The Furies were female divinities who personified
the torturing pangs of an evil conscience,
and the remorse which inevitably follows wrong-doing.
Their names were Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone,
and their origin was variously accounted for.
According to Hesiod, they sprang from the
blood of Uranus, when wounded by Cronus,
and were hence supposed to be the embodiment
of all the terrible imprecations, which the
defeated deity called down upon the head of
his rebellious son. According to other accounts
they were the daughters of Night.
Their place of abode was the lower world,
where they were employed by Hades andPersephone to
chastise and torment those shades who, during
their earthly career, had committed crimes,
and had not been reconciled to the gods before
descending to Hades.
But their sphere of action was not confined
to the realm of shades, for they appeared
upon earth as the avenging deities who relentlessly
pursued and punished murderers, perjurers,
those who had failed in duty to their parents,
in hospitality to strangers, or in the respect
due to old age. Nothing escaped the piercing
glance of these terrible divinities, from
whom flight was unavailing, for no corner
of the earth was so remote as to be beyond
their reach, nor did any mortal dare to offer
to their victims an asylum from their persecutions.
Despite these vivid presentations of furies,
the creatures did not have a well-defined
appearance until the Greek tragedian Aeschylus
featured them in his trilogy, the Oresteia. 
In this three-part tale, King Agamemnon returns
home victorious after the Trojan War, only
to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra as revenge
for him sacrificing their daughter to the
gods.  Their son, Orestes, learns what his
mother has done and murders her.  In the
final play of the trilogy, the Erinyes, goaded
by Clytemnestra’s vehement ghost, rise up
from the underworld and hunt Orestes down.
The furies resemble Gorgons with their snaky
hair.  They are said to have been so frightening
when they appeared on stage women in the audience
miscarried.  In the play, they stalk Orestes
to Athens, threatening to murder him and drink
his blood.  “We drive matricides from their
homes,” they say.  ”We are called Curses
in our home below the earth.”
The loathsome furies are finally placated
by the goddess Athena, who holds a formal
trial for Orestes and casts the deciding vote
for his freedom.  Athena convinces the Erinyes
to take up a place of honor at Athens and
become the goddesses of the court, locally
worshipped as the Venerated Ones.
The final play in the trilogy was called Eumenides,
meaning “Kindly Ones.”  This name became
interchangeable with Erinyes for Greek writers. 
It is thought to be a euphemism so that people
could avoid saying their real name.  After
this play was performed in the fifth century
BC, the Erinyes their reputation was cemented
as avengers of those murdered by their own
family members. 
In Aeschylus’ tale, the Erinyes were daughters
of Night, not Uranos. 
The great Roman poets Vergil and Ovid would
include the Furies in their depictions of
the underworld.  In Ovid’s Metemorphoses,
a spellbinding catalogue of hundreds of Greek
and Roman myths, the goddess Juno visits the
underworld and finds Tisiphone and her sisters
combing snakes from their hair. Juno’s orders
the Furies to punish Ino, a mortal who had
offended Juno.  Tisiphone and her frightening
cohort, including creatures called Grief,
Fear, Terror, and Madness, visit the house
of Ino and her husband Athamas.
>
> From the middle of her hair she seized two
snakes 
> And threw them with a pestilential hand. 
> The snakes terrified the hearts of Ino and
Athamas 
> And breathed sickness into their minds. 
The mortals become infected with madness. 
Athamas murders one of his children.  Ino
flees with the other until she is forced to
jump off a cliff into the sea.
The Furies in Ovid’s story are not the enforcers
of the natural order we met in Homer.  By
the first century AD their reputation had
changed to be fearsome creatures who love
to wreak havoc.
In each of these stories, the Furies are especially
associated with snakes.  This is because
in ancient Greek religion, snakes were closely
linked with the dead.  Snakes would often
appear at gravesites to lap up libations and
sacrifices offered to the dead.  There was
even a belief that when a dead body breaks
down, the spine slithers off as a snake. 
The Erinyes, adorned with snakes, have instilled
terror for centuries by embodying the dead.
