Kill him at once!
And, killed, expose him to such burial,
From dogs and vultures, as beseemeth such.
The Sophoclean Erinnyes are even more ‘Homeric,’ and therefore less ‘tragic,’[22] than the Aeschylean Erinnyes. In Sophocles we do not find any reference to the Erinnyes of the slain Clytaemnestra. This is perhaps because he conceived Orestes’ act as clearly and unmistakably the act of a just avenger. Hence Electra prays[23]:
And ye, Erinnyes, of mortals feared,
Daughters of Heaven that ever see
Who die unjustly,
Avenge our father’s murder on his foe.
But Sophocles shares with his brother-dramatists two ideas which we have ascribed[24] to post-Homeric times, namely the notion of an ancestral curse and the notion of the blood-thirst of the dead, as is manifest from the following lines[25]:
The curse hath found, and they in earth who lie