Paura e ‘paure’: Pausania, Medea e una statua a Corinto

In his description of Corinth, Pausanias dwells on an expiatory Deima, the statue of a woman with frightening features, erected on the funerary monument of Medea's children. Rather than an isolated “personification of Terror”, it seems preferable to think of the use of deima in the sense of “spirit, spectre”, which has numerous folkloric parallels. The statue is said to have been that of a “ghostly woman”, perhaps an allusion to one of the demonic infanticidal figures present in Greek imagination.