Eurynomos

Also Known As: Greek Εὐρύνομος, “wide-ruling”; Latinised Eurynomus; later, in French demonology, Eurynome
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He strips the flesh from the dead and leaves the bones bare, and no source records him doing anything else.
Role in Mythos: He was named by the guides at Delphi as one of the daimones of Hades, and he survives from a single lost painting rather than from any poem, cult or rite.
Relation to Humans: He has no dealings with the living, and there is no story in which anyone meets him, bargains with him, or escapes him. What he does, he does to the body after the person is finished with it.

The light in the Lesche came from above, through a clerestory the Cnidians had raised on wooden pillars so that daylight fell on the walls and not on the visitors. The walls were the reason anyone came. On one side Troy was burning. On the other, Odysseus stood at the lip of the underworld, and the underworld ran the whole length of the room: the reeds of Acheron, fish so faint they read as shadows, the old ferryman resting on his pole. A guide walked you along it and talked. High up, above the sinners, where you had to tilt your head back, a figure sat grinning on a spread animal skin, painted the colour of a blowfly.

The guides had a name for him. That name is the only reason he is still here.

Everything anyone knows about Eurynomos comes from one paragraph. Pausanias, a Greek traveller with a notebook and an unfashionable interest in checking things, came through Delphi in the second century AD and worked through the great painting figure by figure. When he reached this one he wrote down what the Delphian guides told him: Eurynomos, one of the daimones of Hades, who eats off all the flesh of the corpses and leaves only their bones. Then he described what he could see. A colour between blue and black, like that of meat flies. Teeth showing. Seated. Under him, spread flat, the skin of a vulture.

Then Pausanias did the thing that almost everyone who has retold this creature since has quietly skipped. He checked.

The Odyssey goes down into Hades and lingers there. So did the lost epics, the Minyad and the Returns, both of which Pausanias knew and both of which told of Hades and its horrors. None of them, he says flatly, knows any daimon called Eurynomos. Not a line. He recorded the name anyway, and then the picture, and that is the whole ancient record of the flesh-eater of the underworld: a tour guide’s gloss on a wall, preserved by a man who did not believe the guides had a source.

So his origin is a question with three plausible answers and no way to settle it. He may have belonged to a poem that did not survive the two and a half thousand years between the painter and us. He may have been local Phocian lore, a thing people said around Delphi and nowhere else, never important enough to put into verse. Or Polygnotos of Thasos simply invented him. A painter filling a wall with the dead needs the place to be inhabited, a blue-black eater of corpses is exactly the sort of figure a great painter puts in the upper register, and the guides who worked that room for the next six hundred years would have needed something to say when a visitor pointed and asked. There is no altar to Eurynomos anywhere, no festival, no offering, no prayer, no myth in which he does anything at all. He does not chase, judge, speak or bargain.

What he does is the one thing that happens to everybody.

That is the quiet force of the figure, and it explains why the painter’s choice of colour does so much of the work. Blue-black, with the shine of a meat fly. Anyone who has stood downwind of a dead animal in summer knows that sheen, the oily green-blue that catches the light as the flies settle and lift. Polygnotos put the gleam of the carrion fly onto the skin of the being who performs the carrion fly’s office, and then seated him on a vulture, the bird that does the same work in daylight, in the open, where everyone can watch. Above ground the flesh goes to the birds and the flies. Below ground it goes to him. The result is decomposition with a face and a set of teeth, and the teeth are bared, which is the detail that stops it being a diagram.

The room did not last. The Lesche was built in the second quarter of the fifth century BC, a rectangular hall lit by that clever high window, and it was excavated in 1894. Not one flake of the paintings was found. The plaster Polygnotos worked on is gone as thoroughly as the flesh he painted his daimon eating, which leaves the entire creature balanced on a paragraph.

A paragraph turned out to be enough. In the early nineteenth century a French compiler named Jacques Collin de Plancy assembled the Dictionnaire infernal, an alphabetical inventory of demons, and when he came to staff the government of hell he went shopping in the classical texts. Eurynomos came out of Pausanias and went in as Eurynome, prince of death, commander of the Order of the Fly, seated in the infernal court alongside Beelzebub, Satan and Moloch. De Plancy gave him great long teeth, a body covered with sores, and a fox skin to wear. Somewhere in the copying the vulture had become a fox. Louis Le Breton drew him for the illustrated edition, and that engraving is now the image most people meet when they go looking for the corpse-eater of Hades. A being known only from a lost Greek painting is currently represented by a French one.

His powers are easy to state and complete. He reduces the dead to bone, thoroughly, and nothing suggests he distinguishes the pious from the wicked. The punished had their own places lower down that wall, the man being throttled by the father he mistreated, the temple robber, the woman skilled in poisons. Eurynomos sat above all of them and worked on the ordinary dead, on people whose only offence was dying.

His limits are just as absolute. He cannot touch the living. He carries no weapon, has no cunning, has no second trick, and there is no hint that he can be fought, outrun or bought off, because there is no hint that anyone ever tried. He depends entirely on being described. He has run on borrowed sentences for two thousand years, first a guide’s patter in a painted room, then a traveller’s notebook, then a demonologist’s ledger, and if the sentences are taken away there is nothing underneath them. It is a fragile way for a devourer to exist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Eurynomos in Greek mythology?

Eurynomos is a daimon of the Greek underworld who eats the flesh from corpses and leaves only the bones. He is known from a single description by the travel writer Pausanias, who saw him in Polygnotos’s painting of the underworld at Delphi in the second century AD and was given the name by the local guides. He has no myth, no cult and no role beyond stripping the dead.

What does Eurynomos look like?

Pausanias describes him as seated, teeth bared, and coloured somewhere between blue and black, like the meat flies that gather on carrion. Beneath him is spread the skin of a vulture, the bird that eats the dead above ground as he eats them below. That short account is the only ancient description of his appearance.

Which ancient sources mention Eurynomos?

Only Pausanias, in Book 10 of his Description of Greece, and even he treats the name with suspicion. Pausanias points out that Homer’s Odyssey, along with the lost epics known as the Minyad and the Returns, all describe Hades and its horrors without ever naming a daimon called Eurynomos. The name may come from a lost poem, from local Delphian belief, or from the painter Polygnotos himself.

Is Eurynomos the same as the demon Eurynome?

The demon Eurynome of French demonology is a direct descendant of him. Jacques Collin de Plancy lifted the corpse-eater out of Pausanias for the Dictionnaire infernal, renamed him Eurynome, made him prince of death and commander of the Order of the Fly, and gave him long teeth, a body covered with sores, and a fox skin in place of the vulture’s. He should not be confused with Eurynome the Greek Oceanid, who is an entirely different figure.

Does Eurynomos punish the wicked?

No. In the Delphi painting the punished had their own places lower down the wall, while Eurynomos sat above them, working on the ordinary dead. Nothing in the record suggests he judges, selects or punishes anyone. He strips flesh from bone, and that is the whole of his office.