The use of the singular number, ‘dragoness,’ is, in itself, significant. The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely multiplied, but the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the ghost of the murdered mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real ‘dragoness,’ though she does not know it, and by a curious unconscious reminiscence the Erinyes sleep till she, the true Erinys, rouses them. The mention by Aeschylus of the ‘dragoness’ does not stand alone. To Euripides also the Erinys is a snake. In the _Iphigeneia in Tauris_[600] the mad Orestes cries to Pylades, ‘Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed?’ Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover the ‘Hades-snake’ confuses the effect of the ‘dread vipers’ that follow. In his _Orestes_ also[601] Euripides makes the Erinyes ‘maidens with the forms of snakes,’ where it is straining language, and quite needlessly, to say that the word δρακοντώδεις means ‘having snakes in their hands or hair.’ Art too has these harkings back to the primitive snake form. The design in fig. 53 is from a black-figured amphora in the Vatican Museum[602], dating about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. We have the usual striding flying type, the four wings, the huntress boots—a type of which, as has been shown, it is hard to say whether it represents Gorgon or Harpy. There is no context to decide. One thing is clear. The vase-painter is afraid that we shall miss his meaning, shall not understand that this winged thing striding through the air is an earth demon, so he paints below, moving _pari passu_, a great snake. The winged demon _is_ also a snake[603]. [Illustration: FIG. 53.] [Illustration: FIG. 54.] Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out in the vase-painting in fig. 54 from an archaic vase of the type known as ‘prothesis’ vases, in the Museum at Athens[604]. They are a class used in funeral ceremonies and decorated with funeral subjects. Two mourners stand by a grave tumulus, itself surmounted by a funeral vase. Within the tumulus the vase-painter depicts what he believes to be there. Winged eidola, ghosts, and a great snake, also a ghost. Snake and eidolon are but two ways of saying the same thing. The little fluttering figures here represented are merely harmless Keres, not angry vindictive Erinyes, but when the Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is a snake-ghost. [Illustration: FIG. 55.]