Alecto- Greek SpiritSpirit"The Unceasing"

Birth from Blood

When Kronos severed the flesh of Ouranos with a jagged sickle, the drops of blood that fell upon Gaia quickened and gave rise to the Erinyes. Hesiod records this violent nativity in the Theogony, placing the Furies among the oldest beings in the cosmos, born not from union but from mutilation. Aeschylus in the Eumenides names Nyx as their mother instead. Apollodorus lists all three by name: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera.

Alecto's name derives from the Greek alektos, "unceasing." She is the pursuit that does not stop.

The Fury Unleashed in Latium

In the seventh book of Virgil's Aeneid, Juno learns that Aeneas has arrived in Italy and that fate intends him to wed Lavinia. She descends to the Underworld and rouses Alecto from among the Furies. Virgil describes her as hateful even to her own father Pluto and her sister Furies, such is the horror of her transformations.

Alecto first visits Queen Amata, wife of King Latinus, and hurls one of her serpents into the queen's breast. The snake glides beneath Amata's garments and coils around her without her knowledge, its venom seeping into her mind. Amata, who had favored Turnus as a husband for Lavinia, is driven to escalating frenzy: first pleading with Latinus, then raging through the city like a spinning top whipped by boys in a courtyard, and finally fleeing into the forests with other women in a false Bacchic revel.

Next Alecto turns to Turnus himself. She appears to him in a dream disguised as the aged priestess Calybe, urging him to take up arms against the Trojans. When Turnus dismisses her with contempt, she reveals her true form, eyes blazing and serpents writhing from her hair, and hurls a smoking torch into his chest. He wakes consumed with battle-fury.

Her final act is to engineer the incident that makes war inevitable. She drives Ascanius's hunting hound to flush a tame stag belonging to the royal herdsman Tyrrhus. When Ascanius wounds the stag, the Latin farmers take up arms, and the first blood is shed. Alecto returns to Juno to report her success, offering to spread further discord. Juno dismisses her back to the Underworld. The work is done.