Tisiphone

Tisiphone, or Tilphousia, was one of the three Erinyes or Furies. Her sisters were Alecto and Megaera.[1] She was the one who punished crimes of murder: parricide, fratricide and homicide.

In literature

In Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, she is described as the guardian of the gates of Tartarus, 'clothed in a blood-wet dress'.[2]

In Book X of Virgil's Aeneid, she is described as 'pale' and raging 'among the warring thousands' during the battle between Mezentius and Aeneas's men.[3]

In Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, she is described as a denizen of Dis who wears a dripping red robe and who has a serpent coiled around her waist. At the behest of Juno, Tisiphone drives Athamas and Ino mad with the breath of a serpent extracted from her hair and a poison made from froth from the mouth of Cerberus and Echidna's venom.[4]

Tisiphone has a prominent role in Statius' Thebaid, where she spurs on the war between Polynices and Eteocles at the behest of their father, Oedipus. One of her more gruesome feats in the epic is to drive the hero, Tydeus, to cannibalism. In bizarrely pastoral scene, Tisiphone first appears in the epic, lounging beside the Cocytus river in the underworld, letting her serpent locks lap at the sulfuric waters.[5]

According to one myth, she fell in love with a mortal, Cithaeron, but was spurned; in her anger she formed a poisonous snake from her hair, which bit and killed him.[6]

In Book I of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde", the narrator calls upon her to help him to write the tragedy properly.[7]

Ships

Between 1779 and 1816 there was a British navy fireship (later converted to a sloop) named after the goddess.[8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Mythological Index". The Ovid Collection. University of Virginia Library.
  2. ↑ "Virgil: Aeneid VI (A.S.Kline's translation)". poetryintranslation.com. Retrieved 2015-10-25.
  3. ↑ "Virgil: Aeneid X (A.S.Kline's translation)". poetryintranslation.com. Retrieved 2018-04-15.
  4. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk IV:464-511.
  5. ↑ Statius, Thebaid Bk I:88-91.
  6. ↑ Pseudo-Plutarch. De fluviis.
  7. ↑ Geoffrey Chaucer, "Troilus and Criseyde", Book I:5, in "The Riverside Chaucer", 3rd Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.473
  8. ↑ http://www.kenthistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=16287.0 Kent History Forum
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