Everything about Danaides totally explained
Danaus, or
Danaos ("sleeper" ; Greek ), was a
Greek mythological character, twin brother of
Aegyptus and son of
Achiroe and
Belus, a mythical king of
Egypt. The myth of Danaus is a foundation legend (or re-foundation legend) of
Argos, one of the foremost
Mycenaean cities of the
Peloponnesus. In Homer's
Iliad, "
Danaans" ("tribe of Danaus") and "
Argives" commonly designate the Greek forces opposed to the
Trojans.
Danaus and his wife,
Pieria, according to the
Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus had fifty daughters, the
Danaides, and his twin brother, Aegyptus, had fifty sons. Aegyptus commanded that his sons marry the Danaides. Danaus elected to flee instead, and to that purpose, he built a ship, the first ship that ever was.
In it, he fled to
Argos, to which he was connected by his descent from
Io, the maiden wooed by
Zeus and turned into a heifer and pursued by
Hera until she found asylum in Egypt. Argos at the time was ruled by King
Pelasgus, the
eponym of all autochthonous inhabitants who had lived in Greece since the beginning, also called
Gelanor (he who laughs). The Danaides ask Pelasgus for protection when they arrive, the event portrayed in
The Suppliants by
Aeschylus. Protection is granted after a vote by the Argives.
When
Pausanias visited Argos in the
2nd century CE, he related the succession of Danaus to the throne, judged by the Argives, who "from the earliest times... have loved freedom and self-government, and they limited to the utmost the authority of their kings:"
» "On coming to Argos he claimed the kingdom against Gelanor, the son of Sthenelas. Many plausible arguments were brought forward by both parties, and those of Sthenelas were considered as fair as those of his opponent; so the people, who were sitting in judgment, put off, they say, the decision to the following day. At dawn a wolf fell upon a herd of oxen that was pasturing before the wall, and attacked and fought with the bull that was the leader of the herd. It occurred to the Argives that Gelanor was like the bull and Danaus like the wolf, for as the wolf won't live with men, so Danaus up to that time hadn't lived with them. It was because the wolf overcame the bull that Danaus won the kingdom. Accordingly, believing that Apollo had brought the wolf on the herd, he founded a sanctuary of Apollo Lycius."
The sanctuary of Apollo Lykeios ("wolf-Apollo", but also Apollo of the twilight) was still the most prominent feature of Argos in Pausanias' time: in the sanctuary the tourist might see the throne of Danaus himself, an
eternal flame, called the fire of Phoronius.
When Aegyptus and his fifty sons arrived to take the Danaides, Danaus gave them, to spare the
Argives the pain of a battle. However, he instructed his daughters to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine followed through: "they buried the heads of their bridegrooms in
Lerna;" but one,
Hypermnestra (or
Amymone, the "blameless" Danaid) refused because her husband,
Lynceus, honored her wish to remain a virgin. Danaus was angry with his disobedient daughter and threw her to the Argive courts.
Aphrodite intervened and saved her (Lynceus later killed Danaus as revenge for the death of his brothers). Lynceus and Hypermnestra then began a dynasty of Argive kings (the Danaan Dynasty).
In some versions of the legend, the Danaides were punished in
Tartarus by being forced to carry water through a jug to fill a bath and wash off their sins, but the jugs were actually sieves, so the water always leaked out (the Danish government's third world aid agency's name was changed from DANAID to
DANIDA in the last minute when this unfortunate connotation was discovered).
The remaining forty-nine Danaides had their grooms chosen by a common mythic competition: a foot-race was held and the order in which the potential Argive grooms finished decided their brides (compare the myth of
Atalanta).
Even a cautious reading of the subtext as a vehicle for
legendary history suggests that a
Pelasgian kingship in archaic Argos was overcome, not without violence, by seafarers out of Egypt (compare the
Sea Peoples), whose leaders then intermarried with the local dynasty. The descendants of Danaus' "blameless" daughter Hypermnestra, through
Danaë, led to Perseus, founder of
Mycenae, thus suggesting that Argos had a claim to be the "mother city" of Mycenae.
Danaus in Rhodes
Another account of the travels of Danaus gave him had three daughters,
Ialysa,
Kamira and
Linda, who were worshipped on
Rhodes, where he stopped and founded a sanctuary to
Athena on the way from Egypt to
Greece.
The Danais
The
epic Danais, written by one of the
cyclic poets, though the name hasn't survived and narrating these events, doesn't survive, but the Danaid teralogy of
Aeschylus undoubtedly draws upon its material. It is represented in the table of epics in the received canon on the very fragmentary "Borgia table" as "
Danaides".
The Danaides are also the name of major characters in the novel,
The Lost Kings, who are committed to the city of
Dis for killing their husbands in the manner described by several Greek mythologies.
U.S. federal judges use the version of the legend in which the Danaides are forced to perform an impossible task as a simile for the judges' task of determining whether a case "arises under" the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Danaides'.
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