OUR fullest account of Danaus and his daughters is to be found in the Bibliotheca ascribed to Apollodorus (II. 1). The essential features of the story are about as follows:

Danaus and Aegyptus were two brothers of royal lineage; the one settled in Libya, the other in Arabia or Egypt. Aegyptus had by different wives fifty sons, and Danaus had fifty daughters. The two brothers fell into strife about the succession to their father's kingdom, and Danaus, fearing for the safety of his daughters and himself, fled with them to Argos. The sons of Aegyptus pursued, and by force or persuasion prevailed upon Danaus to give them his daughters in marriage. But after the wedding feast, Danaus bade his daughters slay their husbands during the night. Thus all the young men perished except Lynceus, whom his bride, Hypermestra, allowed to escape. For this disobedience, she was imprisoned by her father. Meanwhile, her sisters had sunk the heads of their murdered husbands in the Lernaean marsh, and had been cleansed of their guilt by Hermes and Athena. Afterward Danaus released Hypermestra and gave his sanction to her marriage with Lynceus. His other daughters were married to the victors in an athletic contest.

In the scholia to Euripides (Hec. 886) there is an account. that differs in some noteworthy particulars from the narrative of Apollodorus. From that it appears that Danaus and Aegyptus lived in Argos, and that the former, moved by envy and fear, drove his brother into Egypt with his sons. The sons of Aegyptus afterward returned, and met their death in the fatal wedding-night. Nothing is said about the purification of the guilty sisters, nor about their second marriage; on the contrary, the scholiast relates that Lynceus

revenged the murder of his brothers by slaying Danaus and all his daughters except Hypermestra.

There are several allusions to the crime of the Danaids in writers of the classical period,1 but no mention of their punishment in the lower world is found until the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus (p. 371 E). Hence there is some ground for believing this punishment to be a later addition to the story.

Writers on mythology have almost with one accord sought to find an explanation of the Danaid myth in natural phenomena. The interpretation of Preller (Preller-Plew, Griech. Myth. II. pp. 46-47), which is repeated in Roscher's Lexikon, may be taken as a type of these attempts. According to Preller, the Danaids are the nymphs of the Argive springs, their impetuous suitors are the streams of the land, which in wet seasons are violent torrents, but in summer dry up, as the nymphs cut off their heads; that is, check the waters at the fountains. Preller finds a confirmation of his view in the tradition that the heads of the sons of Aegyptus were buried in the Lernaean marsh. For, he says, springs are the heads of rivers, and the moist region of Lerna was especially rich in springs.

The interpretation of myths by natural phenomena is much less in favor now than formerly, and one may well be dissatisfied with Preller's fanciful explanation. Let us examine some of the arguments that may be urged in favor of his view. First, about the heads of the murdered youths. The tradition is not consistent, for Pausanias (II. 24, 2) says that their heads were buried beside a road leading into the Argive citadel, and their bodies thrown into the Lernaean marsh. This, of course, may be only a confusion; but even supposing the other version to be the correct one, the argument is worth very little, for it is doubtful whether the use of head for source, spring, was as familiar to the Greeks as it is to us. I know of only one certain instance of kepaλn with the meaning source or headwater, in Herodotus (IV. 91). But since

1 Cf. Aesch. Prom. 879 ff.; Eur. Hec. 886; H. F. 1016; Pindar, Nem. X. 1 ff.

in that passage Herodotus is reproducing an inscription of Darius, one commentator, Abicht, has gone so far as to suggest that the peculiar use of kepaλý may be due to its representing an Old Persian word (Sir) which means both head and source. No example of kepaλń with the meaning of spring is quoted in Sophocles's Lexikon of Byzantine Greek, and it is not until the modern period that we find the diminutive kepaλáρiov with the meaning spring. But leaving all this out of the question, the story about the heads of the sons of Aegyptus can be better explained in another way. I shall, therefore, return to this matter later.

Another circumstance that has done much to uphold the old interpretation of the myth is, that Amymone was numbered among the daughters of Danaus. Her adventure with a satyr and her amour with Poseidon are related by Apollodorus, .c., and Hyginus (Fab. 169). Now Amymone as the favorite of Poseidon, and the maiden from whom the river Amymone, near Lerna, took its name, is rightly to be considered a nymph.1 But the story of Amymone does not really belong to the Danaid-myth. Some of the ancient writers themselves set her apart from the blood-stained sisters. Pindar (Pyth. IX. 193) gives the number of the women that were won in the athletic contest as forty-eight, and the scholiast ad locum says that Hypermestra and Amymone were excepted, the former because she was married to Lynceus, the latter because she had found a lover in Poseidon. Lucian (Dial. Mar. 6, ad fin.) makes Poseidon say to Amymone that she alone shall escape the endless punishment to which the Danaids were doomed. Thus it seems not unlikely that in the earliest form of the story Amymone had nothing whatever to do with the women that murdered their husbands, and that the statement that she was one of the daughters of Danaus is an invention of genealogical writers. Similarly Agraulos, Pandrosos, and Herse, originally nymphs, were by Attic genealogists said to be daughters of Cecrops. (See Bloch in Roscher's Lexikon, article "Nymphen," col. 529.)

1 In regard to the river and fountain Amymone, see Paus. II. 37, 1; Strab. VIII., p. 371.

Other bits of evidence cited in favor of the current interpretation are that the art of digging wells was, according to the legend, first taught by Danaus or his daughters, and the number of the Danaids corresponds to that of the Nereids. But Danaus, as the eponymous hero of the Danaän race, is the reputed inventor of other arts as well: even that of writing is ascribed to him by some authorities. And as for the number fifty, what of the fifty sons of Priam and the fifty daughters of Thestius?

Whatever may be said of Amymone and certain other nymphs that were included in the family of Danaus, there is no reason to regard the women that murdered their husbands as nymphs, or to put an allegorical interpretation upon their crime. If this narrative is carefully examined, I think it will be found to be no nature-myth, but a mere monster-story like many that are told in the nursery to-day.

It is necessary, however, to set aside an element that does not belong to the original story. This is the fiction that the murder of the sons of Aegyptus was a justifiable action, committed by the Danaids in defence of their honor and freedom. Thus in the Suppliants of Aeschylus the Danaids are represented as having fled from Egypt to Argos in order not to be forced into a marriage with their violent cousins. But Eduard Meyer (Forschungen zur alten Geschichte, pp. 78, 82) has shown that the story of Danaus and his daughters belonged to Greece, and that its connection with Egypt was a consequence of the identification of the Argive Io with the Egyptian Isis; for Danaus was said to be descended from Io. (See Apollodorus, .c.) When the story arose that Io wandered to Egypt and there gave birth to Epaphus, the historians and genealogists had to explain how the later descendants of Io came back to Argos. They resorted to the familiar device of a quarrel between Danaus and his brother, and hence arose the account of the flight of Danaus to Argos, and the conception of the Danaids as persecuted maidens. There are indications that this conception never

1 Wecklein, in Sitzungsber. d. bair. Akad. 1893, pp. 401 ff., proposes a less satisfactory explanation of the transference of Danaus from Argos to Egypt.