Chapter V (2)

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[505]. 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. Four-footed 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[506].

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[507].’

THE KER AS SIREN[508].

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[509]:

‘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[510]:

‘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[511]:

‘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 noon-tide 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 mermaid, the bird element survives in mediaeval times[512]. 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[513] 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[514].’ 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[515] 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[516] 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[517] 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[518] 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[519] 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[520] (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 Ἱμε(ρ)οπα ‘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 (Chap. XII.). 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[521]. 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[522]. 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 hetaira 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 (p. 177). The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum[523] (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 προβασκάνιον, a soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter-charm. 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[524] wrote for her girl-friend 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[525] 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[526] 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[527] 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[528] 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[529].’

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[530].’

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[531]. 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[532] 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 oinochoë. 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 (Chap. XII.); 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[533] 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 και τρι, 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[534].

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[535] 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[536] 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[537], 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[538] 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 oinochoë in the Berlin Museum[539], 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[540]. 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[541] 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[542]. 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[543] in the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at Florence. The Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound (χῶμα γῆς) of the regular sepulchral type. That the mound is sepulchral is certain from the artificial stone basis pierced with holes[544] 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 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).

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.