Furies. In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Erinyes, also known as the Furies, were female chthonic deities of vengeance, sometimes referred to as infernal goddesses.
A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as the Erinyes, that under earth take vengeance on men, whosoever hath sworn a false oath. Walter Burkert suggests they are an embodiment of the act of self-cursing contained in the oath.
They correspond to the Dirae in Roman mythology. The Roman writer Maurus Servius Honoratus wrote that they are called Eumenides in hell, Furiae on earth, and Dirae in heaven.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth, while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level, from Nyx, or from a union between air and mother earth.
Their number is usually left indeterminate. Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three: Alecto or Alekto, Megaera, and Tisiphone or Tilphousia, all of whom appear in the Aeneid. Dante Alighieri followed Virgil in depicting the same three-character triptych of Erinyes; in Canto IX of the Inferno they confront the poets at the gates of the city of Dis. Whilst the Erinyes were usually described as three maiden goddess
A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as the Erinyes, that under earth take vengeance on men, whosoever hath sworn a false oath. Walter Burkert suggests they are an embodiment of the act of self-cursing contained in the oath.
They correspond to the Dirae in Roman mythology. The Roman writer Maurus Servius Honoratus wrote that they are called Eumenides in hell, Furiae on earth, and Dirae in heaven.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth, while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level, from Nyx, or from a union between air and mother earth.
Their number is usually left indeterminate. Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three: Alecto or Alekto, Megaera, and Tisiphone or Tilphousia, all of whom appear in the Aeneid. Dante Alighieri followed Virgil in depicting the same three-character triptych of Erinyes; in Canto IX of the Inferno they confront the poets at the gates of the city of Dis. Whilst the Erinyes were usually described as three maiden goddess
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