Pausanias[481] in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells of the figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. The scene is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; Polyneikes has fallen on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at him. ‘Behind Polyneikes is a woman-figure with teeth, as cruel as a wild beast’s, and her finger-nails are hooked. An inscription near her says that she is a Ker, as though Polyneikes were carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles were in accordance with justice.’ Pausanias regards the word Ker as the equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception so abstract on the primitive artist who decorated the chest. We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged bacilli, but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts who in the Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), and—a forecast of the Erinyes—the ‘blue-black[482]’ Keres are near akin to the horrid Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi. Pausanias[483] says, ‘Above the figures I have mentioned (i.e. the sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eurynomos; the guides of Delphi say that Eurynomos is one of the demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of the dead bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer’s poem about Odysseus, and those called the _Minyas_ and the _Nostoi_, though they all make mention of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. I will therefore say this much, I will describe what sort of a person Eurynomos is and in what fashion he appears in the painting. The colour is blue-black (κυανοῦ τὴν χρόαν μεταξύ ἐστι καὶ μέλανος) like the colour of the flies that settle on meat; he is showing his teeth and is seated on the skin of a vulture.’ The Keres of the _Shield_ are human vultures; Eurynomos is the sarcophagus incarnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld, the flesh-eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly sits upon a vulture’s skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes, are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when he sees a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is ‘a Ker.’ We are in the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, Empusa, Lamia and Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, of Siren. To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead too far afield, but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren and Sphinx both in art and literature is so instructive that at the risk of digression each of these forms must be examined somewhat in detail. THE KER AS GORGON. The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom one, most evil of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her lovely terrible face had power to turn men into stone.