Hypermnestra and her sisters on their wedding night, drawn for a German translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel (1412-1482) of De Mulieribus Claris by Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), and printed by Johannes Zainer (?-?1541) at Ulm in about 1474. Hypermnestra and Lynceus (Linus) are at the righthand edge. In his Heroides XIV, Roman poet Ovid included a passionate and conflicted letter such as Hypermnestra might have written from gaol to Lynceus, the husband she had helped to escape in defiance of her father.
Part 1 of 2
THE Danaides were the fifty daughters of Danaus, who lived beside the Nile. As it happened, his brother Aegyptus had fifty sons, and Aegyptus suggested rather strongly that the cousins should marry. The idea dismayed the girls, and they fled with their father to Argos,* where they were received kindly; and when the sons of Aegyptus came to claim their brides, the brave men of Argos defied them. But their defiance was in vain. The sons of Aegyptus besieged Argos, and cut off its water-supply. To spare the citizens, Danaus capitulated, and the hated marriage went ahead.
Although the wedding feast was awkward, to most eyes Danaus carried out his parental duties scrupulously; but he also brought his daughters fifty unusual wedding gifts, in the form of fifty concealed daggers. That same night, forty-nine brides each slew the drunken intruder in her bed. Hypermnestra alone felt pity: thrice she brought her knife to the neck of Lynceus, the husband who had fallen to her lot, but then she smuggled him to safety.* Her disobedience made Danaus so angry that he dragged her to gaol by her hair, and demanded that King Pelasgus put her to death; but the good people of Argos forbade it.
* Pronounced (by English speakers) da-NAY-ee-deez. The name is derived from their father Danaus, pronounced DA-nay-us. Homer, in his tale of the Trojan War, frequently refers to the Greeks as Danaans, i.e. people of Danaus’s clan.
* Argos is an ancient city in the Peloponnese, Greece’s southern mainland. It stands at the head of the Argolic Gulf, about 24 miles southwest of Corinth. Another name for the Greeks used by Homer was Argives, i.e. people from Argos.
* So imagined Ovid in his Heroides XIV, writing as if from Hypermnestra in her prison cell to her husband Lynceus (pronounced LINS-yoos). As some tell the tale, Lynceus was spared because he alone had not violated his allotted bride on that wedding night — inviting us to reflect on how this small addition changes the credit and blame attached to each of the players in the drama.
Précis
After Danaus’s fifty daughters refused to marry their fifty cousins, he took them to Argos for safety. However, their cousins followed them, and besieged them into submission. At the wedding feast, Danaus supplied each of his daughters with a knife, and that night they slew their domineering husbands - all except Hypermnestra, who helped her Lynceum to get away. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
A hemispherical terracotta strainer, dating from the sixth century BC and originally from Lydia, in what is now southwest Turkey. The porous bath of purification which was the Danaides’ doom has become, like Sisyphus’s rock, a symbol of useless effort. Reginald Welby (1832-1915), a former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, drew on the myth of the Danaides when describing how Richard Cobden (1804-65) felt about the way successive Governments handled the economy. “Military experts, policy-mongers, interested trades have only to ask in order to receive. The tub of the Danaids is a water-tight vessel compared with the exchequer. The burthen of this extravagance weighs upon all classes, but most upon the poor.”
DANAUS found worthier husbands (in his opinion) for his wronged daughters by arranging an athletics contest with his daughters as the prizes. Contestants were understandably slow to come forward, for news of the girls’ late husbands had spread. However, the early winners survived their wedding nights, and eventually grooms were found for everyone except Hypermnestra, who needed none, because she was blissfully reunited with Lynceus.
Yet to the Greek mind, though the fifty sons of Aegyptus had no doubt deserved death, nevertheless forty-nine of the Danaides had committed a crime in this world from which they must not profit in the next. Even the purification rites of Athene and Hermes, performed in the lake at Lerna with Zeus’s blessing, did not satisfy the judges of the Underworld. They instructed the forty-nine to wash away their sins again, in a bath of water they must draw, jug by toilsome jug, from the River Phlegethon in deepest Tartarus. But though they laboured to all eternity they would never complete the sacred rite; for the stern judges had riddled the base of the bath with dozens and dozens of holes.*
* In Plato’s Gorgias 492c-493c, Callicles boldy states that ‘luxury, licentiousness and liberty’ are virtues and should be cultivated. Socrates replies by saying that a soul so untaught and so weakly suggestible is like a man trying to fill a leaky jar with water from a sieve, because his desires are never satisfied, and his mind is too forgetful and infirm of purpose to bring it anything worthwhile. “Of all who are in Hades” he reflects “these uninitiate will be most wretched, and will carry water into their leaky jar with a sieve which is no less leaky.”
Précis
Danaus found better husbands for his forty-nine widowed daughters by offering them as prizes in an athletics competition. But when years had passed and the girls went down to the Underworld, the rulers of that place imposed a penalty for their crime, condemning them to spend eternity filling a bath of purification that could never be filled. (57 / 60 words)
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