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THE DANAÏDS

These maidens are famous—far more so than anyone reading their story would expect. They are often referred to by the poets and they are among the most prominent sufferers in the hell of mythology, where they must forever try to carry water in leaking jars. Yet except for one of them, Hypermnestra, they did only what the Argonauts found the women of Lemnos had done: they killed their husbands. Nevertheless, the Lemnians are hardly ever mentioned, while everyone who knows even a little about mythology has heard of the Danaïds.

There were fifty of them, all of them daughters of Danaüs, one of Io’s descendants, who dwelt by the Nile. Their fifty cousins, sons of Danaüs’ brother Aegyptus, wanted to marry them, which for some unexplained reason they were absolutely opposed to doing. They fled with their father by ship to Argos, where they found sanctuary. The Argives voted unanimously to maintain the right of the suppliant. When the sons of Aegyptus arrived ready to fight to gain their brides, the city repulsed them. They would allow no woman to be forced to marry against her will they told the newcomers, nor would they surrender any suppliant, no matter how feeble, and no matter how powerful the pursuer.

At this point there is a break in the story. When it is resumed, in the next chapter, so to speak, the maidens are being married to their cousins and their father is presiding at the marriage feast. There is no explanation of how this came about, but at once it is clear that it was not through any change of mind in either Danaüs or his daughters, because at the feast he is represented as giving each girl a dagger. As the event shows, all of them had been told what to do and had agreed. After the marriage, in the dead of night, they killed their bridegrooms—everyone except Hypermnestra. She alone was moved by pity. She looked at the strong young man lying motionless in sleep beside her, and she could not strike with her dagger to change that glowing vigor into cold death. Her promise to her father and her sisters was forgotten. She was, the Latin poet Horace says, splendidly false. She woke the youth, —his name was Lynceus,—told him all, and helped him to flee.

Her father threw her into prison for her treachery to him. One story says that she and Lynceus came together again and lived at last in happiness, and that their son was Abas, the great-grandfather of Perseus. The other stories end with the fatal wedding night and her imprisonment.

All of them, however, tell of the unending futility of the task the forty-nine Danaïds were

compelled to pursue in the lower world as a punishment for murdering their husbands. At the river’s edge they filled forever jars riddled with holes, so that the water poured away and they must return to fill them again, and again see them drained dry.

GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA

Glaucus was a fisherman who was fishing one day from a green meadow which sloped down to the sea. He had spread his catch out on the grass and was counting the fish when he saw them all begin to stir and then, moving toward the water, slip into it and swim away. He was utterly amazed. Had a god done this or was there some strange power in the grass? He picked a handful and ate it. At once an irresistible longing for the sea took possession of him. There was no denying it. He ran and leaped into the waves. The sea-gods received him kindly and called on Ocean and Tethys to purge his mortal nature away and make him one of them. A hundred rivers were summoned to pour their waters upon him. He lost consciousness in the rushing flood. When he recovered he was a sea-god with hair green like the sea and a body ending in a fish’s tail, to the dwellers in the water a fine and familiar form, but strange and repellent to the dwellers on earth. So he seemed to the lovely nymph Scylla when she was bathing in a little bay and caught sight of him rising from the sea. She fled from him until she stood on a lofty promontory where she could safely watch him, wondering at the half-man, half-fish. Glaucus called up to her, “Maiden, I am no monster. I am a god with power over the waters—and I love you.” But Scylla turned from him and hastening inland was lost to his sight.

Glaucus and Scylla

Glaucus was in despair, for he was madly in love; and he determined to go to Circe, the enchantress, and beg her for a love-potion to melt Scylla’s hard heart. But as he told her his tale of love and implored her help Circe fell in love with him. She wooed him with her sweetest words and looks, but Glaucus would have none of her. “Trees will cover the sea bottom and seaweed the mountain tops before I cease to love Scylla,” he told her. Circe was furiously angry, but with Scylla, not Glaucus. She prepared a vial of very powerful poison and, going to the bay where Scylla bathed, she poured into it the baleful liquid. As soon as Scylla entered the water she was changed into a frightful monster. Out from her body grew serpents’ and fierce dogs’ heads. The beastly forms were part of her; she could not fly from them or push them away. She stood there rooted to a rock, in her unutterable misery hating and destroying everything that came within her reach, a peril to all sailors who passed near her, as Jason and Odysseus and Aeneas found out.

ERYSICHTHON

One woman had power given her to assume different shapes, power as great as Proteus had. She used it, strangely enough, to procure food for her starving father. Her story is the only one in which the good goddess, Ceres, appears cruel and vindictive. Erysichthon had the wicked audacity to cut down the tallest oak in a grove sacred to Ceres. His servants shrank from the sacrilege when he ordered them to fell it; whereupon he seized an ax himself and attacked the mighty trunk around which the dryads used to hold their dances. Blood flowed from the tree when he struck it and a voice came from within warning him that Ceres would surely punish his crime. But these marvels did not check his fury; he struck again and again until the great oak crashed to the ground. The dryads hastened to Ceres to tell her what had happened, and the goddess, deeply offended, told them she would punish the criminal in a way never known before. She sent one of them in her car to the bleak region where Famine dwells to order her to take possession of Erysichthon. “Bid her see to it,” Ceres said, “that no abundance shall ever satisfy him. He shall starve in the very act of devouring food.”

Famine obeyed the command. She entered Erysichthon’s room where he slept and she wrapped her skinny arms around him. Holding him in her foul embrace she filled him with herself and planted hunger within him. He woke with a raging desire for food and called for something to eat. But the more he ate the more he wanted. Even as he crammed meat down his throat he starved. He spent all his wealth on vast supplies of food which never gave him a moment’s satisfaction. At last he had nothing left except his daughter. He sold her too. On the seashore, where her owner’s ship lay, she prayed to Poseidon to save her from slavery and the god heard her prayer. He changed her into a fisherman. Her master, who had been but a little behind her, saw on the long stretch of beach only the figure of a man busy with his fishing lines. He called to him, “Where has that girl gone who was here a moment ago? Here are her footprints and they suddenly stop.” The supposed fisherman answered, “I swear by the God of the Sea that no man except myself has come to this shore, and no woman either.” When the other, completely bewildered, had gone off in his boat, the girl returned to her own shape. She went back to her father and delighted him by telling him what had happened. He saw an endless opportunity of making money by her. He sold her again and again. Each time Poseidon changed her, now into a mare, now into a bird, and so on. Each time she escaped from her owner and came back to her father. But at last, when the money she thus earned for him was not enough for his needs, he turned upon his own body and devoured it until he killed himself.