When Women Commit Violence

The title is telling. Many ancient cultures represented justice in female form, Flock notes. She mentions the Hindu warrior goddess Durga and the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who is raped by a gardener while sleeping, then sends down plagues to flush him out of hiding. The Furies of ancient Greece and Rome were also divine, a trio of miserable hags with snakes for hair. They appear in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where they hound Orestes after he murders his mother, and, seventeen hundred years later, in Dante’s Inferno, where they shriek and tear at their breasts. (Flock doesn’t mention the Furies’ origin story, but it is a Freudian field day: according to the poet Hesiod, they sprang from drops of blood shed when Cronus, son of Gaia and Uranus, was incited by his mother to cut off his father’s testicles.)