About the birth of the Erinyes, read the file about the goddess Aphrodite. They appear regularly in literature from Homer down as terrible, but just, avengers of crime and executors of curses invoked by one wronged on those who have wronged him, but most especially on those who have violated the ties of kinship. Thus above all they hear the prayer of a father or mother wronged by a son. The most famous example of their activity is their pursuit of Orestes after the killing of Klytaimestra, and on that basis Aeschylus has built one of his greatest plays, the Eumenides. They know no pity, they understand no mitigating circumstances; the deed, and the deed only, interests them. They thus embody an earlier idea of justice, before mankind, with growing enlightenment, began to see that animus was a necessary part of every crime, and that a deed which was done through mere accident or as the result of force majeure did not carry with it the full moral or legal responsibility of a deliberate act.
They punish, not families or clans, but individuals; yet they may be said to represent the moral ideas of the clan, for they are regularly on the side of elders—not only of father or mother, but of elder brothers as well. The sins which they avenge are those for which, originally, human law provided no redress, for if clansman has wronged clansman, the usual remedy of the blood-feud is obviously not applicable; how can the clan avenge itself upon itself? The wrong-doer is polluted and dangerous, and so is either driven out or else made to die of himself (e.g., by shutting him up to starve). In either case it is the Erinyes who punish him, in this world or the next; man does not, for there is no man in a position to do so.
Thus the Erinyes embody a just, although rude and undeveloped, idea of law and punishment. It is not surprising that we find them, as early as Homer, intervening to stop an unnatural prodigy, and Herakleitos is less obscure than usual when he says that if the sun went off his course the Erinyes would bring him back.
In art and in literature, they are regularly represented as formidable beings, stern of aspect, carrying torches and scourges, and generally wreathed with serpents, or having serpents in their hair or carried in their hands. Much of the most terrifying part of their shape is due to the vivid description of Aeschylus, in the Eumenides, but it is noteworthy that no artist makes the Erinyes ugly or misshapen; they are rather beautiful, but fierce-looking women, known for what they are by their expression and the scourges or other implements which they carry, and in general as unlike Etruscan or medieval devils as possible. Latin has no equivalent for them, the name Furiae being a mere attempt at translation (from furere, ‘to be raging mad’), although once or twice confusion arises in Latin between these Furiae imported from the Greek and the very obscure native Latin goddess Furrina.
The Erinyes appear in a number of legends, and also are a regular piece of epic machinery. The most characteristic tale is perhaps that of Orestes. Agamemnon having been murdered by his wife Klytaimestra and her lover Aigisthos, it naturally devolved upon his only son, Orestes, to take up the blood-feud. This, when he came to man’s estate, he accordingly did, and, by force or fraud, killed Aigisthos. Being, moreover, the senior surviving male of the household, he naturally executed judgment upon his erring ward—who happened to be his mother also. His action was perfectly right and proper, although doubtless painful to him, and his reputation was much increased thereby. Such was the judgment of the non-introspective, patriarchal Achaians who told the story in later days, as interpreted for us by Homer, who, to put the matter beyond all doubt, makes gods and not only men praise the dutiful and pious son. Such, also, is the verdict of Sophokles, who with an insight rare in Greek poets (or any other) admirably recaptures the tone of the Homeric story in his Elektra.
That the Erinyes should take up Klytaimestra’s cause never enters Homer’s head for a moment, although he is perfectly well acquainted with them and their functions. But in the non-Homeric tradition another view was taken of it, at first sight more humanitarian than that of Homer, but really simply less enlightened, for, like the Erinyes themselves, it takes no account of Orestes’ motive. The rule is absolute; a clansman must not shed the blood of a clansman, or of a clanswoman, and still less must anyone slay a member of his own immediate family circle. Orestes had undoubtedly killed his mother, and the fact that he did so as a righteous executioner (for no one else was competent to act, seeing that a married woman normally passed into the guardianship of her husband’s clan) and by the explicit orders of Apollo, counted for nothing. Therefore the Erinyes relentlessly pursued him.
Aeschylus tells inimitably the tale of his subsequent adventures. He took refuge at the shrine of his divine monitor, at Delphoi. Thence he was bidden to go to Athens, to be tried by Athena’s own court, the Areiopagos. Apollo himself appeared as his advocate; the Erinyes pled their own cause with terrible eloquence; the court was equally divided, and Athena as president gave the deciding vote in favour of Orestes, thus forever establishing the precedent that if the votes were equal, a verdict of acquittal should be registered. The Erinyes themselves were appeased by Athena, and henceforth were worshipped in Athens, at the foot of the Akropolis, under the new name of Eumenides, ‘the Kindly Goddesses.’
There, for Aeschylus, the story ends, but others had different versions, with the common idea that Orestes got rid of his persecutors, not by any form of trial or by divine defence, but by some kind of expiation. The most famous story is that told by Euripides, in the Iphigeneia in Tauris. Orestes was told to go to the country of the Tauroi (in the Crimea) to get an ancient image of Artemis, which the barbarous natives worshipped with unholy rites of human sacrifice. This he brought to Halai in Attica (one of half-a-dozen places which in after-times claimed to possess it) and henceforth it was worshipped as Artemis Tauropolos, and in the ritual there a pretence was made of cutting a man’s throat, the supposed victim being really let go after one or two drops of blood had been drawn. In Euripides, this all happens after Orestes’ acquittal, a very lame combination of the two stories.
Pausanias shows us a coarser variant. Orestes did not get rid of the Erinyes by an act of piety towards any deity, but gave them the blood they sought by biting off one of his own fingers; when he did this, the goddesses, who had appeared black, suddenly turned to white, and he was free. So, at least, we may interpret the story, complicated as it is by the rationalistic assumption, found also, where we might expect to find it, in Euripides, that Orestes was simply mad with remorse. Shrines near Megalopolis in Arkadia marked the spot where the expiation had taken place, and the Eumenides were there sacrificed to along with the Charites. Finally, there are numerous references to Orestes having been purified by Apollo from his blood-guilt, in the usual manner, that is, by pouring over him the blood of a pig.
The Erinyes frequently appear in company with other, collective goddesses; the Harpies, for example, (to whom they carried off the daughters of Pandareos to be their attendants), and Aeschylus was only one of many who identified them with the Eumenides and other powers of fertility, such as the Charites. Their dwelling is in Tartaros, where they punish the guilty, besides their pursuit of such offenders as Orestes and Alkmaion in this world. If we are right in accepting the view that they are a sort of embodied curse, the last functions are the primary ones. But the connexion with the Eumenides, Charites, and so forth is easily explained. Any underworld power was apt to be connected with fertility in Greek thought, because it is out of the ground that the crops and pasturage grow. Conversely, any fertility-power is apt to be assimilated to those grimmer spirits who dwell underground because they are ghosts, or because they belong to the world of ghosts, as rulers, guardians, executioners, or what-not. Finally, the ghostly associations of the Erinyes, and the close relations existing, in Greek as in other languages, between the ideas of ghost, spirit, breath, wind, and air are enough to connect them with beings such as the Harpies, whom we have good reason to consider wind-daimones of some kind.