Furies- Roman GroupCollective"Ultrices"

Born from Darkness

The Furies were daughters of Nox, the goddess of Night who existed before the ordered world. They were older than Jupiter, older than the cosmos he ruled. Virgil called them "the sorrowing ones, whom dark Night bore," and wreathed their heads with serpents and gave them wings of wind.

In another tradition, they sprang from blood. When Saturn castrated his father Caelus, the blood fell on Terra and the Furies rose from where it soaked the earth. Their birth was itself the crime they would spend eternity punishing: a son's violence against his father, the first violation of blood.

Even Jupiter acknowledged their authority. He did not command them. He did not interfere with their judgments.

Alecto Loosed

In the Aeneid, Juno cannot stop the Trojans from reaching Italy, so she sends for something worse. She goes to the underworld and calls up Alecto, the Fury whose name means she who never rests.

Alecto moves through Latium like a plague. She finds Queen Amata asleep and slips a serpent from her hair under the queen's robes, where it slides between skin and clothing and pours its venom into her blood. Amata wakes changed. Where she had welcomed the Trojans, she now opposes them with a mother's fury, hiding her daughter Lavinia in the mountains rather than give her to Aeneas.

Then Alecto finds Turnus, the Rutulian prince. She appears to him as an old priestess and warns him that foreigners are stealing his bride. When he laughs at her, she drops the disguise. The Fury stands before him in her true shape, serpents writhing, torches blazing. She hurls a smoking brand into his chest. Turnus wakes drenched in sweat, screaming for his weapons. War follows.

The Gates of Tartarus

Aeneas sees them when the Sibyl leads him through the underworld. Tisiphone sits before the gates of Tartarus in a blood-soaked robe, sleepless, guarding the entrance to the pit where the worst of the dead suffer forever.

Behind the gate, Virgil says, the drop is twice the distance from earth to heaven. Inside, the damned endure punishments that never end and never lessen. Tisiphone and her sisters administer the torments, their whips falling without pause, their torches held close enough that the condemned can see each other's agonies.

The Ghost of Tantalus

Seneca's Thyestes opens not with the living but with the dead. A Fury drags the ghost of Tantalus up from the underworld and forces him to watch as his grandson Atreus plots a crime that will outdo even Tantalus's own: Atreus will murder his brother's sons and serve their flesh to their father at a feast.

Tantalus begs not to witness it. The Fury refuses. She pours hunger and thirst and madness into the house of Atreus, corrupting every room. The Fury ensures the sin passes down. Tantalus fed human flesh to the gods. His descendants feed it to each other.