Tisiphone- Greek SpiritSpirit"Avenger of Murder"

The Fury Unleashed on Thebes

Oedipus, blind and exiled, called upon the Erinyes to curse his sons. Tisiphone answered. In Statius's Thebaid, she rises from the underworld wreathed in serpents, her hair alive with vipers, and plants the seed of murderous hatred between Eteocles and Polynices. Throughout the war she hovers at the margins of the battlefield, stoking rage and ensuring that no reconciliation can hold. When the brothers finally meet in single combat and kill each other simultaneously, the work is done. Every truce that failed, every embassy turned away, had her hand behind it.

The Gates and the Threshold

Virgil stations Tisiphone at the gates of Tartarus in the Aeneid, where she sits sleepless in a blood-soaked robe, cracking her whip over the damned who pass through the iron threshold.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Juno descends to the underworld and enlists Tisiphone to punish Athamas and Ino for raising the infant Dionysus. Tisiphone ascends to the mortal world carrying two serpents. At the threshold of Athamas's palace she wrings venom from them into a potion of madness. Her breath is pestilence. Her presence wilts the fields. When she shakes her hair the serpents hiss in chorus. Athamas, driven insane, mistakes his wife and children for a lioness and cubs and kills his son Learchus. Ino flees with the other child and leaps from a cliff into the sea.