Tisiphone

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In the Commedia Tisiphone is recalled with the dialectal form Tesifón. Virgil, immediately recognizing the three monstrous women who block his path, indicates one of them as the middle figure: «Tesifón is in the middle». The notes to the canto document that the Furies are described as girded with serpents and with serpentine tresses, according to the traditional figuration shared by Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. The same passage also mentions hydras, small serpents, and horned serpents (cerastae) that encircle their temples, details that the notes explicitly connect to the iconography of the Furies and, for the hydras, directly to Virgil's description of Alecto in the Aeneid. Tisiphone thus appears in the scene of Canto IX as one of the three sisters who threaten the poets before the city of Dis.