Erinyes

The Erinyes are born of a crime against the father, and that origin is their whole office. Hesiod's Theogony (lines 176 to 187) tells how Cronus, armed with the sickle his mother Gaia gave him, castrated Uranus and cast what he cut into the sea; the drops of blood, however, fell on the earth, and Gaia, made fertile by them, bore the Erinyes, the Giants and the Meliae nymphs. They are, literally, daughters of a filial mutilation, and what they pursue for the rest of time is exactly that: blood shed within one's own house.

Aeschylus gives another genealogy. In the Eumenides they call themselves daughters of Night, with no father, a version that stresses their antiquity and their independence from the Olympians rather than their kinship. The two traditions lived side by side without anyone bothering to reconcile them, because the Greeks cared less whose daughters they were than what they were capable of.

And one piece of evidence places them long before any of that. On the Linear B tablets from Knossos, of the fourteenth century BC, the name e-ri-nu appears among the recipients of offerings. If the reading is right, and there is broad agreement that it is, the Erinyes are among the very few Greek divinities already attested in the Bronze Age, centuries before Homer named them.

What the Erinyes punish is not crime in general but a short and very precise list. First of all, blood shed among kin, and above all matricide, which no human court could try because no accuser was left: victim and accuser belonged to the same house. Then perjury, of which the Iliad makes them the guarantors when it calls them those who beneath the earth punish men that swear falsely (book nineteen). And lastly offence against parents and against the suppliant or the guest, the other relationships that Greek custom left without legal protection.

There is a limit the tragedy underlines and that is almost never told: outside common blood they have no jurisdiction. In the Eumenides they themselves explain that they did not pursue Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, because husband and wife share no blood; they do pursue Orestes for killing her, who was his mother. It is an archaic and strictly familial justice, not a moral tribunal.

And they do not kill. The Erinyes harry: they follow the guilty like tracking hounds, sleepless and untiring, until the mind gives way. Aeschylus describes them scenting the smell of blood; Euripides makes them visible to their prey alone. Their punishment is madness, exile and the impossibility of being received in any house, because whoever has them at his back pollutes what he touches. They hear from below, with no ritual and no priest: it is enough for an offended father or mother to speak the curse for them to set out.

Aeschylus' Oresteia, staged in 458 BC, is where the Erinyes stop being a background threat and become characters with a voice. Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon, obeying an express command of Apollo, and they pursue him all the same: a god's order does not cancel blood. In the third play, the one that bears their name, Apollo drives them from the sanctuary of Delphi with contempt and they accuse him of harbouring a murderer, while Clytemnestra's ghost wakes them, reproaching them for sleeping.

The solution does not come by divine decree. Athena refuses to judge the case alone and founds a court of Athenian citizens on the hill of Ares, the Areopagus. The votes are tied, Athena adds hers in favour of the accused and Orestes is acquitted. The Erinyes then threaten to make Attica barren, and what stops them is not force but persuasion: Athena offers them a sanctuary of their own beneath the Acropolis, perpetual honours and first place in the offerings.

The play ends in a torchlit procession in which they are clothed in crimson robes and called, at last, the Kindly Ones. It is the myth with which Athens explained to itself the passage from blood vengeance, which never ends because every death creates a new avenger, to the public court, which cuts it short. And the detail that makes the ending great is that the old powers are neither defeated nor banished: they are persuaded, given cult and taken into the new order.

The cult was real and stood in several places at once. In Athens the Semnai Theai, the August Goddesses, had a precinct on the slope of the Areopagus which also served as asylum for the pursued, with its priestesses and its wineless offerings. At Colonus, the deme where Sophocles was born, there was a sacred grove of the Eumenides which the blind Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus reaches in order to die there, and the first thing the chorus does is warn him not to speak their name. Pausanias (book eight) describes at Megalopolis a double sanctuary where they were called Maniae, the Madnesses, and points out the exact spot where Orestes is said to have lost his reason.

The euphemism is not a literary ornament. Naming them was dangerous, and that is why the name by which they have reached everyday speech, Eumenides, means the very opposite of what they are. The same prudence explains their other titles: August, Revered, Unnameable.

It is worth dating what was added later, because today it is usually told as though it were archaic. That they are exactly three and are called Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone is not in Hesiod, who does not count them: those names are fixed in Virgil's Aeneid and in Apollodorus' Library, already in Roman times. Rome called them Furiae or Dirae, and under that name they passed into painting, theatre and opera, where they ended up shown almost always as three young women with snakes in their hair and lighted torches. The image is beautiful and it is late; the original Greek terror was vaguer, and that is why it frightened more.