Two things with respect to Homer’s usage must be borne in mind. First, his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far more abstract and literary than the usage we have already noted. It is impossible to say that Homer has in his mind anything of the nature of a tiny winged bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost always defined and limited by the genitive θανάτοιο, and this looks as though, behind the expression, there lay the half-conscious knowledge that there were Keres of other things than death. Ker itself is _not_ death, but the two have become well-nigh inseparable. Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems to survive in the expression two-fold Keres (διχθάδιαι Κῆρες). Achilles[450] says: ‘My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on To the term of death.’ It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but there is strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The English language has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for Ker, because it has no word weighted with the like associations. In one passage only in the Iliad[451], i.e. the description of the shield of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the battlefield: ‘And in the thick of battle there was Strife And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker. She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound, Another still unwounded, and one dead She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red Her raiment on her shoulders with men’s blood.’ A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the feeling is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case not a fate but a horrible she-demon of slaughter. THE KER AS HARPY AND WIND-DEMON. In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they have another function, they actually _carry off_ the souls to Hades. Odysseus says[452]: ‘Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off To Hades’ house.’ It is impossible here to translate Keres by ‘fates,’ the word is too abstract: the Keres are πρόσπολοι, angels, messengers, death-demons, souls that carry off souls. [Illustration: FIG. 19.]