‘Night bore The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.’ Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the Fates, Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they ‘To mortals at their birth Give good and evil both.’ Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both because it gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the Erinyes, and also because with a reminiscence of earlier thought it makes them the source of good and of evil. It is probably this last idea that is at the back of the curious Hesiodic epithet Κηριτρεφής, which occurs in the _Works and Days_[477]: ‘Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day For a brief space over the heads of men Ker-nourished.’ ‘Men nourished for death’ assuredly is not the meaning; the idea seems to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that nourishes him, keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which his life depends. The epithet might come to signify something like _mortal_, subject to, depending on fate. If this be the meaning it looks back to an early stage of things when the Ker had not been specialized down to death and was not wholly ‘black,’ when it was more a man’s luck than his fate, a sort of embryo Genius. Κηριτρεφής, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of Κηρίφατος ‘slain by Keres,’ which Hesychius[478] explains as those who died of disease; and would look back to a primitive doubleness of functions when the Keres were demons of all work. In vague and fitful fashion they begin where the Semnae magnificently end, as Moirae with control over all human weal and woe. ‘These for their guerdon hold dominion O’er all things mortal[479].’ In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology. * * * * * But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most impressive to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of death, almost a personified death, it was fitting and natural that it should be tricked out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, or the writer of the _Shield_, with his rude peasant imagination was ready for the task. The Keres of Pandora’s jar are purely primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at all: the Keres of the _Shield_ are a literary effort and much too horrid to be frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted hands for their fighting children stood ‘The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth, Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable; They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink Black blood, and whomsoever first they found Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus[480].’