The Orphic Hymns

she who drives mortals mad with airy phantoms, showing the outline of her form in strange shapes, now plain to see, now dark, shining in the night, in hostile visitations through the black night.

Melinoe is a night terror. She maddens people with phantasmata, apparitions, the word Plato uses in the Phaedo for the shadowy ghosts seen around tombs, and she comes in ephodoi, "visitations." A doctor of the Hippocratic school, writing about epilepsy, criticizes people who blamed night terrors on "attacks of Hekate and visitations of heroes," and he uses the same word. Melinoe belongs to that dark company: her saffron robe, her nights and her dead all recall Hekate.