We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the Gorgoneion on tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis[497] in fig. 33 the Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two delicate feet remain. On two sides of the triangular statue we have the Gorgon head; on the third, serving a like protective purpose, a ram’s head. The statue, dedicated in the precinct of Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself, but we need seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and Apollo; Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis has a further interest in that the inscription[498] dates the Gorgon-type represented with some precision. The form of the letters shows it to have been the work and the dedication of a Naxian artist of the early part of the 6th century. [Illustration: FIG. 34.] On a Rhodian plate[499] in the British Museum in fig. 34 the Gorgoneion has been furnished with a body tricked out with wings, but the mask-head is still dominant. The figure is conceived in the typical heraldic fashion of the Mistress of Wild Things (πότνια θηρῶν); she is in fact the ugly bogey-, Erinys-side of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess, not as in later days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest divinities of the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys of the cult of ‘service.’ The Olympians in their turn became Christian devils. Aeschylus[500] in instructive fashion places side by side the two sets of three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but two by-forms of each other. Prometheus foretells to Io her long wandering in the bogey land of Nowhere: ‘Pass onward o’er the sounding sea, till thou Dost touch Kisthene’s dreadful plains, wherein The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids, Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all, One tooth—whom never doth the rising sun Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night— Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged, With snakes for hair—hated of mortal man— None may behold and bear their breathing blight.’ The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod[501] calls Grey Ones or Old Ones, Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and one-toothed; but the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye shows that in tooth and eye resided their potency, and that in this they were own sisters to the Gorgons.