Alecto

One of the three Erinyes (Furies), the chthonic avengers of blood-guilt, broken oaths, and crimes against kin and the natural order. In Hesiod the Erinyes are born — unnamed and unnumbered — from the drops of blood that fell on Gaia (Earth) when Kronos castrated Uranus, sprung in the same birth as the Giants and the ash-tree nymphs (Hes. *Theog.* 183–187). The fixed triad of names is later: Apollodorus numbers them three and calls them Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera (Apollod. *Bibl.* 1.1.4). Alecto's name means 'the unceasing,' the anger that does not relent. In Aeschylus's *Eumenides* the Furies hound Orestes for his mother's blood until Athena's court at the Areopagus acquits him and persuades them to become the Eumenides, the 'Kindly Ones,' with a cult at Athens.