In book I poem 3 of Tibullus's elegies, Tisiphone, unkempt with fierce snakes instead of hair, chases impious souls here and there inTartarus.[4]
In Book VI ofVirgil'sAeneid, she is described as the guardian of the gates ofTartarus, "clothed in a blood-wet dress".[5]
In Book X of theAeneid, she is described as "pale" and raging "among the warring thousands" during the battle betweenMezentius andAeneas's men.[6]
In Book IV ofOvid'sMetamorphoses, she is described as a denizen ofDis who wears a dripping red robe and who has a serpent coiled around her waist. At the behest ofJuno, Tisiphone drivesAthamas andIno mad with the breath of a serpent extracted from her hair and a poison made from froth from the mouth ofCerberus andEchidna's venom.[7]
Tisiphone has a prominent role inStatius'Thebaid, where she spurs on the war betweenPolynices andEteocles at the behest of their father,Oedipus. One of her more gruesome feats in the epic is to drive the hero,Tydeus, to cannibalism. In a bizarrely pastoral scene, Tisiphone first appears in the epic lounging beside theCocytus river in the underworld, letting her serpent locks lap at the sulfuric waters.[8]
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.[9]
In Canto IX ofDante'sInferno, she appears with her sisters before the gates ofDis, threatening to unveil theMedusa.
In Henry Fielding’sTom Jones (Book I, ch. VIII), Bridget smiles “one of those smiles which might be supposed to have come from the dimpled cheeks of the august Tisiphone.”
In the David Weber space operaIn Fury Born, Tisiphone appears as an ancient Greek spirit who is mind-melded with a super-soldier Alicia Devries, and they (along with a starship AI namedMegaera) save the universe from evil pirates.
In Evie Shockley's poetry collectionSuddenly We, the final stanza of the poem "breonna taylor's final rest (or, the furies are still activists)" invokes Tisiphone in her role as avenger of murder victims.
In Warhammer 40k, at the beginning of the 31st millennium the first official execution of a traitor in the Imperium is accomplished with a Power Sword named Tisiphone, made for former Luna Wolves Legionary Iacton Qruze and lent to Primarch Rogal Dorn for that purpose.
Media related toTisiphone (mythology) at Wikimedia Commons