In other Homeric Erinyes there is often not even a _fond_ of possible ghosts. Phoenix transgresses against his father Amyntor[553], and Amyntor for his unnatural offence invokes against him the ‘hateful Erinyes’: they are no ancestral ghosts, they are merely avengers of the moral law, vaguer equivalents of ‘Underworld Zeus and dread Persephone.’ Ares[554] offends his mother Aphrodite, who is certainly _not_ dead and has no ghost, and the wounds inflicted on him by Athene appease the ‘Erinys of his mother.’ In a word, in Homer, as has frequently been pointed out, the Erinyes are avengers of offences against blood-relations on the mother’s and father’s side, of all offences against moral, and finally even natural law. The familiar case of Xanthus, the horse of Achilles[555], marks the furthest pole of complete abstraction. Xanthus warns Achilles that, for all their fleetness, his horses bear him to his death, and ‘When he thus had spoken The Erinyes stayed his voice.’ The intervention of the Erinyes here is usually explained by a reference to the saying of Heracleitus[556] that ‘the sun could not go out of his course without the Erinyes, ministers of justice, finding him out.’ I doubt if the philosophy of Heracleitus supplies the true explanation. The horse speaks as the mouthpiece of the fates, the Erinyes; they tell of what fate (μοῖρα) will accomplish; nay more, _as fates_ they, reluctant but obedient, carry him to his death. When Xanthus has uttered the mandate of fate, the Fates close his mouth, not because he transgresses their law, but because he has uttered it to the full. Be that as it may, the view stated by Heracleitus is of capital importance. It shows that to a philosopher writing at the end of the 6th century B.C. the Erinyes were embodiments of law, ministers of Justice. Of course a philosopher is as little to be taken as reflecting popular faith as a poet, indeed far less; but even a philosopher cannot, save on pain of becoming unintelligible, use words apart from popular associations. Heracleitus was indeed drunk with the thought of law, of Fate, of unchanging ‘moral retribution,’ with the eternal sequence of his endless flux; his Erinyes are cosmic beyond the imagination of Homer, but still the fact remains that he uses them as embodiments of the vengeance that attends transgression. By his time they are not Keres, not souls, still less bacilli, not even avengers of tribal blood, but in the widest sense ministers of Justice[557] (Δίκης ἐπίκουροι). THE ERINYES OF AESCHYLUS. Heracleitus has pushed abstraction to its highest pitch. When we come to Aeschylus we find, as would be expected, a conception of the Erinyes that is at once narrower and more vitalized, more objective, more primitive. In the _Septem_[558] the conception is narrower, more primitive than in Homer; the Erinys is in fact an angry ghost. This is stated with the utmost precision.