On Lower Italy vases the Erinyes as Poinae frequently appear (Chap. XI.). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. From the august ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have sunk to be the mere pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on Sisyphos to his ceaseless task, they bind Peirithoös, they fasten Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious to note that, though the notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still wear the huntress garb, the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to follow the downward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated by Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation in Plutarch’s treatise ‘On those who are punished by the Deity late[596].’ The criminals whom Justice (Dike)—the Orphic divinity of purification rather than vengeance—rejects as altogether incurable are pursued by an Erinys, ‘the third and most savage of the ministrants of Adrasteia.’ She drives them down into a place which Plutarch very properly describes as ‘not to be seen, not to be spoken of.’ The Erinyes are from beginning to end of the old order, implacable, vindictive; they know nothing of Orphic penance and purgatory; as ‘angels of torment[597]’ they go to people a Christian Hell. THE ERINYS AS SNAKE. We return to Aeschylus. His intent was to humanize the Erinyes that thereby they might be the more inhuman. The more horrible the shape of these impersonations of the old order the greater the miracle of their conversion into the gentle Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we know them the Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane. In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers one lapse, the more significant because probably unconscious. When Clytaemnestra would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, she cries[598], ‘Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators, Have spent the fell rage of the _dragoness_.’ It is of course possible to say that she uses the word ‘dragoness’ (δράκαινα) ‘poetically,’ for a monster in general, possibly a human monster; but the question is forced upon us, why is this particular monster selected? why does she say ‘dragoness’ and not rather ‘hound of hell’? In the next lines[599] comes the splendid simile of the dog hunting in dreams, and it would surely have been more ‘poetical’ to keep the figure intact. But language and associations sometimes break through the best regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind lay the notion that the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. The notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be considered when hero-worship is dealt with (p. 326). For the present it can only be noted in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower stratum of thought, a stratum in which the Erinys was not yet an abstracted or even humanized minister of vengeance, but simply an angry ghost in snake form.