication of a Naxian artist of the early part of the 6th century.

On a Rhodian plate in the British Museum in fig. 34 the Gorgoneion has been furnished with a body tricked out with wings, but the mask-head is still dominant. The figure is conceived in the typical heraldic fashion of the Mistress of Wild Things; she is in fact the ugly bogey, Erinys-side of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess, not as in later days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest divinities of the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys of the cult of 'service.' The Olympians in their turn became Christian devils.

Aeschylus in instructive fashion places side by side the two sets of three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but two by-forms of each other. Prometheus foretells to lo her long wandering in the bogey land of Nowhere:

'Pass onward o'er the sounding sea, till thou
Dost touch Kisthene's dreadful plains, wherein
The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids,
Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all,
One tooth whom never doth the rising sun
Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged,
With snakes for hair hated of mortal man
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.'

The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod calls Grey Ones or Old Ones, Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and one-toothed; but the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye shows that in tooth and eye resided their potency, and that in this they were own sisters to the Gorgons.

The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, on the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens, reproduced in fig. 35.

They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show; old Phorkys their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and Athene are present in regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has brought Perseus, and Perseus waits his chance to get the one eye as it is passed from hand to hand.

The eye is clearly seen in the hand outstretched above Perseus; one blind sister hands it to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth.

The vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are lovely maidens; he remembers that they were white-haired from their youth.

The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to explain their nature:

'None may behold, and bear their breathing blight.'

They slay by a malign effluence, and this effluence, tradition said, came from their eyes. Athenaeus quotes Alexander the Myndian as his authority for the statement that there actually existed creatures who could by their eyes turn men to stone.

Some say the beast which the Libyans called Gorgon was like a wild sheep, others like a calf; it had a mane hanging over its eyes so heavy that it could only shake it aside with difficulty; it killed whomever it looked at, not by its breath but by a destructive exhalation from its eyes.

What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, but it is clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate Evil Eye. The monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and snakes, but it slew by the eye, it fascinated.

The Evil Eye itself is not frequent on monuments; the Gorgoneion as a more complete and more elaborately decorative horror attained a wider popularity. But the prophylactic Eye, the eye set to stare back the Evil Eye, is common on vases, on shields and on the prows of ships (see fig. 38). The curious design in fig. 36 is from a Roman mosaic dug up on the Caelian hill. It served as the pavement in an entrance hall to a Basilica built by a certain Hilarius, a dealer in pearls (margaritarius) and head of a college of Dendrophoroi, sacred to the Mother of the Gods. The inscription prays that'God may be propitious to those who enter here and to the Basilica of Hilarius,'and to make divine favour more secure, a picture is added to show the complete overthrow of the evil eye. Very complete is its destruction. Fourfooted beasts, birds and reptiles attack it, it is bored through with a lance, and as a final prophylactic on the eye-brow is perched Athene's little holy owl. Hilarius prayed to a kindly god, but deep down in his heart was the old savage fear.

The Gorgon is more monstrous, more savage, than any other of the Ker-forms. The Gorgoneion figures little in poetry though much in art.'It is an underworld bogey but not human enough to be a ghost, it lacks wholly the gentle side of the Keres, and would scarcely have been discussed here, but that the art-type of the Gorgon lent, as will be seen, some of its traits to the Erinys, and notably the deathly distillation by which they slay:

'From out their eyes they ooze a loathly rheum.'

The Ker as Siren

The Sirens are to the modern mind mermaids, sometimes all human, sometimes fish-tailed, evil sometimes, but beautiful always. Milton invokes Sabrina from the waves by

'. . .the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia's golden comb
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.'

Homer by the magic of his song lifted them once and for all out of the region of mere bogeydom, and yet a careful examination, especially of their art form, clearly reveals traces of rude origin.

Circe's warning to Odysseus runs thus:

'First to the Sirens shalt thou sail, who all men do beguile.
Whoso unwitting draws anigh, by magic of their wile,
They lure him with their singing, nor doth he reach his home
Nor see his dear wife and his babes, ajoy that he is come.
For they, the Sirens, lull him with murmur of sweet sound
Crouching within the meadow: about them is a mound
Of men that rot in death, their skin wasting the bones around.'

Odysseus and his comrades, so forewarned, set sail:

'Then straightway sailed the goodly ship and swift the Sirens'isle
Did reach, for that a friendly gale was blowing all the while.
Forthwith the gale fell dead, and calm held all the heaving deep
In stillness, for some god had lulled the billows to their sleep.'

The song of the Sirens is heard:

'Hither, far-famed Odysseus, come hither, thou the boast
Of all Achaean men, beach thou thy bark upon our coast,
And hearken to our singing, for never but did stay
A hero in his black ship and listened to the lay
Of our sweet lips; full many a thing he knew and sailed away.
For we know all things whatsoe'er in Troy's wide land had birth
And we know all things that shall be upon the fruitful earth.'

It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh. To primitive man, Greek or Semite, the desire to know to be as the gods was the fatal desire.

Homer takes his Sirens as already familiar; he clearly draws from popular tradition. There is no word as to their form, no hint of parentage: he does not mean them to be mysterious, but by a fortunate chance he leaves them shrouded in mystery, the mystery of the hidden spell of the sea, with the haze of the noontide about them and the meshes of sweet music for their unseen toils, knowing all things yet for ever unknown. It is this mystery of the Sirens that has appealed to modern poetry and almost wholly obscured their simple primitive significance.

'Their words are no more heard aright
Through lapse of many ages, and no man
Can any more across the waters wan
Behold these singing women of the sea.'

Four points in the story of Homer must be clearly noted. The Sirens, though they sing to mariners, are not sea-maidens; they dwell on an island in a flowery meadow. They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future. Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death. It is only from the warning of Circe that we know of the heap of bones, corrupt in death horror is kept in the background, seduction to the fore.

It is to art we must turn to know the real nature of the Sirens. Ancient art, like ancient literature, knows nothing of the fish-tailed mermaid. Uniformly the art-form of the Siren is that of the bird-woman. The proportion of bird to woman varies, but the bird element is constant. It is interesting to note that, though the bird-woman is gradually ousted in modern art by the fish-tailed rnermaid, the bird element survives in mediaeval times. In the Hortus Deliciarum of the Abbess Herrad (circ. A.D. 1160), the Sirens appear as draped women with the clawed feet of birds; with their human hands they are playing on lyres.

The bird form of the Sirens was a problem even to the ancients. Ovid asks:

'Whence came these feathers and these feet of birds?
Your faces are the faces of fair maids.'

Ovid's aetiology is of course beside the mark. The answer to his pertinent question is quite simple. The Sirens belong to the same order of bogey beings as the Sphinx and the Harpy; the monstrous form expresses the monstrous nature; they are birds of prey but with power to lure by their song. In the Harpy-form the ravening snatching nature is emphasized and developed, in the Sphinx the mantic power of all uncanny beings, in the Siren the seduction of song. The Sphinx, though mainly a prophetess, keeps Harpy elements; she snatches away the youths of Thebes: she is but 'a man-seizing Ker.' The Siren too, though mainly a seductive singer, is at heart a Harpy, a bird of prey.

This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings.

A black-figured aryballos of Corinthian style (fig. 37), now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the Siren myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to the island: on the island are perched'Sirens twain.'Above the ship hover two great black birds of prey in act to pounce on the mariners. These birds cannot be merely decorative: they in a sense duplicate the Sirens.

The vase-painter knows the Sirens are singing demons sitting on an island; the text of Homer was not in his hands to examine the account word by word, but the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey; hence the great birds. To the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third figure; she is all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed all but certainly, represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the Earth. Euripides makes his Helen in her anguish call on the

'Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth,
The Sirens,'

to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant. The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of the underworld; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls.

The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in Egyptian, but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, so far as I know, the vase in the British Museum on which is represented the death of Procris. Above Procris falling in death hovers a winged bird-woman. She is clearly, I think, the soul of Procris. To conceive of the soul as a bird escaping from the mouth is a fancy so natural and beautiful that it has arisen among many peoples. In Celtic mythology Maildun, the Irish Odysseus, comes to an island with trees on it in clusters on which were perched many birds. The aged man of the island tells him,'These are the souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and women, who are sent to this little island to abide with me according as they die in Erin.' Sailors to this day believe that sea-mews are the souls of their drowned comrades. Antoninus Liberalis tells how, when Ktesulla because of her father's broken oath died in child-bed, 'they carried her body out to be buried, and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body of Ktesulla disappeared.'

The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the bird-soul of all but its wings. The human winged eidolon prevailed in art: the bird-woman became a death-demon, a soul sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that lures a soul, a Siren.

Later in date and somewhat different in conception is the scene on a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum (fig. 38). The artist's desire for a balanced design has made him draw two islands, on each of which a Siren is perched. Over the head of one is inscribed 'lovely-voiced.'

A third Siren flies or rather falls headlong down on to the ship. The drawing of the eye of this third Siren should be noted. The eye is indicated by two strokes only, without the pupil. This is the regular method of representing the sightless eye, i.e. the eye in death or sleep or blindness. The third Siren is dying; she has hurled herself from the rock in despair at the fortitude of Odysseus. This is clearly what the artist wishes to say, but he may have been haunted by an artistic tradition of the pouncing bird of prey. He also has adopted the number three, which by his time was canonical for the Sirens. By making the third Siren fly headlong between the two others he has neatly turned a difficulty in composition. On the reverse of this vase are three Love-gods, who fall to be discussed later. Connections between the subject matter of the obverse and reverse of vases are somewhat precarious, but it is likely, as the three Love-gods are flying over the sea, that the vase-painter intended to emphasize the seduction of love in his Sirens.

The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown by the design in fig. 39 from a Hellenistic relief. The monument is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than the vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought and one moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The scene is a rural one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in front of it an altar, near at hand a tree on which hangs a votive syrinx. Some peasant or possibly a wayfarer has fallen asleep.

Down upon him has pounced a winged and bird-footed woman. It is the very image of obsession, of nightmare, of a haunting midday dream.

The woman can be none other than an evil Siren. Had the scene been represented by an earlier artist, he would have made her ugly because evil; but by Hellenistic times the Sirens were beautiful women, all human but for wings and sometimes bird-feet.

The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the obsession of a demon. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a Jietaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite.

There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted. The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum (fig. 40) is purely monumental.

She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a Trpoftao-Kaviov, a soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic ritual, that the charm itself is used as countercharm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations would gather round. The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna wrote for her girlfriend Baukis begins

Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.'

On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a sphinx.

Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either soul or Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as sweet singer. Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, there is at least a haunting remembrance that she is a soul who sings to souls. In the cosmography with which he ends the Republic, Plato thus writes:

'The spindle turns on the knees of Ananke, and on the upper surface of each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone. The eight together form one Harmony.'

Commentators explain that the Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but then, if music be all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good Muses who chant the music of the spheres? Plutarch felt the difficulty. In his Symposiacs he makes one of the guests say:

'Plato is absurd in committing the eternal and divine revolutions not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who are by no means either benevolent or in themselves good.'

Another guest, Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving to them in Homer a mystical significance.

'Even Homer,'he says, 'means by their music not a power dangerous and destructive to man, but rather a power that inspires in the souls that go from Hence Thither, and wander about after death, a love for things heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness of things mortal, and thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even here he goes on to say,'a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing reminiscence.'

It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer's Sirens had really any such mystical content. But, given that they have the bird-form of souls, that they'know all things, 'are sweet singers and dwellers in Hades, and they lie ready to the hand of the mystic. Proclus in his commentary on the Republic says, with perhaps more truth than he is conscious of,

'the Sirens are a kind of souls living the life of the spirit.'

His interpretation is not merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive tradition with mystical philosophy.

The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the spheres by the Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, nay even became stars. In the Peace of Aristophanes 4 the servant asks Trygaeus,

'It is true then, what they say, that in the air A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?'

To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free:

'Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod,
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding,
As a bird among the bird-droves of God.'

And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of a Siren:

'With golden wings begirt my body flies,
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet,
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies.'

But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the Siren,'half-angel and half-bird' to cosmic functions, yet, to the popular mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet fearful and to be shunned. This is seen in the myth of their contest with the Muses. Here they are the spirits of forbidden intoxication; as such on vases they join the motley crew of Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos. They stand, it would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the impulses in life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his 'Land of Heart's Desire' and to which if he hearken it may be he will return home no more voices too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.

The Siren bird-woman transformed for ever by the genius of Homer into the sweet-voiced demon of seduction may seem remote from the Ker of which she is but a specialized form. A curious design on a black-figured cylix in the Louvre (fig. 41) shows how close was the real connection.

The scene is a banquet: five men are reclining on couches, two of them separated by a huge deinos, a wine-vessel, from which a boy has drawn wine in an oinochoe. Over two of the men are hovering winged figures, each holding a crown and a spray; over two others hover bird-women, each also holding a crown and a spray. What are we to call these ministrant figures, what would the vase-painter himself have called them ? Are the human winged figures Love-gods, are the bird-women Sirens? For lack of context it is hard to say with certainty.

Thus much is clear, both kinds of figures are favouring genii of the feast, and for our purpose this is all-important: the bird-women, be they Sirens or not, and the winged human figures, be they Love-gods or merely Keres, perform the same function. The development of the Love-god, Eros, from the Ker will be discussed later; for the present it is best to regard these bird-women and winged sprites as both of the order of Keres, as yet unspecialized in function.

The Ker as Sphinx

Two special features characterize the Sphinx: she was a Harpy carrying off men to destruction, an incarnate plague; she was the soothsayer with the evil habit of asking riddles as well as answering them. Both functions, though seemingly alien, were characteristic of underworld bogeys; the myth-making mind put them together and wove out of the two the tale of the unanswered riddle and the consequent deathly pest.

On the vase-painting in fig. 42 from a cylix in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we have a charming representation of the riddle-answering Oedipus, whose name is written Oidipodes, sitting meditating in front of the oracle. The Sphinx on her column is half monument, half personality; she is a very human monster, she has her lion-body, but she is a lovely attentive maiden. From her lips come the letters kcu rpi, which may mean and three or and three (-footed). In the field is a delicate decorative spray, which, occurring as it does on vases with a certain individuality of drawing seems to be, as it were, the signature of a particular master.

The Sphinx in fig. 42 is all oracular, but occasionally, on vases of the same date, she appears in her other function as the 'man-snatching Ker.' She leaves her pedestal and carries off a Theban youth. The 5th century vase-painter with his determined euphemism, even when he depicts her carrying off her prey, makes her do it with a certain Attic gentleness, more like a death-Siren than a Harpy. Aeschylus in the Seven against Thebes describes her as the monster she is; the Sphinx on the shield of Parthenopaeus is a horrid bogey, the 'reproach of the state,' 'eater of raw-flesh' with hungry jaws, bringing ill-luck to him who bears her on his ensign.

In the curious vase-painting in fig. 43, a design from a late Lower Italy krater in the museum at Naples, the Sphinx is wholly oracular, and this time she must answer the riddle, not ask it. The Sphinx is seated on a rocky mound, near which stands erect a snake. The snake is not, I think, without meaning; it is the oracular beast of the earth-oracle. The Silenus who has come to consult the oracle holds in his hand a bird. The scene would be hopelessly enigmatic but for one of the fables that are current under the name of Aesop, which precisely describes the situation. 'A certain bad man made an agreement with some one to prove that the Delphic oracle was false, and when the appointed day came, he took a sparrow in his hand and covered it with his garment and came to the sanctuary, and standing in front of the oracle, asked whether the thing in his hand was alive or dead, and he meant if the oracle said it was dead, to show the sparrow alive, but if the oracle said it was alive, to strangle it first and then show it. But the god knew his wicked plan, and said to him,

Have done, for it depends on you whether what you hold is dead or living."

The story shows plainly that the divinity is not lightly to be tempted.'

The story, taken in conjunction with the vase-painting it explains, shows clearly another thing. The Sphinx was mainly a local Theban bogey, but she became the symbol of oracular divinity. At Delphi there was an earth-oracle guarded by a snake, and in honour of that earth-oracle the Naxians upreared their colossal Sphinx and set it in the precinct of Gaia. As time went on, the savage'man-snatching'aspect of the Sphinx faded, remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect grew; but the local legend is here as always the more instructive.

The next representation of the Sphinx (fig. 44), from the fragment of an oinochoe in the Berlin Museum, is specially suggestive. The monster is inscribed, not with the name we know her by, 'Sphinx,' but as 'Kassmia' the Kadmean One, the bogey of Kadmos. The bearded monster with wings and claws and dog-like head has lost her orthodox lion-body, and lent it perhaps to Oedipus who stands in front of her. The scene is of course pure comedy, and shows how near to the Greek mind were the horrible and the grotesque, the thing feared and the thing scoffed at.

The Kassmia, the bogey of Kadmos, may have brought her lion-body with Kadmos from the East, but the supposition, though very possible, is not necessary. Cithaeron was traditionally lion-haunted. The Sphinx may have borrowed some of her traits and part of her body from a real lion haunting a real local tomb.

It is worth noting in this connection that Hesiod calls the monster not Sphinx but Phix:

'By stress of Orthios, she, Echidna, bare Disastrous Phix, a bane to Kadmos'folk.'

The scholiast remarks that'Mount Phikion where she dwelt was called after her but the reverse is probably true. Phix was the local bogey of Phikion. The rocky mountain which rises to the S.-E. corner of Lake Copais is still locally known as Phaga. By a slight and easy modification Phix became Sphix or Sphinx, the 'throttler' an excellent name for a destructive bogey.

The last representation of the Sphinx, in fig. 45, brings us to her characteristic as tomb-haunter. The design is from a krater in the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at Florence. The Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound of the regular sepulchral type. That the mound is sepulchral is certain from the artificial stone basis pierced with holes on which it stands. Two lawless Satyrs attack the mound with picks. The Sphinx is a tomb-haunting bogey, a Ker, but ultimately she fades into a decorative tomb monument, with always perhaps some prophylactic intent. In this, as in her mantic aspect, she is own cousin to the Ker-Siren, but with the Sphinx the mantic side predominates. The Sphinx, unlike the Siren, never developed into a trinity, though when she became decorative she is doubled for heraldic purposes.

It is time to resume the various shifting notions that cluster round the term Ker, perhaps the most untranslateable of all Greek words. Ghost, bacillus, disease, death-angel, death-fate, fate, bogey, magician have all gone to the making of it. So shifting and various is the notion that it is hard to say what is primary, what developed, but deep down in the lowest stratum lie the two kindred conceptions of ghost and bacillus. It is only by a severe effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves back into an adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations of Ker.

When the lexicographers carne to define the word they had no easy task. Their struggles they are honest men, if not too intelligent are instructive. Happily they make no attempt at real formulation, but jot things down as they come. Hesychius, after his preliminary statement

'the soul, death-bringing fate, death,'

gives us suggestive particulars: where we see the unclean bacilli which reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the vase-painting (fig. 17); where the bogey Ker is manifest; where the whirlwind seems indicated, though it may be the dizziness of death. Kerukainae were the female correlatives of Kerykes, 'women whose business it was to collect things polluted' and carry them off to the sea. Most curious and primitive of all, we are told that crjpvkes itself means not only messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended from Hermes, but they call the insects that impregnate the wild fig ctfpvtcas.'Here are bacilli indeed, but for life not for death.

The Ker as Erinys

It has been already indicated that a Ker is sometimes an avenger, but this aspect of the word has been advisedly reserved because it takes us straight to the idea of the Erinys.

Pausanias, a propos of the grave of Koroibos at Megara, tells us a story in which a Ker figures plainly as an Erinys, with a touch of the Sphinx and of the death-Siren. Psamathe, daughter of Krotopos, King of Argos, had a child by Apollo, which, fearing her father's anger, she exposed. The child was found and killed by the sheep-dogs of Krotopos. Apollo sent Poine (Penalty or Vengeance) on the city of the Argives. Poine, they say, snatched children from their mothers until Koroibos, to please the Argives, slew her. After he had slain her, there came a second pestilence upon them and lasted on. Koroibos had to go to Delphi to expiate his sin; he was ordered to build a temple of Apollo wherever the tripod he brought from Delphi should fall. He built of course the town of Tripodisci. The grave of Koroibos at Megara was surmounted by the most ancient Greek stone images Pausanias had ever seen, a figure of Koroibos slaying Poine. There were elegiac verses carved on it recounting the tale of Psamathe and Koroibos. Now Pausanias mentions no Ker, only Poine; but the Anthologists have preserved for us verses which, if not actually those carved on the grave, at all events refer to it, and in them occur the notable words:

'I am the Ker, slain by Koroibos, I dwell on his tomb,
Here at my feet, on account of the tripod, he lies for his doom.'

Poine is clearly the avenging ghost of the child of Psamathe causing a pest which snatched babes from their mother, and Poine the ghost-pest is a Ker and practically a Ker-Erinys.

The simple truth emerges so clearly as to be almost self-evident, yet is constantly ignored, that primarily the Keres-Erinyes are just what the words say, the'Keres Angry-ones.'There is no reason to doubt the truth of what Pausanias tells us, that the Arcadians and, with the Arcadians, probably the rest of the primitive Greeks, called'being in a rage'epivvew. Demeter at Thelpusa had two surnames and even two statues. When she was wroth they called her Erinys on account of her wrath, when she relented and bathed they called her Lousia. Pausanias gives as literary authority for the surname Erinys, Antimachus who wrote (4th cent. B.C.) of the expedition of the Argives against Thebes.

The Erinyes, on this showing, are one form of the countless host of divine beings whose names are simply adjectival epithets, not names proper. Such others are the Eumenides the Kindly Ones, the Potniae the Awful Ones, the Maniae the Madnesses, the Praxidikae the Vengeful Ones. With a certain delicate shyness, founded possibly on a very practical fear, primitive man will not address his gods by a personal name; he decently shrouds them in class epithets. There are people living now, Celts for the most part, who shrink from the personal attack of a proper name, and call their friends, in true primitive fashion, the Old One, the Kind One, the Blackest One, and the like.

It is apparent that, given these adjectival names, the gods are as many as the moods of the worshipper, i.e. as his thoughts about his gods. If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones; when he feels vengeful, they are Vengeful Ones.

The question arises, why did the angry aspect of the Keres, i.e. the Erinyes, attain to a development so paramount, so self-sufficing, that already in Homer they are distinct from the Keres, with functions, if not forms, clearly defined, beyond possibility of confusion. It is precisely these functions that have defined them. A Ker, as has been seen, is for good and for evil, is active for plants, for animals, as for men: a Ker when angry is Erinys: a Ker is never so angry as when he has been killed. The idea of Erinys as distinct from Ker is developed out of a human relation intensely felt. The Erinys primarily is the Ker of a human being unrighteously slain. Erinys is not death; it is the outraged soul of the dead man crying for vengeance; it is the Ker as Poine. In discussing the Keres it has been abundantly shown that ghost is a word too narrow: Keres denote a wider animism. With Erinys the case is otherwise: the Erinyes are primarily human ghosts, but all human ghosts are not Erinyes, only those ghosts that are angry, and that for a special reason, usually because they have been murdered. Other cases of angry ghosts are covered by the black Ker. It is the vengeful inhumanity of the Erinyes, arising as it does from their humanity, which marks them out from the Keres.

That the Erinyes are primarily the vengeful souls of murdered men can and will in the sequel be plainly shown, but it would be idle to deny that already in Homer they have passed out of this stag? and are personified almost beyond recognition. They are no longer souls; they are the avengers of souls. Thus in Homer, in the prayer of Althaea, Erinys, though summoned to avenge the death of Althaea's brethren, is clearly not the ghost of either of them; she is one, they are two; she is female, they are male. Althaea prays:

'And her the Erinys blood-haunting
Heard out of Erebos' depths, she of the soul without pity.'

There is nothing that so speedily blurs and effaces the real origin of things as this insistent Greek habit of impersonation. We were able to track the Keres back to something like their origin just because they never really got personified. In this respect poets are the worst of mythological offenders. By their intense realization they lose all touch with the confusions of actuality. The Erinyes summoned by Althaea were really ghosts of the murdered brothers, but Homer separates them off into avengers.

In other Homeric Erinyes there is often not even a fond of possible ghosts. Phoenix transgresses against his father Amyntor, and Amyntor for his unnatural offence invokes against him the 'hateful Erinyes': they are no ancestral ghosts, they are merely avengers of the moral law, vaguer equivalents of 'Underworld Zeus and dread Persephone Ares offends his mother Aphrodite, who is certainly not dead and has no ghost, and the wounds inflicted on him by Athene appease the'Erinys of his mother. In a word, in Homer, as has frequently been pointed out, the Erinyes are avengers of offences against blood-relations on the mother's and father's side, of all offences against moral, and finally even natural law.

The familiar case of Xanthus, the horse of Achilles, marks the furthest pole of complete abstraction. Xanthus warns Achilles that, for all their fleetness, his horses bear him to his death, and

'When he thus had spoken The Erinyes stayed his voice'

The intervention of the Erinyes here is usually explained by a reference to the saying of Heracleitus that'the sun could not go out of his course without the Erinyes, ministers of justice, finding him out.' I doubt if the philosophy of Heracleitus supplies the true explanation. The horse speaks as the mouthpiece of the fates, the Erinyes they tell of what fate will accomplish; nay more, as fates they, reluctant but obedient, carry him to his death. When Xanthus has uttered the mandate of fate, the Fates close his mouth, not because he transgresses their law, but because he has uttered it to the full.

Be that as it may, the view stated by Heracleitus is of capital importance. It shows that to a philosopher writing at the end of the 6th century B.C. the Erinyes were embodiments of law, ministers of Justice. Of course a philosopher is as little to be taken as reflecting popular faith as a poet, indeed far less; but even a philosopher cannot, save on pain of becoming unintelligible, use words apart from popular associations. Heracleitus was indeed drunk with the thought of law, of Fate, of unchanging 'moral retribution' with the eternal sequence of his endless flux; his Erinyes are cosmic beyond the imagination of Homer, but still the fact remains that he uses them as embodiments of the vengeance that attends transgression. By his time they are not Keres, not souls, still less bacilli, not even avengers of tribal blood, but in the widest sense ministers of Justice.

The Erinyes of Aeschylus

Heracleitus has pushed abstraction to its highest pitch. When we come to Aeschylus we find, as would be expected, a conception of the Erinyes that is at once narrower and more vitalized, more objective, more primitive. In the Septem the conception is narrower, more primitive than in Homer; the Erinys is in fact an angry ghost. This is stated with the utmost precision.

'Alas, thou Fate grievous, dire to be borne,
And Oedipus'holy Shade,
Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou,'

chant the chorus again and again. Fate is close at hand and nigh akin, but the real identity and apposition is between the shade, the ghost of Oedipus, and the black Erinys.

Here and in the Prometheus Bound Aeschylus is fully conscious that it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract vengeance that haunts and pursues. lo is stung by the oestrus because she was a cow-maiden, but the real terror that maddens her is that most terrifying of all ancient ghosts, the phantom of earth-born Argus.

'Woe, Woe!
Again the gadfly stings me as I go.
The earth-born neatherd Argos hundred-eyed,
Earth, wilt thou never hide?

O horror ! he is coming, coming nigh,
Dead, with his wandering eye.
Uprising from the dead
He drives me famished
Along the shingled main,

His phantom pipe drones with a sleepy strain.
Ye gods, what have I done to cry in vain,
Fainting and frenzied with sting-driven pain?'

But when we come to the Oresteia, the Erinyes are envisaged from a different angle. The shift is due partly to the data of the plot, the primitive saga out of which it is constructed, partly to a definite moral purpose in the mind of the tragedian.

The primitive material of the trilogy was the story of the house of Atreus in which the motive is the blood-curse working from generation to generation, working within the narrow limits of one family and culminating in the Erinys of a slain mother. At the back of the Orestes and Clytaemnestra story lay the primaeval thought so clearly expressed by Plato in the Laws.

'If a man' says the Athenian, 'kill a freeman even unintentionally, let him undergo certain purifications, but let him not disregard a certain ancient tale of bygone days as follows:

"He who has died by a violent death, if he has lived the life of a freeman, when he is newly dead, is angry with the doer of the deed, and being himself full of fear and panic on account of the violence he has suffered and seeing his murderer going about in his accustomed haunts, he feels terror, and being himself disordered communicates the same feeling with all possible force, aided by recollection, to the guilty man both to himself and to his deeds."'Here the actual ghost is the direct source of the disorder and works like a sort of bacillus of madness. It is not the guilty conscience of the murderer, but a sort of onset of the consciousness of the murdered.

The Curse of the Blood

Its action is local, and hence the injunction that the murderer must leave the land. How fully Aeschylus was conscious of this almost physical aspect of crime as the action of the disordered ghost on the living comes out with terrible vividness in the Choephori:

'The black bolt from below comes from the slain
Of kin who cry for vengeance, and from them
Madness and empty terror in the night
Comes haunting, troubling.'

It is 'the slain of kin' who cries for vengeance. As Pausanias says of the same house, 'the pollution of Pelops and the avenging ghost of Myrtilos dogged their steps.' 'Fate' says Polybius, 'placed by his (Philip's) side Erinyes and Poinae and Pointers-to-Vengeance. Here clearly all the words are synonymous. Apollo threatens the slayer of his mother with

'Yet other onsets of Erinys sent
Of kindred blood the dire accomplishment,
Visible visions that he needs must mark,
Aye, though he twitch his eyebrows in the dark.'

To cause these 'onsets,' these lrpooboai or, as they are some-times called, efoSoi, was, Hippocrates tells us, one of the regular functions of dead men.

Behind the notion of these accesses of fright, these nocturnal apparitions caused by ghosts, there is in the mind of Aeschylus the still more primitive notion that the shed blood not only'brings these apparitions to effect,'but is itself a source of physical infection. Here we seem to get down to a stratum of thought perhaps even more primitive than that of the bacillus-like Keres. The Chorus in the Choephori sings:

'Earth that feeds him hath drunk of the gore,
Blood calling for vengeance flows never more,
But stiffens, and pierces its way
Through the murderer, breeding diseases that none may allay.

The blood poisons the earth, and thereby poisons the murderer fed by earth. As Dr Verrall (ad loc.) points out, it is the old doctrine of the sentence of Cain,'And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.'

In the crudest and most practical form, this notion of the physical infection of the earth comes out in the story of Alcmaeon. Pausanias tells us that when Alcmaeon had slain his mother Eriphyle, he came to Psophis in Arcadia, but there his disease nowise abated. He then went to Delphi, and the Pythia taught him that the only land where the avenger of Eriphyle could not dog him was the newest land which the sea had laid bare subsequently to the pollution of his mother's blood, and he found out the deposit of the river Achelous and dwelt there. There, by the new and unpolluted land he might be nourished and live. Apollodorus misses the point: he brings Alcmaeon to Thesprotia and purifies him, but by the waters of Achelous.

The case of Alcmaeon does not stand alone. It has a curious parallel in the fate that befell Bellerophon, a fate that, I think, has not hitherto been rightly understood.

In Homer the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the episode with Sthenoboea, he go to Lycia, is royally entertained, marries the king's daughter, rules over a fair domain, begets three goodly children, and then, suddenly, without warning, without manifest cause, he comes to be

'Hated of all the gods. And in the Aleian plain apart
He strayed, shunning men's foot-prints, consuming his own heart.'

Homer, with a poet's instinct for the romantic and mysterious, asks no questions; Pindar with his Olympian prejudice saw in the downfall of Bellerophon the proper meed of 'insolence.' Bellerophon's heart was'aflutter for things far-off,'he had vainly longed for

'The converse of high Zeus.'

But the mythographers knew the real reason of the madness and the wandering, knew of the old sin against the old order. Apollodorus says:'Bellerophon, son of Glaukos, son of Sisyphos, having slain unwittingly his brother Deliades, or, as some say, Peiren, and others Alkimenes, came to Proetus and was purified/ On Bellerophon lay the taboo of blood guilt. He came to Proetus, but, the sequel shows, was not purified. In those old days he could not be. Proetus sent him on to the king of Lycia, and the king of Lycia drove him yet further to the only land where he could dwell, the Ale'ian or Cilician plain. This Aleian plain was, like the mouth of the Achelolis, new land, an alluvial deposit slowly recovered from the sea, ultimately in Strabo's time most fertile, but in Bellerophon's days a desolate salt-marsh. The madness of Bellerophon for in Homer he is obviously mad is the madness of Orestes, of the man blood-stained, Erinys-haunted; but the story of Bellerophon, like that of Alcmaeon, looks back to days even before the Erinys was formulated as a personality, to days when Earth herself was polluted, poisoned by shed blood.

Aeschylus then in the Oresteia is dealing with a primitive story and realizes to the uttermost its primaeval savagery. But he has chosen it for a moral purpose, nay more, when he comes to the Eumenides, with an actual topical intent. He desires first and foremost by the reconciliation of old and new to justify the ways of God to men, and next to show that in his own Athenian law-court of the Areopagus, those ways find their fullest practical human expression. That court, he somehow contrived to believe, or at least saw fit to assert, was founded on a fact of tremendous moral significance, the conversion of the Erinyes into Semnae. The conception of the Erinyes comes to Aeschylus from Homer almost full-fledged; his mythological data, unlike his plots, were slices from the great feasts of Homer and this in a very strict sense, for, owing no doubt partly to the primitive legend selected, he has had to narrow somewhat the Homeric conception of the Erinyes and make of them not avengers in general, but avengers of tribal blood. Moreover he has emphasized their legal character.

It is noteworthy that when Athene formally asks the Erinyes who and what they are, their answer is not 'Erinyes' but

'Curses our name in haunts below the earth.'

And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives the answer is:

'Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes.'

The essence of primitive law resided, as has already) been seen, in the curse, the imprecation. Here the idea is not that of a cosmic Fate but of a definite and tangible curse, the curse of blood-guilt. It is scarcely possible to doubt that in emphasizing the curse aspect of the Erinyes, Aeschylus had in his mind some floating reminiscence of a traditional connection between the Arae and the Areopagus. He is going to make the Erinyes turn into Semnae, the local Athenian goddesses invoked upon the Areopagus: the conception of the Erinyes as Arae makes as it were a convenient bridge. The notion of the Erinyes as goddesses of Cursing is of course definitely present in Homer, but it is the notion of the curse of the broken oath rather than the curse of blood-guilt. In the great oath of Agamemnon he, as became an Achaean, prays first to Zeus, but also to Earth and to the Sun and to the Erinyes who

'Beneath the earth
Take vengeance upon mortals, whosoe'er
Forswears himself.'

Hesiod, borrowing from Melampus, tells us that

'On the fifth day, they say, the Erinyes tend
Oath at his birth whom Eris bore, a woe
To any mortal who forswears himself.'

Aeschylus narrows the Homeric and Hesiodic conception of the Erinyes to the exigencies of the particular legend he treats; they are for him almost uniformly the personified Curses that attend the shedding of kindred blood, though now and again he rises to the cosmic conception of Heracleitus, as when the chorus in the Eumenides exclaim

'0 Justice, ye thrones
Of the Erinyes,'

and chant the doom that awaits the transgressor in general; but the circumstances of the plot compel a speedy return within narrower limits.

The Tragic Erinyes

The Erinyes in Homer are terrors unseen: Homer who lends to his Olympians such clear human outlines has no embodied shape for these underworld Angry Ones; he knows full well what they do, but not how they look. But Aeschylus can indulge in no epic vagueness. He has to bring his Erinyes in flesh and blood actually on the stage; he must make up his mind what and who they are. Fortunately at this point we are not left with a mere uncertain stage tradition or the statements of late scholiasts and lexicographers. From Aeschylus himself we know with unusual precision how his Erinyes appeared on the stage. The priestess has seen within the temple horrible things; she staggers back in terror to give for her horror-stricken state a description remarkably explicit. The exact order of her words is important:

'Fronting the man I saw a wondrous band
Of women, sleeping on the seats. But no!
No women these, but Gorgons yet methinks
I may not liken them to Gorgon -shapes.
Once on a time I saw those pictured things
That snatch at Phineus'feast, but these, but these
Are wingless black, foul utterly. They snore,
Breathing out noisome breath. From out their eyes
They ooze a loathly rheum.'

The whole manner of the passage arrests attention at once. Why is Aeschylus so unusually precise and explicit? Why does he make the priestess midway in her terror give this little archaeological lecture on the art-types of Gorgons and Harpies? The reason is a simple one; the Erinyes as Erinyes appear for the first time in actual definite shape. Up to the time when Aeschylus brought them on the stage, no one, if he had been asked what an Erinys was like, could have given any definite answer; they were unseen horrors which art up to that time had never crystallized set form. The priestess is literally correct when she says: Aeschylus had behind him, to draw from, a great wealth of bogey types; he had black Keres, such as those on the shield of Herakles; he had Gorgons, he had Harpies, but he had no ready-made shape for his Erinyes, only the Homeric horror of formlessness. What will he do? What he did do is clearly set forth by the priestess. When she first, in the gloom of the adyton, catches sight of the sleeping shapes, she thinks they are women, they have something human about them; but no, they are too horrible for women, they must be Gorgons. She looks a little closer. No, on second thoughts, they are not Gorgons; they have not the familiar Gorgon mask; there is something else she has seen in a picture, Harpies, 'those that snatch at Phineus'feast.' Can they be Harpies? No, again, Harpies have wings, and these are wingless. Here precisely came in the innovation of Aeschylus; he takes the Harpy-type, loathsome and foul, and rids them of their wings. It was a master-touch, lifting the Erinyes from the region of grotesque impossible bogeydom to a lower and more loathsome, because wholly human, horror.

The 'Gorgon shapes,' which indeed amount almost to Gorgon masks so characteristic is the ugly face with tusks and protruding tongue have been already fully discussed, but for clearness' sake another illustration, which can be securely dated as before the time of Aeschylus, may be added here.

The design in fig. 46 is from a black-figured olpe in the British Museum. It is signed by the potter Amasis, and dates about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. The scene depicted is the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa by Perseus. Medusa is represented with the typical ugly face, protruding tusks and tongue. On her lower lip is a fringe of hair; four snakes rise from her head. She wears a short purple chiton, over which is a stippled skin with two snakes knotted at the waist. She has high huntress-boots and two pairs of wings, one outspread the other recurved. The essential feature of the Gorgon in Greek art is the hideous mask-like head; but she has usually, though not always, snakes somewhere about her, in her hair or her hands or about her waist. The wings, also a frequent though not uniform appendage, are sometimes two, sometimes four. In common with the Harpy, to whom she is so near akin, she has the bent knee that indicates a striding pace. That Harpy and Gorgon are not clearly distinguished is evident from the vase-painting already discussed, in which the Gorgon sisters of Medusa are inscribed Harpies.

Broadly speaking the Gorgon is marked off from the Harpy by the mask-face. The Harpy is a less monstrous form of Gorgon, but at worst there was not much to choose between them. We sympathize with the hesitation of the priestess, when we compare the Medusa-Gorgon of the Amasis vase (fig. 46) with the undoubted Harpies of the famous Wiirzburg cylix (fig. 47). Here we have depicted the very scene remembered by the priestess, 'those pictured things that snatch at Phineus'feast.'The vase is in a disastrous condition, and the inscriptions present many difficulties as well as uncertainties, but happily those that are legible and certain are sufficient to place the subject of the scene beyond a doubt. It would indeed be clear enough without the added evidence of inscriptions. Phineus to the right reclines at the banquet, attended by women of his family, whose names present difficulties and need not here be discussed. The Harpies, pestilential unclean winds as they are, have fouled the feast. But for the last time they are chased away by the two sons of Boreas, Zetes and Kalais, sword in hand. The sons of the clean clear North Wind drive away the unclean demons. All the winds, clean and unclean, are figured alike, with four wings each; but the Boreadae are of course male, the women Harpies are draped.

Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be the large dog, a creature of supernatural size, almost the height of a man. To the left of him a bearded man is hastening away; he looks back, apparently in surprise or consternation. Immediately behind the dog comes a winged figure, also in haste, and manifestly interested in the dog. Behind her is Hermes, and behind him, as quiet spectators, two women figures. There is only one possible explanation of the general gist of the scene. It is the story of the golden dog of Minos stolen from Crete by Pandareos, king of Lycia, and by him from fear of Zeus deposited with Tantalos. The scholiast on the Odyssey tells the story in commenting on the lines 'As when the daughter of Pandareos the bright brown nightingale'as follows.'

There is a legend about the above mentioned Pandareos, that he stole the golden dog of Zeus in Crete, a life-like work of Hephaistos, from the precinct of Zeus, and having stolen it he deposited it with Tantalos. And when Zeus demanded the stolen thing by the mouth of Hermes Tantalos swore that he had it not. But Zeus when he had got the dog again, Hermes having secretly taken it away, buried Tantalos under Sipylos.' Another scholiast gives a different version, in which judgment fell on the daughters of Pandareos.'Merope and Kleothera (daughters of Pandareos) were brought up by Aphrodite; but when Pandareos, having received the dog stolen from Crete in trust for Tantalos, denied that he ever took it, Merope and Kleothera were snatched away by the Harpies and given to the Erinyes.'

In the light of this version the vase-painting is clear. The moment chosen is the coming of Hermes to claim the dog. It is no use Pandareos denying he had it, for there it is, larger than life. The vase-painter had to put the dog in, to make the story manifest. The two women spectators are the daughters of Pandareos, Merope and Kleothera. Who is the winged figure? Archaeologists variously name her Iris, a Harpy, an Erinys. Iris I unhesitatingly reject. Between a Harpy and an Erinys the choice is harder, and the doubt is instructive. Taking into consideration the Lycian character of the story, and the not unimportant fact that the design of the reverse represents a Lycian myth also, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, I think we may safely say that the figure is a Harpy, but it is a Harpy performing the functions of an Erinys, avenging the theft, avenging the broken oath, come also to fetch the two maidens whom she will give to be handmaids to the hateful Erinyes so near akin, so fluctuating are the two conceptions.

The fact then that Aeschylus brought them on the stage and his finer poetical conception of horror compelled the complete and human formulation of the Erinyes; before his time they have no definite art-type. The Erinyes of Aeschylus are near akin to Gorgons, but they lack the Gorgon mask; nearer still to Harpies, but wingless. It is curious and interesting to note that at the close of the Choephori, where they do not appear on the stage, where they are visible only to the imagination of the mad Orestes, he sees them like the shapes he knows

'These are like Gorgon shapes
Black-robed, with tangled tentacles entwined
Of frequent snakes.'

Aeschylus felt the imaginative gain of the purely human form, but his fellow artist the vase-painter will not lightly forego the joy of drawing great curved wings. In vases that are immediately post-Aeschylean the wingless type tends to prevail, though not wholly; later it lapses and the great fantastic wings reappear. On the red-figured vase-painting in fig. 49 the earliest of the series and dating somewhere towards the end of the 5th century we have the scene of the purification of Orestes. He is seated close to the omphalos sword in hand. Above his head Apollo holds the pig of purification, in his left hand the laurel; to the right is Artemis as huntress with spears; to the left are the sleeping wingless Erinyes; the ghost of Clytaemnestra beckons to them to wake. From the ground rises another Erinys, a veritable earth demon. The euphemism of the vase-painter makes the Erinyes not only wingless but beautiful, as fair to see as Clytaemnestra.

The next picture (fig. 50) is later in style, but far more closely under dramatic influence. We have the very opening scene of the Eumenides.

The inner shrine of the temple, a small Ionic naos, the omphalos, and the supplicant Orestes, with no Apollo to purify; the frightened priestess holding the symbol of her office, the great temple key with its sacred fillet.

All about the shrine are lying the Erinyes, wingless and loathly; the scanty dishevelled hair and pouting barbarous lips are best seen in the rightmost Erinys, whose face is drawn profile-wise.

In the third representation from a krater formerly in the Hope Collection (fig. 51) the style is late and florid, and the vase-painter has shaken himself quite free from dramatic influence. Orestes crouches in an impossible pose on the great elaborately decorated omphalos; Apollo is there with his filleted laurel staff. The place of Artemis is taken by Athene, her foot resting on what seems to be an urn for voting.

To the left is an Erinys, in huntress garb, with huge snake and high curved wings; but the vase-painter is indifferent and looks for variety: a second Erinys, who leans over the tripod, is well furnished with snakes, but has no wings.

The Erinyes as Poinae

In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin Museum (fig. 52), the Erinys is a mere angel of vengeance; her wings are no longer fantastic, she is no huntress, but a matronly, heavily draped figure; she holds a scourge in her hand, she is more Poine than Erinys, only about her is still curled a huge snake.

Aeschylus then, we may safely assert, first gave to the Erinyes outward and visible shape, first differentiated them from Keres, Gorgons, or Harpies.

In this connection it is worth noting that the Erinyes or Poinae were not infrequently referred to in classical literature as though they were almost the exclusive property of the stage. Aeschines, in his oration against Timarchus, exhorts the

Athenians not to imagine'that impious men as in the tragedies are pursued and chastized by Poinae with blazing torches.' Plutarch in his life of Dion tells how, when the conspiracy of Callippus was on foot against him, Dion had a'monstrous and portentous vision.'As he was meditating alone one evening he heard a sudden noise and saw, for it was still light, a woman of gigantic size, 'in form and raiment exactly like a tragic Erinys.' She was sweeping the house with a sort of broom.

On Lower Italy vases the Erinyes as Poinae frequently appear.

They are sometimes winged, sometimes un winged. From the august ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have sunk to be the mere pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on Sisyphos to his ceaseless task, they bind Peirithoos, they fasten Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious to note that, though the notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still wear the huntress garb, the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to follow the downward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated by Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation in Plutarch's treatise'On those who are punished by the Deity late.' The criminals whom Justice (Dike) the Orphic divinity of purification rather than vengeance rejects as altogether incurable are pursued by an Erinys,'the third and most savage of the ministrants of Adrasteia.' She drives them down into a place which Plutarch very properly describes as 'not to be seen, not to be spoken of.' The Erinyes are from beginning to end of the old order, implacable, vindictive; they know nothing of Orphic penance and purgatory; as 'angels of torment' they go to people a Christian Hell.

The Erinys As Snake

We return to Aeschylus. His intent was to humanize the Erinyes that thereby they might be the more inhuman. The more horrible the shape of these impersonations of the old order the greater the miracle of their conversion into the gentle Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we know them the Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane. In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers one lapse, the more significant because probably unconscious. When Clytaemnestra would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, she cries,

'Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators,
Have spent the fell rage of the dragoness.'

It is of course possible to say that she uses the word 'dragoness'' poetically, for a monster in general, possibly a human monster; but the question is forced upon us, why is this particular monster selected? why does she say 'dragoness' and not rather 'hound of hell'? In the next lines comes the splendid simile of the dog hunting in dreams, and it would, surely have been more'poetical'to keep the figure intact. But^ language and associations sometimes break through the best regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind lay the notion that the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. The notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be considered when hero-worship is dealt with. For the present it can only be noted in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower stratum of thought, a stratum in which the Erinys was not yet an abstracted or even humanized minister of vengeance, butX simply an angry ghost in snake form.

The use of the singular number,'dragoness,'is, in itself, significant. The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely multiplied, but the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the ghost of the murdered mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real 'dragoness/ though she does not know it, and by a curious unconscious reminiscence the Erinyes sleep till she, the true Erinys, rouses them.

The mention by Aeschylus of the 'dragoness' does not stand alone. To Euripides also the Erinys is a snake. In the Iphigeneia in Tauris the mad Orestes cries to Py lades,

'Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes
To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed V

Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover the 'Hades-snake' confuses the effect of the 'dread vipers' that follow. In his Orestes also Euripides makes the Erinyes 'maidens with the forms of snakes,' where it is straining language, and quite needlessly, to say that the word spafcovrdbseis means 'having snakes in their hands or hair.'

Art too has these harkings back to the primitive snake form. The design in fig. 53 is from a black-figured amphora in the Vatican Museum, dating about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. We have the usual striding flying type, the four wings, the huntress boots a type of which, as has been shown, it is hard to say whether it represents Gorgon or Harpy. There is no context to decide. One thing is clear. The vase-painter is afraid that we shall miss his meaning, shall not understand that this winged thing striding through the air is an earth demon, so he paints below, moving pari passu, a great snake. The winged demon is also a snake.

Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out in the vase-painting in fig. 54 from an archaic vase of the type known as prothesis vases, in the Museum at Athens. They are a class used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects. Two mourners stand by a grave tumulus, itself surmounted by a funeral vase. Within the tumulus the vase-painter depicts what he believes to be there. Winged eidola, ghosts, and a great snake, also a ghost. Snake and eidolon are but two ways of saying the same thing. The little fluttering figures here represented are merely harmless Keres, not angry vindictive Erinyes, but when the

Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is a snake-ghost.

The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek mind every bogey was earth-born.

In the design in fig. 55 we have the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa. The inscriptions are not clearly legible, but the scene is evident. Perseus attended by Athene and one of the nymphs, who gave him the kibisis and helmet and winged sandals, is about to slay Medusa. Medusa is of the usual Gorgon type, but she holds in her hand a huge snake, the double of herself.

But the crowning evidence as to the snake-form of the Erinys is literary, Clytaemnestra's dream in the Choephori. Clytaemnestra dreams that she gives birth to and suckles a snake. Dr Verrall (ad loc.) has pointed out that the snake is here the regular symbol of things subterranean and especially of the grave, and he conjectures that the snake may have been presented to the eyes of the audience by,'the visible tomb of Agamemnon which would presumably be marked as a tomb in the usual way. 'I would go a step further. The snake is more than the symbol of the dead; it is, I believe, the actual vehicle of the Erinys. The Erinys is in this case not the ghost of the dead Agamemnon, but the dead Agamemnon's son Orestes. The symbol proper to the ghost-Erinys is transferred to the living avenger. Orestes states this clearly:

'Myself in serpent's shape
Will slay her.'

And this, not merely because he is deadly as a snake, but because he is the snake, i.e. the Erinys.

Again, when Clytaemnestra cries for mercy, Orestes answers:

'Nay, for my father's fate hisses thy doom.'

The snake-Erinys in the Eumenides, and here again in the Choephori, remains of course merely an incidental survival, important mainly as marking the road Aeschylus has left far behind. It is an almost unconscious survival of a tradition that conceived of the Erinyes as actually ghosts, not merely as the ministers of ghostly vengeance.

Before we leave the snake-Erinys, one more vase-painting must be cited, which brings this conception very vividly before us. The design in fig. 56 is from an early black-figured amphora of the class known as 'Tyrrhenian,' formerly in the Bourguignon collection at Naples. The figure of a woman just murdered lies prostrate over an omphalos-shaped tomb.

The warrior who has slain her escapes with drawn sword to the right. But too late. Straight out of the tomb, almost indeed out of the body of the woman, rises a huge snake, mouthing at the murderer. The intent is clear; it is the snake-Erinys rising in visible vengeance. The murderer is probably Alcmaeon, who has just slain his mother Eriphyle. His story, already discussed, is as it were the double of that of Orestes. The interpretation as Alcmaeon is not quite certain. It does not however affect the general sense of the scene, i.e. a murderer pursued by the instant vengeance of a snake-Erinys.

Before passing to the shift from Erinyes to Semnae it may be well to note that another tragedian priest as well as poet held to the more primitive view, realized definitely that the Erinyes, the avengers, were merely angry implacable Keres. To Sophocles in the Oedipus Tyrannus Apollo is the minister, not, as in the Eumenides, of reconciliation, but of vengeance. He has taken over the functions of the Erinyes. With the lightning and fire of his father Zeus he leaps full-armed upon the guilty man; but even Apollo cannot dispense with the ancient avengers. With him

'Dread and unerring
Follow the Keres.'

The Keres here are certainly regarded as a kind of Fate, but to translate the word 'Fates' is to precipitate unduly the meaning. The words calls up in the poet's mind, not only the notion of ministers of vengeance, but also the reminiscence of ghostly fluttering things. He says of the guilty man:

'Fierce as a bull is he,
Homeless, with desolate foot he seeks to flee
The dooms of Gaia's central mound.
In vain, they live and flit ever around.'

Again, in the Electra of Euripides, though the Erinyes are fully personified as dog-faced goddesses, yet they are also Keres.

'They hunt you like dread Keres, goddesses
Dog-faced, in circling madness.'

Here the word Keres seems to be used because Moirae is of too beneficent and omnipotent association; Keres keeps the touch of personal ghostly vengeance.

To resume: the Erinyes are attributive epithets of ghosts, formless in Homer, but gradually developed by literature, and especially by the genius of Aeschylus, into actual impersonations. In accordance with this merely attributive origin it is not strange that qua Erinyes their cult is practically non-existent. In only one instance do we hear of a definite place of worship for the Erinyes as such. Herodotus tells us that at Sparta the children of the clan of the Aegidae' did not survive. Accordingly in obedience to an oracle the Aegidae 'made a sanctuary to the Erinyes of Laios and Oedipus.'

Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts destructive to the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to be appeased. In so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered or outraged men, the Erinyes were of course everywhere propitiated, but rarely under their 'Angry' name. That the natural prudence of euphemism forbade. As abstract ministers of vengeance we have no evidence of their worship. Clytaemnestra indeed recounts in detail her dread service to the Erinyes, but when closely examined it is found to be merely the regular ritual of the dead and of underworld divinities; it has all the accustomed marks, the 'wineless libations' and the 'nephalia for propitiation, the banquets by night' offered on the low brazier characteristic of underworld sacrifice. The hour was one, she adds,'shared by none of the gods.' What she means is none of the gods of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour shared by every underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word transferred the regular ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted ministers of vengeance, and has thereby left unconscious witness to their real origin.

The Semnai Theai

To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable Goddesses present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes owe such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, to Homer first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with the Semnae it is quite otherwise. Their names are of course adjectival almost all primitive cultus names are but from the first, as we know them, they are personal and local. The Erinyes range over earth and sea, the Semnae are seated quietly and steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a strictly local cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for the fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have realized their existence; they would have remained obscure local figures like the Ablabiae and the Praxidikae.

In this connection it is of cardinal importance that, though we are apt to speak of them as the Semnae, the Venerable Ones, this is not their cultus title, not the fashion in which they were actually addressed at Athens. They are uniformly spoken of, nojfc as the Venerable Ones, but as the Venerable Goddesses. The distinction is important. It marks the fact that the Semnae from the first moment they come into our view have attained a complete anthropomorphism, have passed from ghosts to goddesses; they are clearly defined personalities with a definite cultus; they are primitive forms, in fact the primitive forms, of earth goddesses, of such conceptions as culminated finally in the great figures of Demeter and Kore. Other such figures are, for Athens the two Thesmophoroi, who are indeed but developments, other aspects, of the Semnae; for Eleusis the 'two goddesses,' known to us by inscriptions and reliefs; for Aegina Damia and Auxesia; and for the rest of Greece many another local form, dual or triune, which need not now be enumerated. The process of this gradual anthropomorphism, this passage from sprite and ghost and demon to full-fledged divinity will be fully traced when we come to the 'making of a goddess'. For the present it can only be noted that the term'goddesses'sharply differentiates the Semnae from the Erinyes, who, save for sporadic literary mention, never attained any such rank. Euripides does indeed make Orestes call the Erinyes'dread goddesses,'but Aeschylus is explicit:'their adornment was neither human nor divine.' It must be distinctly understood that, as the Semnae are goddesses, they are dealt with at this point only by anticipation, to elucidate the transformation effected by Aeschylus.

What we certainly know of the Semnae, as distinct from kindred figures such as the Eumenides, is not very much, but such as it is, is significant. We know the site of their sanctuary, something of the aspect of their images, something also of their functions and of the nature of their ritual. We know in fact enough, as will be shown, to feel sure that like the Erinyes they were underworld potencies, ghosts who had become goddesses. The origin of the two conceptions is the same, but their development widely different, and moreover we catch it arrested at a different stage.

It is obvious from the play of the Eumenides that the worship of the Semnae at Athens was of hoary antiquity. It is true that Diogenes Laertius states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) that the sanctuary of the Seranae at Athens was founded by Epimenides. The scene of the operations of Epimenides was undoubtedly the Areopagos, but, as the purification of Athens took place in the 46th Olympiad, the statement that he founded the sanctuary must be apocryphal. Very likely he may have revived and restored the cult. Diogenes says that he took a number of black and white sheep and led them up to the Areopagos and thence let them go whither they would, and he commanded those who followed them to sacrifice each of them wherever the sheep happened to lie down, and so the plague would be stayed. Whence even now, adds Diogenes, you may find in the Athenian denies nameless altars in memory of this atonement. Some such altar as this was still to be seen at or near the Areopagos when St Paul preached there, and such an altar may have got associated with the Semnae, who like many other underworld beings were Nameless Ones.

The site of the worship of the Semnae was undoubtedly some sort of cave or natural chasm amplified artificially into a sanctuary. Such caves, clefts or chasms are, as has already been shown, the proper haunts of underworld beings; they are also usually, though not uniformly, primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus images Pausanias speaks as follows. After describing the Areopagos and the two un wrought stones called 'Transgression' and 'Pitilessness' on which accused and accuser stood, he says'And near is a sanctuary of the goddesses whom the Athenians call Semnae, but Hesiod in the Theogony calls Erinyes. Aeschylus represents them with snakes in their hair, but in their images there is nothing frightful, nor in the other images of the underworld gods that are set up. There is a Pluto also and a Hermes and an image of Ge. And there those who have been acquitted in a suit before the Areopagos sacrifice. And others besides sacrifice, both strangers and citizens, and within the enclosure there is the tomb of Oedipus.'

Pausanias by his reference to Aeschylus betrays at once the source of hfs identification of the Semnae with the Erinyes. The statement cannot be taken as evidence that prior to Aeschylus any such identification was current. After the time of Aeschylus, classical writers, except when they are quoting ritual formularies, begin to accept the fusion and use the names Erinyes, Eumenides, and Semnae as interchangeable terms. A like laxity unhappily obtains among modern commentators.

The statement of Pausanias, that about the cultus images of the Semnae there was nothing frightful, is important, as showing how foreign to the Semnae was the terror-haunted conception of the tragic Erinys. Aeschylus might fuse the Erinyes and the Semnae at will, but the cultus images of the Semnae take on no attribute of the Erinyes. About these cultus images we learn something more from the scholiast on Aeschines. Commenting on the Semnae he says 'These were three in number and were called Venerable Goddesses, or Eumenides, or Erinyes. Two of them were made of lychnites stone by Scopas the Parian, but the middle one by Kalamis.'Here again we must of course discount the statement as regards the triple appellation, at least for a date preceding Aeschylus. The number of the statues is noticeable. At the time when the scholiast or his informant wrote the images were unquestionably three. The origin and significance of the female trinities will be considered later. For the present it is sufficient to note that the trinity was probably a later stage of development than the duality. From the notice of the scholiast we cannot be certain that the images were originally three; nay more, it looks as if there was some reminiscence of a duality. Moreover the scholiast on the Oedipus Coloneus expressly states that according to Phylarchus the images of the Semnae at Athens were two in number. He adds that according to Polemon they were three. That the number three ultimately prevailed is highly probable, indeed practically certain. The scholiast on Aeschines goes on to say 'the court of the Areopagos adjudged murder cases on three days in each month, assigning one day to each goddess.'

The three days were probably a primitive institution, three being a number sacred to the dead, and these three days may have helped the development of the threefold form of the Semnae. Later in considering the Charites and other kindred shapes it will be shown that many different strands went to the weaving of a trinity. The strictly definite number of the Semnae, be it two or three, is in marked contrast to the indefinite 'wondrous throng' of the Aeschylean Erinyes. The contrast may have been softened, if in the concluding scene the chorus of Erinyes filed away in groups of three.

The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of the word 'sanctuary' a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, a trait that it has in common with many other precincts. Thucydides tells how in the conspiracy of Kylon some of the conspirators sat down at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses, and were put to death at the entrance. A monument, the Kyloneion, was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate the pollution. Plutarch, in his account of this same conspiracy, adds a curious primitive touch: the conspirators connected themselves with the image of 'the goddess' by a thread, believing thereby they would remain immune; the thread broke of its own accord when they reached the Semnae; this was taken as an omen of rejection and they were put to death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the precinct of the Semnae as a place of sanctuary. In the Knights, he makes the outraged triremes say

'If this is what the Athenians like, we must needs set sail forthwith
And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae's shrine.'

In the Tkesmophoriazusae; when Mnesilochus is about to make off in a fright, Euripides asks

'You villain, where are you off to?'

and the answer is

'To the shrine of the Semnae.'

It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to the goddesses of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides.

The confusion of the three was never local, only literary, and by the time of Aristophanes it has not yet begun.

Euripides is our solitary authority for the fact that the sanctuary was also oracular. At the close of the Electro, he makes the Dioscuri, in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy that Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, will come to Athens and be acquitted by the equal vote, and that in consequence the baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a subterranean cleft hard by the Areopagos:

'A mantic shrine,
Sacred, adored of mortals.'

Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the Dioscuri is correct.

The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to those who sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class of the community, happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. These were the people known as 'second-fated' or 'later-doomed' Hesychius, in explaining the term 'second-fated', says'he is called by some "later-doomed." So a man is termed when the accustomed rites have been performed as though he were dead, and later on he reappears alive; and Polemon says that to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the Venerable Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who passes a second time through the folds of a woman's garment, as was the custom among the Athenians in a case of second birth.'

This curious statement is fortunately explained to us in instructive detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th Roman Question. He there says 'Those who have had a funeral and sepulture as though they were dead are accounted by the Greeks as not pure, and they will not associate with them, nor will they permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they say that a certain Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to Delphi to enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities this custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer:

"Whatsoe'er is accomplished by woman that travails in childbed,
That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods."

And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like a new-born child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, and all the others who were called "later-doomed" did the like.' 'But,' adds Plutarch, and doubtless most justly, 'some say that these things were done with respect to the "later-doomed" before Aristinus did them, and the custom was an ancient one.'

Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In this he is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, and of all underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If a man comes back to life after burial rites, the reason to the primitive mind is that there is something wrong with him; he is rejected by the powers below and unfit to mingle with his fellows in the world above; he is highly taboo. Despised of the gods, he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The only chance for him is to be born again.

When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail confirms the view that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus himself we know that animal sacrifices consumed but not eaten, were offered to them. Athene bids the Erinyes, after they have turned Semnae,

'pass below the earth
With these your sacred sphagia.'

The underworld nature of sphagia the word has no English equivalent has been fully discussed . In careful writers, as has been seen, it is never interchangeable with lepela, victims sacrificed and eaten.

The scholiast on Sophocles speaks of the holocaust of a black sheep to the Eumenides, whom he identifies with the Semnae; but, as he expressly states that this sacrifice took place in the Peloponnese, we cannot safely attribute it to the local Semnae of Athens. It is probable that sphagia a formed part of the regular sacrifice mentioned by Pausanias as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted; sphagia belong, as has already been shown, to the class of expiatory offerings. It was on odjia, which were also called roljaa, that oaths were taken in the law courts, oaths the extraordinary solemnity of which Demosthenes emphasizes. A man so swearing stood on the fragments of victims officially and solemnly slain, and devoted himself and his household to destruction in case of perjury. By standing on the slain fragments he identifies himself proleptically with them. We have no explicit statement that the divinities by whom these awful oaths on the roqia, had to be taken were the but as the Semnae were the underworld divinities resident on the Areopagos, and as they were frequently invoked with the local heroes, and as sacrifice was done to them by the acquitted, it seems highly probable. If they were the goddesses of oaths, this is another link with the Erinyes, the avengers of oaths. It is notable that in an ordinary imprecation in the law-courts they take precedence of Athene herself. Thus Demosthenes says,

'I call to witness the Venerable Goddesses, and the place they inhabit, and the heroes of the soil, and Athene of the city, and the other gods who have the city and the land in their dominion.'

We learn from Philo that no slave was allowed to take part in the processions of the Semnae. This in a worship of special antiquity and solemnity is natural enough. But it is strange to hear from Polemon that there was the same taboo on all the Eupatrids. Strange at first sight, but easily explicable. The Semnae are women divinities, and in this taboo on the Eupatrids there seems to lurk a survival of matriarchal conditions. Aeschylus in the Eumemdes is not concerned, save incidentally, to emphasize the issue between matriarchy and patriarchy, between kinship through the mother and through the father, but it lies at the back of the legend he has chosen for his plot. The stories of Orestes and Clytaemnestra, of Alcmaeon and Eriphyle, are deep-rooted in matriarchy both look back to the days when the only relationship that could be proved, and that therefore was worth troubling about, was that through the mother; and hence special vengeance attends the slayer of the mother. In the light of this it is easy to understand why in the worship of the Semnae the family of Eupatrids those well-born through their fathers had no part. For them Apollo was the fitter divinity. The family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation, ancestral rites significantly called irdrpia, paternal. These rites as described by Dorotheos have been already discussed.

The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae is also recorded; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius describes as 'a family of well-born people at Athens.' Polemon is again our authority for connecting these'Silent Ones'with the cult of the Semnae. He is quoted by the scholiast already cited. In commenting on the expression 'uttering words inaudible' the scholiast says' This is from the sacrifice performed to the Eumenides. For they enact the sacred rites in silence, and on account of this the descendants of Hesychos (the Silent One) sacrifice to them, as Polemon says in his writings about Eratosthenes, thus: " the family of the Eupatrids has no share in this sacrifice "; and then further, " in this procession the Hesychidae, which is the family that has to do with the Venerable Goddesses, take the lead." And before the sacrifice they make a preliminary sacrifice of a ram to Hesychos... giving him this name because of the ritual silence observed. His sanctuary is by the Kyloneion outside the Nine Gates.'

Though these remarks of the scholiast are prompted by the cult of the Eumenides at Colonos, it is quite clear that Polemon is speaking of the Semnae at Athens. He states three important facts. The cult of the Semnae was in the hands of a clan descended from a hero called aetiologically'the Silent One.'Sacrifice to the goddesses was regularly preceded by the sacrifice of a ram to the eponymous hero. That hero had a sanctuary of his own outside the Nine Gates of the old Pelasgic fortification, and near the historic monument of Kylon. The name'Silent One'is possibly a mere cultus epithet, used to preserve safely the anonymity of the hero; heroes, as will later be seen, are dangerous persons to mention. On the other hand Hesychos may have been the actual name of a real hero, and after his death it may have seemed charged with religious significance. This seems quite possible, the more so as the name was adopted by the whole family. The female form Hesychia was a proper name in the days of Nikias, and it is curious to find that even then an omen could be drawn from it. Plutarch recounts that when the Athenians were taking omens before the Syracusan expedition an oracle ordered them to fetch a priestess of Athene from Clazomenae. They found, when they got her, that her name was Hesychia; and this seemed 'a divine indication that they should remain quiet.'

The scholiast speaks of Hesychidae, male members of the family of Hesychos, but if we may trust Callimachus it was the women of the family who brought burnt-offerings; and these offerings were, as we should expect, wineless libations and honey-sweet cakes. The name of the priestesses was according to Callimachus, and it is no doubt from this source that Hesychius gets his gloss, 'Leteirai, priestesses of the Semnae.'

The Semnae were women divinities served by priestesses, and it is noticeable that Athene, who was 'all for the father,' promises to the Erinyes that, if they become Semnae, they shall have worshippers, both men and women. But when the procession to the cave is actually formed, in strict accordance no doubt with the traditional ritual of the place, it is women attendants who bring the ancient image,

'A goodly band,
Maidens and wives and throng of ancient dames.'

It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were members of the clan of Hesychids.

Aeschylus has left us other notes of underworld significance in the ritual of the Semnae. When the procession is forming for the cave Athene speaks:

'Do on your festal garments crimson-dyed
For meed of honour, bid the torches flame
So henceforth these our visitants shall bless
Our land and folk with shining of their grace.'

Athene proffers for guerdon to the Semnae the ritual that as underworld goddesses was already theirs, torches and crimson raiment.

In connection with the torches it cannot be forgotten that some, though possibly not all, the sittings of the court of the Areopagos took place by night, doubtless in honour of the underworld goddesses who presided. In Lucian's time, at least, these sittings were almost proverbial. He says of a man perceiving with difficulty, 'unless he chance to be stone-blind or like the Council of the Areopagos which gives its hearing by night': and again in the Hermotimus 'he is doing it like the Areopagites who give judgment in darkness.' To these sittings in the night-time it may be that Athene refers when she says

This court I set, untouched of gain, revered,
Alert, a wakeful guard o'er those who sleep.'

The garments of crimson or purple dye point to a ritual of placation and the service of the underworld. This is clearly shown in the details given by Plutarch of the rites of placation performed annually for those who fell in the battle of Plataea. 'On the 16th day of the month Mairnakterion the archon of Plataea, who on other days may not touch iron nor wear any garment that is not white, puts on a crimson chiton and taking a hydria and girded with a sword goes to the sepulchres. There with water from the spring he washes the stelae and anoints them with myrrh; he slays a black bull, prays to Zeus and Hermes Chthonios, and invokes to the banquet and the bloodshed the heroes who died for Greece.'

The crimson-purple is blood colour, hence it is ordained for the service of the dead. It has already been noted that Dion when he took the great oath in the Thesmophorion identified himself with Kore of the underworld by putting on her crimson robe and holding a burning torch. Purple, Pliny tells us, was employed when gods had to be appeased.

The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the point to a dread underworld ritual, a ritual that shows clearly that the darker side of the Venerable Ones was not far remote from the Erinyes. But Aeschylus, whose whole mind is bent on a doctrine of mercy, naturally emphasizes the brighter side of their functions and worship. Athene herself knows that they are underworld goddesses, that they must have low-lying altars and underground dwellings; only so seated will they ever feel really at home. She remembers even that for their feast they must have the wineless sacrifice that drives them mad; but she bids them leave this madness, and they for their part promise that the earth, their kingdom as vengeful ghosts, shall cease to drink the black blood of citizens. Henceforth they will be content with the white side of their service.

'From this great land, thine is the sacrifice
Of first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children.

Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. Underworld goddesses presided over marriage: in later days, as Plutarch tells us, it was the priestess of Demeter; earlier we can scarcely doubt it was the Semnae. Here they stand in sharp contrast to the Erinyes, who are all black. Who would have bidden an Erinys to a marriage feast? as well bid Eris who, in form (fig. 57) and function as perhaps in name, was but another Erinys, Eris

'The Abominable, who uninvited came
And cast the golden fruit upon the board.'

The Erinyes transformed to Semnae ask Athene what spells they shall chant over the land. She makes answer:

'Whatever charms wait on fair Victory
From earth, from dropping dew and from high heaven,
The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land
Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks
Untouched of time, safety for human seed.'

The chorus accept these functions of health and life, and chant their promised guerdon.

'No wind to wither trees shall blow,
By our grace it shall be so;
Nor that nor shrivelling heat
On budding plants shall beat
With parching drouth
To waste their growth,
Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping;
But teeming, doubled flocks the earth
In her season shall bring forth,
And evermore a wealthy race
Pay reverence for this our grace Of spirits that have the rich earth in their keeping.'

We are reminded that Ploutos himself, the Wealth of the underworld, had, according to Pausanias, a statue in the precinct of the Venerable Goddesses. Moreover it is impossible to hear the words'no wind to wither trees shall blow'without recalling the altar of the Wind-stillers, which stood somewhere on the western slope of the Areopagos. Arrian, speaking of the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, says'they stand at Athens in the Cerameicus where we go up to the citadel, just opposite the Metroon not far from the altar of the Wind-stillers. Whoever has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the altar of the Windstillers which stands on the ground. 'A low-lying altar doubtless, an eschara, for, as has already been shown, the winds were to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped with underworld sacrifices. Hesychius tells us that there was at Corinth a family called the Wind-calmers. The Areopagos was a wind-swept hill. It was thence, according to a form of the legend recorded by Plato, that Boreas caught up Oreithyia.

The Semnae claim as their special grace control over the winds. As goddesses who bring the blessings of marriage and of fertile breezes, they are but good fructifying Keres like the Tritopatores already discussed; the Erinyes are blighting poisonous Keres, who Harpy-like foul the food by which men live.

The Erinyes, in the play of Aeschylus, are transformed into Semnae, into the local goddesses of Athens. Of this there is no shadow of doubt. They accept the citizenship of Pallas, and they are actually hailed as Semnae. Aeschylus it is true never definitely states that they entered the cleft of the Areopagos, but Euripides, manifestly borrowing from him, is as has been seen explicit.

Such a conversion may have been gratifying to the patriotism of an Athenian audience, but Athenian though he is, it is not the glorification of a local cult that inspires Aeschylus; it is the reconciliation of the old order of vengeance with the new law of mercy. It is significant in this connection that Aeschylus, or some one who took his meaning, gave to the play the title, not as we should expect of Semnae, but of Eumenides. The moral of the play is thereby emphasized.

It is, to say the least, curious that a play called traditionally, if not by the author, the 'Eumenides' should contain no single mention of the Eumenides by this name. Harpocration, commenting on the word Eumenides, says 'Aeschylus in the Eumenides, recounting what happened about the trial of Orestes, says that Athene, having mollified the Erinyes so that they did not deal harshly with Orestes, called them Eumenides.' Aeschylus says no such thing. The text of the play contains no mention of the Eumenides, though in the hypothesis prefixed to the text occur the following words:'Having prevailed by the counsel of Athene, he (Orestes) went to Argos, and when he had mollified the Erinyes he addressed them as EumenidesV Harpocration attributes to Athene in the play what the hypothesis notes as done by Orestes in the sequel at Argos. By his use of the word'mollified' (Trpavvaaa) he betrays, I think, the source of his information. It must always be remembered that the Orestes Jegend was native to Argos and at Argos the local cult was of Eumenides not Semnae.

The Eumenides

The worship of divinities bearing the name of Eumenides, though unknown at Athens, was wider-spread than that of the Semnae, which is found nowhere outside Attica. It was possibly for this reason that Aeschylus or later tradition gave this name to the play. The Semnae were familiar figures at Athens, and, spite of many underworld analogies, the shift from Erinyes to Semnae must have been a difficult one. A great deal is borne for the glory of the gods, but there must have been among the audience men conservative and hard-headed who would be likely to maintain that, all said and done, the Erinyes were not, could not be, Semnae. If asked to believe that the Erinyes became Eumenides, they would feel and probably say: that is a matter for Colonos, for Argos, for Sekyon to consider; it affects no Athenian's faith or practice. At Colonos it is certain that goddesses were worshipped who bore the name of Eumenides, goddesses of function and ritual precisely identical with the Semnae, but addressed by a different cult us epithet. We have the express statement of Sophocles, who, as a priest himself and a conservative, was not likely to tamper with ritual titles. He makes Oedipus ask the stranger who they are whose dread name he is to invoke. The answer is explicit:

'Eumenides all-seeing here the folk
Would call them: other names please otherwhere.'

Sophocles no doubt shows the influence of Aeschylus in his other names please otherwhere. He realizes that Eumenides and Semnae are'one form of diverse names.' This truth it was the mission of the reconciling monotheist always to preach, but he would scarcely dare to tamper with the familiar titles of a local cult. In fact by this very statement, that elsewhere the goddesses bore other names, he makes the local appellation certain. He may indeed have brought Oedipus to Colonos rather than to the Areopagos, where he had also a grave, just because the local attributive title of the goddesses at Colonos suited the gentle moral of his play.

Again when Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright, the Chorus lay emphasis on the title Eumenides.

'That, as we call them Kindly, from kind hearts
They may receive the suppliant.'

So strong is the exclusiveness of local cults that, had the title of Eumenides occurred only at Colonos, neither Aeschylus nor tradition would perhaps have ventured to assume it for the Semnae. But from Pausanias we learn of sanctuaries of the Eumenides at Titane near Sekyon, at Cerynaea in Achaia, and in Arcadia near Megalopolis. The sanctuary between Sekyon and Titane consisted of a grove and a temple. Pausanias expressly says these belonged to the goddesses whom the Athenians called Semnae and the Sikyonians Eumenides. The festival in their honour was a yearly one, and has already been discussed. Tradition said that the sanctuary at Cerynaea was founded by Orestes, and that 'if any one stained by blood or any other pollution, or impious, entered the sanctuary wishing to see it, he straightway went out of his wits by the terrors he beheld. The images in it were made of wood ... and they were not large.' The ritual of the sanctuary at Megalopolis, with its black and white sides, addressed severally to the goddesses as Madnesses (Maniae) and Kindly Ones (Eumenides), has already been noted. To the Madnesses Orestes sacrifices, it will be remembered, with underworld rites to avert their wrath; to the Kindly Ones when healed, and after the same fashion as to the gods; the clearest possible instance of two stages of development in ritual and theology side by side.

To these four instances of the cult of the Eumenides a fifth may safely be added, the sanctuary at or near Argos. Of any such sanctuary we have no literary record, but we have what is of even greater value monumental evidence. Three votive reliefs dedicated to the Eumenides have been found at the little church of Hag. Johannes, about half-an-hour to the east of the modern village of Argos.

They are still preserved in the local museum of the Demarchy. The material of all three is the hard local limestone, and they must have been set up in a local sanctuary. The sanctuary of Titane was nearly twenty miles away, too far to admit of any theory of transportation. All three are inscribed, and in each the dedicator is a woman. The relief reproduced in fig. 58 was found built into the outside of the Church of Hag. Johannes. It is clearly inscribed }LvpevLaiv ev^av, a vow or prayer to the Eumenides. The beginning of the inscription is lost, but enough remains to show that a woman dedicated it, and that she was probably an Argive. It is a woman's offering, but she likes to have her husband carved upon it and she lets him walk first. Perhaps he went with her to the sanctuary and offered sacrifice of honey and water and flowers and a ewe great with young.

'The first-fruits offered for accomplishment
Of marriage and for children.'

About the figures of the Eumenides at Argos, as of the Semnae at Athens,'there is nothing frightful.'These are not the short-girt huntress women of the vases, nor yet the loathly black horrors of tragedy; they are gentle, staid, matronly figures, bearing in their left hands, for tokens of fertility, flowers or fruit, and in their right, snakes as the symbols, not of terror and torture, but merely of that source of weahh, the underworld; but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity, they would be Charites. From the inscriptions these reliefs are certainly known to be later than Aeschylus, but because a poet writes a great play at Athens the local stonemason does not alter the type of the votive offerings he supplies.

Why should he frighten pious women and perhaps lose his custom ? The Erinys of tragedy took strong hold of literature, but even at Athens there was a sceptic to whom the great conversion scene was merely absurd. If we may trust Suidas, the comic poet Philemon held to it that'the Semnae were quite other than the Eumenides,' and we may be sure that the humour of the situation attempted would lose nothing in his hands. Great though the influence of Aeschylus over the educated undoubtedly was, it was powerless to alter traditional types in art; equally powerless we may be sure to abate or alter one jot or one tittle of hieratic ceremonial. The Erinyes remained Erinyes, and in popular bogey form went, as has been seen, to people with horrors a Christian hell. Man was not ready yet to worship only the Kindly Ones. For generations, nay centuries, he must bear the hard yoke of attopotrrf before he might offer to gods remade in his own image the free-will offering of a kindly Oepairela.