The Erinyes

Where the Erinyes come from

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives the Erinyes a birth that suits their work. Cronus wounds his father Uranus with a sickle that Gaia, the Earth, has made. Drops of blood fall on the earth. Gaia receives them and later gives birth to the powerful Erinyes, the Giants and the Melian nymphs.

So the Erinyes begin with violence between parent and child. Their task is narrower than punishment in general. In the stories that survive, they are called when blood shed within a family, a broken oath or a curse needs an answer that ordinary force cannot give. They do not judge every wrong.

In the Iliad, the epic poem of Homer, a mother named Althaea beats the ground. She calls on Hades and Persephone, the gods of the underworld, to kill her own son Meleager. An Erinys hears the mother’s curse from Erebus, the darkness below the earth. The goddess does not create the anger or decide whether it is fair. She carries the spoken demand into the world of the gods.

The hunters reach Athena’s image

The best-known story of the Erinyes comes from the Eumenides, a play by Aeschylus. Orestes has killed his mother, Clytaemnestra. He has crossed land and sea, and now he clings to an ancient statue of the goddess Athena in Athens. The Erinyes follow the scent of his mother’s blood. The god Apollo ordered the killing, but the goddesses speak for the murdered parent.

That conflict sets up the trial. Orestes cannot obey both claims. The death of his father demands revenge, but taking it against his mother creates another murder in the family. Apollo can purify Orestes and defend him. He cannot order the Erinyes to forget the blood they follow.

Their case is older than the court that will hear it. They insist that a child owes a mother a bond that no oracle, no word from a god, can cancel. Orestes defends himself with Apollo’s order and with revenge for his father, Agamemnon. Nobody disputes the killing. The question is whether one duty can free him from the other.

What happens at the Areopagus

Athena will not settle the case by her own command. She chooses jurors from Athens and sets up a court for bloodshed on the Hill of Ares, the Areopagus. Apollo speaks for Orestes, and the Erinyes act as prosecutors. Their hunt has become an argument that other people must weigh.

The votes split equally. Athena has already declared that a tied vote will acquit, so Orestes goes free. The verdict defeats the Erinyes, but it does not prove them wrong that Clytaemnestra’s blood needed an answer.

They turn their anger on Attica, the land around Athens. If their ancient office can be set aside, they threaten to pour poison into the earth and destroy the land’s fertility. The danger now reaches beyond one family. Athens must decide what place an older kind of justice will have inside its new court.

Why Athens honours the defeated goddesses

Athena does not drive the Erinyes away. She gives them a permanent home in Athens, honours from its people and a share in the wealth of the land. The goddesses accept. They answer her blessing with blessings of their own and join a procession by torchlight to their home beneath the city.

The title Eumenides means the Kindly Ones. Pausanias, an ancient writer who described the places of Greece, records another Athenian title: Semnai Theai, the August Goddesses. Neither name removes what the Erinyes can do. Aeschylus ends by giving their dangerous power a place in the city’s worship, and he does not pretend the verdict has abolished it.

Pausanias later saw their sanctuary, a sacred precinct, beside the Areopagus. He notes that Aeschylus was the first to show them with snakes in their hair, but that their statues there had nothing frightening about them. The site keeps the settlement reached in the play: the goddesses of blood vengeance stay beside the court that once ruled against them.