Tisiphone, or Tilphousia, was one of the three Erinyes or Furies. Her sisters were Alecto and Megaera. She was the one who punished crimes of murder: parricide, fratricide and homicide.
Contents
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'.
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.
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.
In Book I of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde", the narrator calls upon her to help him to write the tragedy properly.
Ships
Between 1779 and 1816 there was a British navy fireship (later converted to a sloop) named after the goddess.