The Eumenides ends with a court case and a negotiation, and it is the strangest and most consequential piece of political theatre to survive from antiquity.
Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon. The Erinyes hunt him — Aeschylus put them on stage as a chorus, and the ancient tradition, probably exaggerated, says the audience was so frightened that women miscarried. Apollo purifies him and it does not stop them: purification cleans the pollution, but the debt for spilled kindred blood is theirs and they do not accept substitutions.
Athena refuses to judge the case herself and empanels a jury of Athenian citizens on the Areopagus. The votes are equal; she casts for acquittal. And then, instead of the play ending, the Erinyes — enraged, threatening to blight the soil of Attica — are talked round. Athena offers them a permanent home beneath the Areopagus, honours at every household's births and marriages, and the first offerings from the city, and they accept. They change their name, and their robes, and become the Semnai Theai, the August Goddesses, and process off stage in a torchlit escort.
A society's transition from blood vengeance to jury trial is staged in the actual location where its homicide court sat, in front of the citizens who served on it. Nothing else in Greek drama is doing quite that.
Older than the Olympians
They are among the oldest powers in the mythology and their origins are disputed within it. Hesiod's Theogony has the earth conceive them where the sky-god's blood struck it after the sickle — the same instant that produced the Giants — which makes them a product of the first crime against a parent and therefore the natural avengers of every subsequent one. Aeschylus makes them daughters of Nyx, which puts them with Death, Sleep and the Moirai as inescapable powers. Other sources give them Earth and Darkness, or Hades and Persephone. There is no reconciling these and no need to.
They appear in Linear B, or something does: e-ri-nu on tablets from Knossos, most likely a divine name. That would make them Bronze Age, older than any text we have about them.
What exactly they punish
Not crime in general. Their remit is specific and archaic:
- Kin-murder, above all matricide and parricide — blood that no outside avenger will pursue, because the family that should prosecute is the family that committed it.
- Perjury and broken oaths; the Iliad has Agamemnon invoke those "who beneath the earth punish men who swear falsely".
- Offences against suppliants, guests, beggars and the old — the unprotected.
- Curses uttered by a wronged parent, which they execute. Homer has Meleager's mother and Phoenix's father both curse their sons and be heard.
They also, in one of the strangest passages in Homer, stop Achilles' horse Xanthos from speaking after it prophesies its master's death: a violation of the natural order, corrected.
They are not the Furies of the Renaissance
Aeschylus describes them as black-robed, snake-haired, with blood dripping from their eyes, snorting, and repulsive enough that the Pythia crawls out of her own temple after seeing them. Earlier art shows them as winged women, sometimes with snakes in their hands or hair, running.
Roman literature made them theatrical. Virgil's Allecto in Aeneid 7 is a genuine monster, sent by Juno to break the peace in Italy, hurling a torch into Turnus' chest. Seneca's tragedies are full of them; Dante puts the three on the walls of the city of Dis, tearing their own breasts. From there they reach Renaissance and Baroque art as the standard image of madness-inducing vengeance. The names Alecto ("unceasing"), Tisiphone ("avenger of murder") and Megaera ("grudging") are not in Aeschylus, who does not number them at all — the fixing at three with those names is Hellenistic and later. Megaera is the origin of the English word megrim by one route and of Italian and French words for a shrewish woman by another.
Do not say their name
They are the classic case of a euphemistic cult title. Greeks routinely called them the Eumenides ("kindly ones") or Semnai Theai ("revered goddesses") rather than the Erinyes, on the reasonable principle that you do not attract the attention of powers like these by naming them accurately. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus is set in their grove at Colonus, where offerings of water and honey — never wine — were made and the worshipper approached in silence, and where Oedipus finds the place he is fated to die.
They had real precincts at Athens beneath the Areopagus, at Colonus, at Sicyon, at Megalopolis in Arcadia, where Pausanias reports a shrine with statues of them in black and, nearby, others in white. The distinction is exactly Aeschylus' point made in stone: the same goddesses in their punishing and their reconciled aspects.
Freud, Sartre, and the modern conscience
Because their punishment is internal — they drive a person mad rather than kill him — they translate very easily into psychological terms, and modern reception has taken that road almost exclusively. Sartre's Les Mouches (1943) turns them into flies swarming a guilt-ridden Argos under occupation, a play written and staged in occupied Paris and unmistakably about collaboration. Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra moves the trilogy to New England after the American Civil War. T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion has the Furies appear in a country house drawing room, visible only to the protagonist.
Their name survives in ordinary English mainly as "the furies" for uncontrollable anger, and in erinyes almost not at all. What survives better is the idea Aeschylus staged: that the alternative to courts is a feud that never ends, and that the old avengers have to be given a seat rather than abolished — Athena wins the argument not by defeating them but by paying them.
Whom they chase, whom they resemble, and what they were given
Why do they pursue Orestes but not Clytemnestra's own killers?
That is the argument the play makes explicit. The Erinyes state their jurisdiction: they pursue the shedding of kindred blood, and Clytemnestra killed a husband, who is not her blood relative. Apollo attacks the distinction as absurd, since marriage is sacred; the Erinyes hold their ground. The trial is decided on Apollo's further claim — that the mother is not truly the parent, only the nurse of the seed — which Athena, motherless herself, accepts. Modern readers generally find the winning argument the weakest part of the trilogy, and they are right to.
Are they the same as the Keres?
No, though both are daughters of Night in Hesiod and both are grim female powers. The Keres are violent deaths, spirits that swoop onto a battlefield and drag off the dying, described in the shield description in Hesiod's Shield with bloody claws and black robes. They kill; the Erinyes punish. In practice later authors blur them, and the Athenian festival of the Anthesteria involved rites for wandering spirits sometimes described in either set of terms.
Do they appear in the underworld?
Yes, as executors of punishment. Virgil's Tartarus has Tisiphone on guard at the iron tower with her whip, and the Aeneid makes the underworld's penal arrangements an Erinys' responsibility. Greek sources are vaguer about where they live — Aeschylus has them come from below, and their Athenian shrine is a cleft in the rock, which is consistent with a chthonic residence without being a systematic geography.
What offerings did they get?
Wineless libations of water, milk and honey; black sheep; and, at Colonus, freshly cut branches and woollen fleeces, with the worshipper facing east and departing without looking back. Sophocles has the whole procedure described on stage in detail. Wineless offerings are a marker of very old chthonic cult and are shared with a small group of powers including the Nymphs and the Semnai — another sign of how archaic these goddesses were felt to be.