The Algea are the personified spirits of pain, grief and sorrow — a plural brood borne fatherless by Eris (Strife) among the dark powers that beset mortal life.1
When hard-hearted Eris had herself been born of Night without a father, she continued the dark genealogy in turn, bringing forth a brood of grim children with no father of their own. Among them Hesiod names the Algea — tearful Sorrows, the spirits of bodily pain and the grief of the heart — set immediately after Toil and Forgetfulness and Famine in Strife's catalogue of the powers that afflict humankind.2
Hesiod gives the Algea no adventure and no further parentage: their place in the litany is their identity. They stand among Battles, Murders, Quarrels, Lying Words, Lawlessness and Ruin — all, the poet says, of one nature — so that pain and sorrow are made siblings of conflict itself, the inward suffering that strife sows wherever it touches mortal life.3
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story