Erinyes, also known as Furies, were female spirits who exacted vengeance against those who committed specific crimes. The Furies, in Greek the Erinyes, or euphemistically Eumenides, were avenging spirits of retributive justice. Their names, when in course of time their number had come to be fixed as three, were Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. Their task was to punish crimes not within the reach of human justice. Through Aeschylus the tradition developed that after the time when they had intervened in the case of Orestes, their functions no longer covered cases of "guiltiness" free from moral guilt. In spite of their inexorable sternness, they wept when they heard Orpheus implore the deities of the underworld to restore Eurydice to life.