have characterised a legend which evolved through ages of legal and religious transitions. When once it had become stereotyped in the story, Aeschylus could not, even if he would, have thought it away. Verrall therefore is right in saying[78] ‘That a legend gave the main fact, the prosecution of Orestes by the Erinnyes before a tribunal at Athens and his acquittal there, might safely be inferred from the play and is beyond doubt.’ And Müller says[79]: ‘The transmutation of the Erinnyes into Eumenides formed in Greece an essential appurtenance to the legend of Orestes. The persecution of Orestes from country to country by his mother’s Erinnyes, in the place of human vengeance, was no invention of poet or priest but Greek national tradition.’ The ‘tragic’ Erinnyes, whom we have already encountered in the _Choephoroe_,[80] find in the _Eumenides_ their real battle-ground. In this drama they have received from the hands of Aeschylus an immortality which no mere legend or even religious ritual could ever have bestowed. In the dramatisation of those Titanic shapes the genius of Aeschylus found congenial work: but what, if any, elements of the final product were ‘invented’ by him is a matter of dispute. Miss Harrison thinks that the Erinnyes, _qua_ Erinnyes, had no special cult in Greece. This view implies that religion, or image-magic, had not created these monstrous forms. Müller,[81] however, thinks that in a chasm near the temple of the Semnai Theai beside the Areopagus there were, in all probability, carved wooden images of the Erinnyes. But these images, he holds, did not influence the Aeschylean picture. ‘In the outward and visible form of the Erinnyes,’ he says, ‘Aeschylus seems to have drawn a good deal on his invention, for the earlier poets had no definite image of the goddesses before their eyes: and though there were in the Temple at Athens old carved wooden images of the Semnai, still their figures could not be adapted for dramatic purposes. Hence it is that the Pythian priestess after having beheld the Erinnyes is only able to describe their forms without being apprised thereby of the nature of the beings she had seen.’ Pausanias[82] says that it was an innovation on the part of Aeschylus to have represented the Furies ‘with snakes in their hair.’ Müller holds that this was not an innovation, but that it was borrowed from the images of Gorgons.[83] The Furies are compared to Gorgons in the _Choephoroe_.[84] We have elsewhere maintained[85] that it was from the Gorgon images which, in the _Ion_ of Euripides,[86] are depicted as sitting around the Omphalos at Delphi, that Aeschylus got his idea of the ‘tragic’ Erinnyes. But in the _Eumenides_ the Pythian priestess definitely states that though similar to the Gorgons they are not identical with them. If they had been identical she would no doubt have recognised them: moreover, they are not Harpies, she says, because they have no wings.