The visible ghost is less awful than the unseen Furies.
The plot is continued through the third piece of the trilogy (the Eumenides), and out of Aeschylus himself, no existing tragedy presents so striking an opening--one so terrible and so picturesque.

It is the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

The priestess, after a short invocation, enters the sacred edifice, but suddenly returns.

"A man," she says, "is at the marble seat, a suppliant to the god--his bloody hands hold a drawn sword and a long branch of olive.

But around the man sleep a wondrous and ghastly troop, not of women, but of things woman-like, yet fiendish; harpies they seem, but are not; black-robed and wingless, and their breath is loud and baleful, and their eyes drop venom--and their garb is neither meet for the shrines of God nor the habitations of men.