Padel's warning about Heraclitus is sharper than it first appears: the man who says the dry soul is wisest and best, who calls the cosmos a fire that governs itself by measure, is precisely the thinker whose testimony we should not treat as cultural baseline. He was unusual by ancient recognition, not by modern projection. When scholars reach for Heraclitean fragments to reconstruct what Greeks "normally believed" about the Erinyes or cosmic order, they are pulling the most eccentric witness to the stand as though he were the most representative.

What remains when you set Heraclitus aside is stranger and more interesting: the Erinyes were not primarily regulators of abstract cosmic law. They were resident in and destructive of human relationships — blood-claims, household bonds, the obligations that structure kin. Order, for most Greeks, was not a principle above the messy interior life; it was made from it, out of thūmos and phrenes and the suffering that moves between people. Heraclitus had already begun the turn toward a policing logos, a principle that oversees even the sun. The paradox he loved — justice is conflict — is still a paradox *about* justice as overarching measure, not a surrender to the ungovernable. The Erinyes he imagines are cosmic police. The ones in Aeschylus are something else entirely.