Note 25 — Chapter VII · IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE

Eurynomos: dark-blue body like a bluebottle, with prominent teeth, sitting on a vulture’s skin, Paus. 10, 28, 7. There seems to be no mention of him in literature: whether the statement of Pausanias that he was a δαίμων τῶν ἐν Ἅιδου who eats the flesh of corpses off their bones, is anything more than a guess, we cannot tell. The vulture-skin indeed suggests that the nature of the Daimon who sits on it was related to the vulture. The fact that the vulture eats the flesh of corpses was often observed by the ancients (see Plu., Rom. 9, etc.: Leemans on Horapollo, p. 177). Welcker (Kl. Schr. v, 117) sees in Eurynomos nothing but the “corruption” of the body, in which case he would be a purely allegorical figure. On the contrary he is much more likely to be one of those very concretely imagined spirits of Hell (only with a euphemistic name), like the lesser spirits Lamia, Mormo, Gorgyra, Empousa, etc. (a word about them will be found below, Append. vi). The artist must have known him from some local tradition. He devours the flesh of the corpse: thus a late epigram (Epigr. Gr. 647, 16) calls the dead λυπρὴν δαῖτα Χάρωνι. Even in Soph., El. 542, we have; Ἅιδης ἵμερον τέκνων τῶν ἐκείνης ἔσχε δαίσασθαι (Welcker, Syll., p. 94).