Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts destructive to the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to be appeased. In so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered or outraged men, the Erinyes were of course everywhere propitiated, but rarely under their ‘Angry’ name. That the natural prudence of euphemism forbade. As abstract ministers of vengeance we have no evidence of their worship. Clytaemnestra[614] indeed recounts in detail her dread service to the Erinyes, but when closely examined it is found to be merely the regular ritual of the dead and of underworld divinities; it has all the accustomed marks, the ‘wineless libations’ and the ‘nephalia for propitiation, the banquets by night’ offered on the low brazier (ἐσχάρα) characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). The hour was one, she adds, ‘shared by none of the gods.’ What she means is none of the gods of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour shared by every underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word transferred the regular ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted ministers of vengeance, and has thereby left unconscious witness to their real origin. THE ‘SEMNAI THEAI.’ To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable Goddesses (σεμναὶ θεαί) present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes owe such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, to Homer first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with the Semnae it is quite otherwise. Their names are of course adjectival—almost all primitive cultus names are—but from the first, as we know them, they are personal and local. The Erinyes range over earth and sea, the Semnae are seated quietly and steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a strictly local cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for the fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have realized their existence; they would have remained obscure local figures like the Ablabiae and the Praxidikae.