Daughters of Danaus

The Daughters of Danaus were the fifty daughters of Danaus that were to marry the fifty sons of his twin brother Aegyptus, who was a mythical king of Egypt. Danaus did not want his daughters to go ahead with the marriages and he fled with them in the first boat built to Argos, which is located in Greece near the ancient city of Mycenae.

Danaus agreed to the marriage of his daughters only after Aegyptus came to Argos with his fifty sons in order to protect the local population, the Argives, from any battles. The daughters were ordered by their father to kill their husbands on the first night of their weddings and this they all did with the exception of one, Hypermnestra, who spared her husband Lynceus because he respected her desire to continue a virgin. Danaus was angered that his daughter refused to do as he ordered and took her to the Argives courts. Lynceus killed Danaus as revenge for the death of his brothers and he and Hypermnestra started the Danaan Dynasty of rulers in Argos.

The other forty-nine daughters remarried by choosing their mates in footraces. Some accounts tell that their punishment was in Tartarus being forced to carry a jug to fill a bathtub (pithos) without a bottom (or with a leak) to wash their feet. Because the water was always leaking they would forever try to fill the tub. Probably this myth is connected with a ceremony having to do with the worship of waters, and the Danaides were water-nymphs. The rivers at Argolis were empty during summer and they overflowed during winter, therefore the name Danaus and Danaides is probably connected with the PIE root *danu:"river".

Modern literature
The Daughters of Danaus is also the title of an 1894 novel by Mona Caird, also dealing with imposed marriage although in this case it is a single marriage instead of fifty, and in 19th-century Great Britain.