The Erinnyes

The Erinyes (Erinnyes), known to the Romans as the Furies or Dirae, were goddesses of vengeance who pursued anyone guilty of shedding family blood or breaking a solemn oath. They were usually three in number, and in Attica they were honoured under gentler names, the Semnai Theai (Venerable Goddesses) at Athens and the Eumenides (Kindly Ones) at Colonus.

The Birth of the Erinyes

In Hesiod’s Theogony (180–187), the Titan Cronus cut off the genitals of his father Uranus and threw them behind him. The bloody drops fell on Gaea, and as the seasons turned she bore the strong Erinyes, the great Giants in shining armour, and the Meliae, the nymphs of the ash trees. The severed flesh fell into the sea, and from its foam Aphrodite arose (Theogony 188–206). The Erinyes are therefore children of Gaea, born from the blood of Uranus.

Aeschylus gives a different account. In the Eumenides (lines 321–322 and 416) the Erinyes call themselves the eternal children of Night, “called Curses in our homes beneath the earth”. This is the version of the tragedy.

Erinyes’ Role

Hesiod does not give the Erinyes a number. Later writers made them three and named them: Apollodorus (Library 1.1.4), telling the same story of the blood of Uranus, calls them Alecto (the unceasing), Tisiphone (the avenger of murder) and Megaera (the grudging). Virgil shows Tisiphone in the underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid (555–572), seated sleepless at the gate of Tartarus in a blood-stained robe, scourging the guilty and calling her sisters to the work. In the last book of the Aeneid (12.845–852) Virgil calls them Dirae, twin plagues born at one birth to Night together with Megaera, winged and serpent-girt, who wait at the throne of Jupiter to carry his terror to men. In Statius’ Thebaid (1.46–130) the blinded Oedipus calls on Tisiphone, who had nursed him from birth, to set his sons against each other, and she rises from Cocytus to begin the war of the Seven.

Their duty was to punish crimes that no human court could easily reach, above all the killing of a parent or other relative and the breaking of oaths. In the Iliad (19.259–260), Agamemnon calls on Zeus, Earth, the Sun and “the Erinyes, who under the earth punish whoever has sworn a false oath.” They also hear a parent’s curse: when Meleager’s mother Althaea beat the earth and called on Hades and Persephone to destroy her son, an Erinys heard her from Erebus (Iliad 9.565–572).

The Erinyes in the Oresteia

The best-known story about the Erinyes is told in Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia. Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon when he returns from Troy, claiming vengeance for their daughter Iphigenia, whom he had sacrificed at Aulis (Agamemnon 1412–1420). His son Orestes, commanded by Apollo’s oracle (Libation Bearers 269–296), kills his mother in revenge. The Erinyes, whose duty is to avenge blood shed within the family, begin to pursue him.

In the Eumenides, the Pythian priestess at Delphi finds them asleep around Orestes. She describes them as black and repulsive, with dripping eyes, and compares them to the Gorgons (lines 46–59). Apollo helps Orestes to escape, and he goes to Athens, where he clasps the statue of Athena. Athena sets up the first court for murder trials, with citizens as jurors, and the Erinyes appear as accusers. Apollo argues for Orestes, claiming that the mother is not the true parent but only the nurse of the child (line 657), while the Erinyes insist that the blood of a mother demands vengeance.

The jurors vote and the result is a tie. Athena then declares that her own vote will go to Orestes, and so the law is that an equal vote acquits (line 741). Orestes is freed. The enraged Erinyes threaten to poison the land of Athens, but Athena does not answer with force. She persuades them with offers of a home and a share of honour, promising that they will have a sanctuary under the Hill of Ares and be worshipped in the city, with a part in blessing marriage and childbirth. They accept, and are escorted to their new home as the Semnai Theai, the Venerable Goddesses (line 1041); the title of the play remembers them as the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and they become guardians of Athens’ prosperity.

Cult

Pausanias (1.28.6) describes a sanctuary beside the Areopagus in Athens of the goddesses whom the Athenians call the Semnai (the August or Venerable Goddesses) and Hesiod calls the Erinyes; he adds that Aeschylus was the first to represent them with snakes in their hair, and that their images there had nothing terrible about them. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (39–43) a man of Colonus tells Oedipus that he is sitting in the untrodden grove of the dread goddesses, the daughters of Earth and Darkness, whom the people there call the all-seeing Eumenides.

See Also: Uranus, Cronus, Aphrodite, Gaea, Eumenides, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Athena