Eurynomos

Pausanias saw him in a painting. The great muralist Polygnotus had decorated the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi with scenes of the underworld, and among the shades and punished souls sat Eurynomos, devourer of the dead.

He perched on a vulture skin, and his own skin was blue-black — the colour of a blowfly, Pausanias noted with precision. He bared his teeth in what might have been a grin. Around him lay the bones of those he had already consumed, the flesh stripped clean.

That is nearly everything we know. No myth survives that tells his origin or gives him a genealogy. No hero confronts him. No god commands him. He simply exists in the underworld as part of its ecology — the thing that eats the dead after death has claimed them.

The Delphic guides told Pausanias that Eurynomos was a daimon of decomposition, and that the painting showed a well-known figure from local underworld tradition. But no written source before or after Pausanias confirms this, which means either the tradition was purely oral and Polygnotus captured it, or the painter invented Eurynomos from the observed reality of corpse decay and gave it a name.

His name meant "wide-ruling" or "wide-pasturing," appropriate for a creature whose domain was universal. Everyone died. Everyone rotted. Eurynomos was always fed.

He became a figure of fascination for later artists and heavy metal bands alike — the corpse-eater grinning from his vulture-skin throne.