[25\7: Eurynomos: dark-blue body like a bluebottle, with prominent teeth, sitting on a vulture's skin, Paus. 10, 28, 7. There seems to be no mention of him in literature: whether the statement of Pausanias that he was a ~dai/môn tô=n en Ha/idou~ who eats the flesh of corpses off their bones, is anything more than a guess, we cannot tell. The vulture-skin indeed suggests that the nature of the Daimon who sits on it was related to the vulture. The fact that the vulture eats the flesh of corpses was often observed by the ancients **(see Plu., _Rom._ 9, etc.: Leemans on Horapollo, p. 177). Welcker (_Kl. Schr._ v, 117) sees in Eurynomos nothing but the "corruption" of the body, in which case he would be a purely allegorical figure. On the contrary he is much more likely to be one of those very concretely imagined spirits of Hell (only with a euphemistic name, like the lesser spirits Lamia, Mormo, Gorgyra, Empousa, etc. (a word about them will be found below, Append. vi). The artist must have known him from some local tradition. He devours the flesh of the corpse: thus a late epigram (_Epigr. Gr._ 647, 16) calls the dead ~luprê\n dai=ta Cha/rôni~. Even in Soph., _El._ 542, we have; ~Ha/idês hi/meron te/knôn tô=n ekei/nês e/sche _dai/sasthai_~ (Welcker, _Syll._, p. 94).] [26\7: Paus. 10, 28, 3. Cf. O. Jahn, _Hermes_, iii, 326.] [27\7: The third century vase-paintings from Southern Italy also as a rule keep within the limits of the epic Nekyia. In addition to the few special types of the sinners undergoing punishment in Hades (Sisyphos, Tantalos, the Danaids) we have allusions to the journeys to Hades of Theseus, Peirithoos, Herakles, and Orpheus. All attempts to read mystical or edifying intentions into these (as in Baumeister's _Denkm._ 1926-30) are now regarded as completely mistaken. (Orpheus appears there not as founder and prophet of his mysteries but simply as the mythical singer who goes down to the underworld to rescue Eurydike with his singing. This is rightly maintained by Milchhöfer, _Philol._ 53, 385 ff., 54, 750 f., against Kuhnert, _Arch. Jahrb._ viii, 104 ff.; _Philol._ 54, 193.) Nothing at all is suggested as to the fate of mankind in general. On a vase from Canosa a father and mother with a boy stand on the left of Orpheus: this, too, must belong to the region of mythology. (They cannot, however, be Dionysos and Ariadne as Winkler suggests, _Darst. d. Unterw. auf unterit. Vasen_, 49. But it is difficult to imagine that they can be a family of Mystai as Milchhöfer supposes.)] PART II {{253}} CHAPTER VIII ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS