In particular, we may compare the swarms of black and hideous devils, with horn and hoof of the mediaeval pictures, with the Greek Poenae. We can trace the genealogy of these latter from early times. The Oriental imagination had from very early times delighted in depicting evil spirits in the form of monsters and winged beasts, who are overcome and slain by the gods in human form. For winged monsters the Greek artists of the sixth century had tended to substitute winged human beings of hideous aspect, Gorgons and Harpies, Eris and Phobos, and the like. It was Aeschylus who, wishing to bring on the stage in bodily form in his _Eumenides_ the powers that avenge kindred blood, transformed the Erinnyes, who had hitherto been worshipped at Athens as the Eumenides or gentle goddesses, in beautiful and dignified form[39]. He took as his models the Gorgons and Harpies of earlier art. So he himself tells us in the _Eumenides_[40], where his priestess thus describes the sleeping visitors: ‘I call them not women, but Gorgons; yet cannot I quite liken them to the forms of Gorgons. In a picture once I saw Harpies painted bearing off the food of Phineus: these, however, are unwinged in aspect, but black and utterly abominable.’ Pausanias too says, when speaking of the shrine of the Eumenides at Athens[41]: ‘It was Aeschylus who first wreathed snakes in their hair; but in their statues there is nothing terrible, nor in the other statues set up in honour of the nether gods.’ In a series of vase-paintings which represent the flight to Delphi and the purification of Orestes, the Erinnyes appear sometimes in Aeschylean guise as women, unwinged, but with snakes in their hair and of terrible aspect. With these the Poenae of our vase-painting are almost identical in dress, though the ugliness is softened down. And as Polygnotus knows not the Poenae, it seems likely that it was in part the influence of Aeschylus which introduced them as ministrants of evil in the realm of Hades. But the Poenae certainly fill very inefficiently the place of the Christian demons. Greek art loved to soften, to generalize, while mediaeval art rejoiced, like Dante, in exact detail. Greek art was always ready to sacrifice precise meaning to beauty and grace, while mediaeval art had little sense of beauty, but tried to work on the emotions of fear and horror. Side by side with the evidence derived from the works of ancient painters we must place that derived from ancient poets and other writers. The philosophers are outside our scope, except so far as they testify to the opinions of ordinary men: to regard the views of Plato and Epicurus as ordinary Greek opinions would of course be as absurd as to regard John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer as representatives of the ordinary Englishman.