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 came 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

‘κηρ (neuter, with circumflex accent) the soul, (oxytone, feminine)

death-bringing fate, death,’ gives us suggestive particulars: κῆρας·

ἀκαθαρσίας, μολύσματα, βλάβας, where we see the unclean bacilli;

κηρόν· λεπτὸν νοσηρόν, which reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the

vase-painting (fig. 17); κηριοῦσθαι· ἐκπλήττεσθαι, where the bogey Ker is

manifest; κηριωθῆναι· ὑπὸ σκοτοδινοῦ ληφθῆναι, 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[545]. Most curious and

primitive of all, we are told[546] that κήρυκες itself means not only

messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended from Hermes, but ‘they

call the insects that impregnate the wild fig κήρυκας.’ 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[547], _à 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[548] 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[549] tells us, that the Arcadians and, with

the Arcadians, probably the rest of the primitive Greeks, called ‘being

in a rage’ ἐρινύειν. Demeter at Thelpusa had two surnames and even two

statues. When she was wroth they called her _Erinys_[550] 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 stage 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[551],

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[552]

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[553], 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[554]

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[555], 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[556] 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 (μοῖρα) 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[557] (Δίκης ἐπίκουροι).

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_[558] 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_[559] Aeschylus is fully conscious that

it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract vengeance that haunts and

pursues. Io is stung by the oestrus[560] 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_[561]. ‘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[562] 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. 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_[563]:

‘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[564]

says of the same house, ‘the pollution of Pelops and the avenging ghost

of Myrtilos dogged their steps.’ ‘Fate,’ says Polybius[565], ‘placed

by his (Philip’s) side Erinyes and Poinae and Pointers-to-Vengeance

(προστροπαίους).’ 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[566].’

To cause these ‘onsets,’ these προσβολαί, or, as they are sometimes

called, ἔφοδοι, was, Hippocrates[567] 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[568]:

‘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[569]

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 Acheloüs and dwelt there. There, by the new

and unpolluted land he might be nourished and live. Apollodorus[570]

misses the point: he brings Alcmaeon to Thesprotia and purifies him, but

by the _waters_ of Acheloüs.

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[571] the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the episode

with Sthenoboea, he goes 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 Aleïan 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[572] 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[573]

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 Aleïan or Cilician plain[574]. This

Aleïan plain was, like the mouth of the Acheloüs, _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[575], their answer is not

‘Erinyes’ but

‘Curses our name in haunts below the earth.’

And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives (τιμαί) the

answer is:

‘Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes[576].’

The essence of primitive law resided, as has already (p. 142) 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[577] 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[578], 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[579]

‘O Justice, O 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[580]:

‘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 into set form. The priestess is literally correct when she

says[581]:

‘This race of visitants ne’er have I seen.’

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[582], 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 (p. 187), 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[583]. It is signed by the

potter Amasis (Ἄμασίς μ’ ἐποίησεν), 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

(p. 176, fig. 19), in which the Gorgon sisters of Medusa are inscribed

Harpies (Ἀρεπυια).

[Illustration: FIG. 46.]

[Illustration: FIG. 47.]

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

Würzburg[584] 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[585] (Ἀρε...),

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.

[Illustration: FIG. 48.]

Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be discussed.

The design, from an early black-figured cylix in the Louvre[586], is

reproduced in fig. 48. The centre of interest is clearly 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_[587] 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[588] 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_[589], 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.’

[Illustration: FIG. 49.]

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[590]

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.

[Illustration: FIG. 50.]

The next picture[591] (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.

[Illustration: FIG. 51.]

In the third representation[592] 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.

In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin Museum[593]

(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.

[Illustration: FIG. 52.]

* * * * *

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[594], 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[595] 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 (Chap.

XI.). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. 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 Peirithoös, 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[596].’

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[597]’ 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[598],

‘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’

(δράκαινα) ‘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[599] 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 (p. 326). 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, but 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_[600]

the mad Orestes cries to Pylades,

‘Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes

To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed?’

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[601] Euripides makes the Erinyes ‘maidens with the

forms of snakes,’ where it is straining language, and quite needlessly,

to say that the word δρακοντώδεις 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[602],

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[603].

[Illustration: FIG. 53.]

[Illustration: FIG. 54.]

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[604]. 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 55.]

The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek mind every bogey

was earth-born. In the design in fig. 55[605] 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[606]. 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[607]:

‘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[608]:

‘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[609]. 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 (p. 220), 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.

[Illustration: FIG. 56.]

* * * * *

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_[610]

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[611], 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[612], 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 quâ 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[613]

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[614] 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 (ἐσχάρα)

characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). 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 (σεμναὶ θεαί) 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, not as the Venerable Ones,

but as the Venerable Goddesses[615] (αἱ σεμναὶ θεαί). 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[616]; 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,’ τὼ θεώ, 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’ (p. 257). 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[617] does indeed make Orestes call the Erinyes ‘dread

goddesses,’ but Aeschylus[618] is explicit: ‘their adornment (κόσμος)

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[619] states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) that the

sanctuary of the Semnae 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 demes 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 (p. 125), the proper

haunts of underworld beings; they are also usually, though not uniformly,

primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus images Pausanias[620] speaks

as follows. After describing the Areopagos and the two unwrought stones

called ‘Transgression’ (ὕβρις) and ‘Pitilessness’ (ἀναιδεία) on which

accused and accuser stood, he says ‘And near is a sanctuary (ἱερόν)

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

his 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[621].

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[622] wrote the images were unquestionably three. The

origin and significance of the female trinities will be considered later

(p. 286). 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_[623] 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 (p. 286)

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’ (θαυμαστὸς

λόχος) 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[624] 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[625], 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[626], 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 _Thesmophoriazusae_[627], 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[628] is our solitary authority for the fact that the sanctuary

was also oracular. At the close of the _Electra_ 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[629], in explaining

the term ‘second-fated’ (δευτερόποτμος), 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[630] we know that

σφάγια, 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 (p. 63). In careful writers, as has been seen, it is

never interchangeable with ἱερεῖα, victims sacrificed and eaten.

The scholiast on Sophocles[631] 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 σφάγια formed part of the regular sacrifice mentioned by Pausanias

as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted; σφάγια belong, as has already

been shown, to the class of expiatory offerings. It was on σφάγια, which

were also called τόμια, that oaths were taken (p. 64) in the law courts,

oaths the extraordinary solemnity of which Demosthenes[632] 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 τόμια had to be taken were

the Semnae, 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[633] 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[634] 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[635]

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 _Eumenides_ 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 Patrôos was the fitter

divinity. The family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation,

ancestral rites significantly called πάτρια, paternal. These rites as

described by Dorotheos have been already discussed (p. 60).

The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae is also

recorded; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius[636] 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 (p. 246 note). 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 (p. 340) 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[637] 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[638] 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 λῄτειραι, and it is no

doubt from this source that Hesychius[639] 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[640]. 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[641].’

It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were members of

the clan of Hesychids.

Aeschylus[642] 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[643], ‘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_[644] ‘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[645]

‘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[646] of the rites of placation performed annually for

those who fell in the battle of Plataea. ‘On the 16th day of the month

Maimakterion 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[647], hence it is ordained for the

service of the dead. It has already been noted (p. 144) that Dion[648]

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[649] tells us, was employed when gods had to

be appeased.

The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the σφάγια,

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[650]

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[651]; 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[652].

‘From this great land, thine is the sacrifice

Of first-fruits offered for accomplishment

Of marriage and for children[653].’

[Illustration: FIG. 57.]

Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. Underworld

goddesses presided over marriage: in later days, as Plutarch[654] 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[655]:

‘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[656].

‘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[657], 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 (Εὐδάνεμοι), which stood somewhere on the western slope

of the Areopagos. Arrian[658], 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 Metrôon not far from the altar of

the Wind-stillers. Whoever has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the

altar of the Wind-stillers which stands on the ground.’ A low-lying altar

doubtless, an eschara, for, as has already been shown (p. 65), the winds

were to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped with

underworld sacrifices. Hesychius[659] 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[660],

that Boreas caught up Oreithyia.

The Semnae claim as their special ‘grace[661]’ 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 (p. 179); 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[662], and they are actually hailed as

Semnae[663]. 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[664], 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 Eumenides[665].’ 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’ (πραΰνασα) he betrays, I

think, the source of his information. It must always be remembered that

the Orestes legend 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[666], 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 cultus epithet. We have the express statement

of Sophocles[667], 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[668].’ 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[669].’

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[670] near Sekyon,

at Cerynaea[671] in Achaia, and in Arcadia near Megalopolis[672]. 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 (p. 56).

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[673]

... 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

(p. 56). 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, of ἀποτροπή side by

side with θεραπεία.

[Illustration: FIG. 58.]

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[674]. 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

Εὐμενίσιν εὐχάν, a vow or prayer to the Eumenides. The beginning of the

inscription is lost, but enough remains, ...η Α...εία, 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[675].

‘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[676] as the

symbols, not of terror and torture, but merely of that source of wealth,

the underworld; but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity,

they would be Charites (p. 297). 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[677], 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 (p. 232), 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 ἀποτροπή before he might offer to gods remade in his own image the

free-will offering of a kindly θεραπεία.