Furies, << FYUR eez >>, were the terrible goddesses of vengeance in Roman mythology. The Greeks called them Erinyes or Eumenides. The Roman poet Virgil wrote of three Furies in his epic poem the Aeneid. He called them Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. They carried whips and had snakes in their hair.
The Furies punished people for committing crimes. The Furies were especially vengeful against anyone who had killed a member of his or her family. In his tragedy The Eumenides, the Greek playwright Aeschylus describes how they drove Orestes insane for killing his mother, Clytemnestra.
