Danaides

Also Known As: also Danaids; Greek Danaides, “daughters of Danaus”; the fifty include Hypermnestra and Amymone
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: The Danaides are fifty mortal sisters with no powers of their own, known for a single night of murder and, in later tellings, for carrying water forever to a jar that will not fill.
Role in Mythos: They are the daughters of Danaus who flee Egypt for Argos, kill their bridegroom cousins on the wedding night, and through the one sister who refuses become the root of the royal line that leads to Perseus and Heracles.
Relation to Humans: The people of Argos credited them with finding the springs that ended a great drought, and Herodotus says they brought the women’s rites of Demeter from Egypt to Greece. To later Greeks and Romans they were the standard picture of labour that never ends.

A long ship comes in under oar to the flat shore below Argos, the first ship ever built, if the old mythographers are right. Fifty young women climb out of it into the heat. They are carrying fresh-cut branches wrapped in white wool, the sign of people who have come to beg, and they walk up from the beach to a mound crowded with the altars of gods they have never worshipped. Their father tells them to sit down there and to keep their voices low.

That is how Aeschylus opens his play about them, staged in Athens around 463 BC, and it is the oldest full scene of the Danaides that survives. Their story begins further back. They descend from Io, the Argive girl whom Zeus loved and Hera drove across the world as a cow until she came to rest in Egypt. Io’s great-grandson Belus had twin sons. Aegyptus was given Arabia and took Egypt as well; Danaus was given Libya. Aegyptus fathered fifty sons by many wives, and Danaus fathered fifty daughters the same way. When the brothers fell out over the kingdom, the fifty sons were put forward as husbands for the fifty daughters. Danaus did not trust the offer. On the advice of Athena he built a ship, loaded his daughters aboard and ran, pausing at Rhodes, where the girls set up a temple to Athena at Lindos, and then on to the country Io had come from.

In Aeschylus the king they find there is named Pelasgus, and he is given an ugly choice. If he shelters these strangers he invites a war. If he turns them away he offends Zeus, who protects suppliants. The sisters help him decide by pointing to their own belts and to the statues of the gods, and explaining that they will hang themselves from the images if he refuses. He takes the matter to the people of Argos, who vote to protect them. A herald from the Egyptian fleet arrives soon after and tries to drag the women to the ships by their hair. The mythographer Apollodorus tells it faster: the reigning king, Gelanor, simply hands Danaus the throne.

Argos at that time was bone dry. Poseidon had taken the water out of the land in a rage, because the river Inachus had testified that the country belonged to Hera. So the new king sent his daughters out with jars, and for a while this was their ordinary work: walking a cracked plain under a white sky, looking for anything wet. One of them, Amymone, threw a hunting dart at a deer and hit a sleeping satyr. He woke up interested. Poseidon appeared, the satyr ran, and the god took the girl himself and afterwards showed her the springs of Lerna. An old line credited to Hesiod says that Argos had no water until the daughters of Danaus gave it some. Amymone later bore Poseidon a son, Nauplius.

Then the cousins arrived. They asked for an end to the quarrel and for their brides. Danaus agreed, drew lots to pair the couples, and gave a feast. He also gave each daughter a dagger.

Forty-nine of them used it.

The halls were dark and the bridegrooms heavy with wine and sleep. By morning the sisters were carrying out the dead. Apollodorus says they buried the heads at Lerna and gave the bodies a funeral in front of the city; the traveller Pausanias, centuries later, was shown it the other way round, a tomb for the heads on the road up to the citadel and the bodies down in the marsh. Either way the heads and the bodies were kept apart.

The one who did not strike was Hypermnestra. Her husband, Lynceus, had left her a virgin that night, Apollodorus says, and so she let him live. The people of Argos told Pausanias the rest. Lynceus got away to a hill town and lit a fire there to show he was safe, and she answered with a fire of her own on the citadel, and the Argives went on holding a festival of beacons every year in memory of it. Danaus locked her up and put her on trial for disobedience. The Argives acquitted her. She dedicated a statue of Aphrodite in thanks, and in the lost last play of the Aeschylus trilogy the goddess herself seems to have spoken on the side of love, in a surviving fragment about the sky longing for the earth and the rain that comes of it.

Nothing bad happened to the forty-nine, at least in the older tellings. Athena and Hermes washed them clean of the killing on the orders of Zeus. Their father then had the problem of finding husbands for a large number of daughters with a known history. Pindar describes his answer. He stood all forty-eight of them at the finish line of a racecourse, set the suitors running, and let each man choose in the order he arrived. They were all married before noon.

The famous punishment comes in late. A Greek dialogue once passed off as Plato’s, the Axiochus, is the first text to place the Danaides in the underworld drawing water that never fills anything, and after that the Roman poets cannot leave it alone. Horace, Ovid and others put them in the deep pit beside Tantalus and Sisyphus, hauling jars to a great vessel with holes in its base, or dipping with pitchers that are cracked, or with sieves. The water runs out as fast as it goes in. Older Greeks knew the image well, but they used it for people who had died without being initiated into the mysteries, and never attached a name to it. Somewhere along the way the anonymous water-carriers and the sisters who once went looking for water in Argos became the same women.

What they had was numbers, nerve, and a father with a plan. Fifty people acting together on one night can do what an army could not, and in Aeschylus they are already willing to die on a sacred mound sooner than marry by force. Their limits are just as plain. No single sister except Hypermnestra ever decides anything for herself. They act as a chorus, and one voice out of fifty is enough to undo the scheme: Lynceus lived, and in some accounts he killed Danaus and took the throne. In the end it was the disobedient daughter who founded the dynasty. Her son was Abas, his grandson Acrisius, and from Acrisius came Danae, Perseus and at last Heracles.

The Greeks at Troy are called Danaans in Homer, after the father. In Rome, the emperor Augustus lined the portico of his new temple of Apollo on the Palatine with statues of the daughters, one between each pair of yellow marble columns, their father standing among them with his sword drawn.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Danaides in Greek mythology?

The Danaides are the fifty daughters of Danaus, a descendant of Io who fled from Egypt to Argos. They were forced to marry their fifty cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, and forty-nine of them killed their husbands on the wedding night.

Why did the Danaides kill their husbands?

The Danaides killed their husbands on the orders of their father, Danaus, who had quarrelled with his twin brother Aegyptus and feared his nephews. Danaus agreed to the marriages, then gave each daughter a dagger to use once the bridegrooms were asleep. In Aeschylus the sisters also reject the marriages themselves, because the cousins mean to take them by force.

Which of the Danaides did not kill her husband?

Hypermnestra was the one Danaid who spared her husband. Apollodorus says she saved Lynceus because he had respected her virginity. Danaus imprisoned her and put her on trial, the people of Argos acquitted her, and her descendants with Lynceus include Danae, Perseus and Heracles.

What is the punishment of the Danaides?

In later tellings the Danaides are condemned in the underworld to carry water forever to a vessel full of holes, so the task can never be finished. This punishment does not appear in the oldest accounts. Apollodorus says Athena and Hermes purified the sisters, and Pindar says Danaus married forty-eight of them off to the winners of a footrace.

How did the Danaides bring water to Argos?

Argos was suffering a drought sent by Poseidon when the Danaides arrived, and Danaus sent his daughters out to search for water. Poseidon rescued one of them, Amymone, from a satyr and then showed her the springs at Lerna. An old line credited to Hesiod says Argos was waterless until the daughters of Danaus gave it water.