Belus And The Danaids

KING Belus, who ruled at Chemmis in the Egyptian Thebaid, was the son of Libya by Poseidon, and twin-brother of Agenor. His wife Anchinoë, daughter of Nilus, bore him the twins Aegyptus and Danaus, and a third son, Cepheus.
b. Aegyptus was given Arabia as his kingdom; but also subdued the country of the Melampodes, and named it Egypt after himself. Fifty sons were born to him of various mothers: Libyans, Arabians, Phoenicians, and the like. Danaus, sent to rule Libya, had fifty daughters, called the Danaids, also born of various mothers: Naiads, Hamadryads, Egyptian princesses of Elephantis and Memphis, Ethiopians, and the like.

c. On Belus’s death, the twins quarrelled over their inheritance, and as a conciliatory gesture Aegyptus proposed a mass-marriage between the fifty princes and the fifty princesses. Danaus, suspecting a plot, would not consent and, when an oracle confirmed his fears that Aegyptus had it in his mind to kill all the Danaids, prepared to flee from Libya.
d. With Athene’s assistance, he built a ship for himself and his daughters-the first two- prowed vessel that ever took to sea-and they sailed towards Greece together, by way of Rhodes. There Danaus dedicated an image to Athene in a temple raised for her by the Danaids, three of whom died during their stay in the island; the cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus are called after them.
e. From Rhodes they sailed to the Peloponnese and landed near Lerna, where Danaus announced that he was divinely chosen to become King of Argos. Though the Argive King, Gelanor, naturally laughed at this claim, his subjects assembled that evening to discuss it. Gelanor would doubtless have kept the throne, despite Danaus’s declaration that Athene was supporting him, had not the Argives postponed their decision until dawn, when a wolf came boldly down from the hills, attacked a herd of cattle grazing near the city walls, and killed the leading bull. This they read as an omen that Danaus would take the throne by violence if he were opposed, and therefore persuaded Gelanor to resign it peacefully.
f. Danaus, convinced that the wolf had been Apollo in disguise, dedicated the famous shrine to Wolfish Apollo at Argos, and became so powerful a ruler that all the Pelasgians of Greece called themselves Danaans. He also built the citadel of Argos, and his daughters brought the Mysteries of Demeter, called Thesmophoria, from Egypt, and taught these to the Pelasgian women, But, since the Dorian invasion, the Thesmophoria are no longer performed in the Peloponnese, except by the Arcadians.
g. Danaus had found Argolis suffering from a prolonged drought, since Poseidon, vexed by Inachus’s decision that the land was Hera’s, had dried up all the rivers and streams. He  sent his daughters in search of water, with orders to placate Poseidon by any means they knew. One of them, by name Amymone, while chasing a deer in the forest, happened to disturb a sleeping satyr. He sprang up and tried to ravish her; but Poseidon, whom she invoked, hurled his trident at the satyr. The fleeing satyr dodged, the trident stuck quivering in a rock, and Poseidon himself lay with Amymone, who was glad that she could carry out her father’s instructions so pleasantly. On learning her errand, Poseidon pointed to his trident and told her to pull it from the rock. When she did so, three streams of water jetted up from the three tine- holes. This spring, now named Amymone, is the source of the river Lerna, which never fails, even at the height of summer.
h. At Amymone the monstrous Hydra was born to Echidna under a plane-tree. It lived in the near-by Lernaean Lake, to which murderers come for purification-hence the proverb: ‘A Lerna of evils.’
i. Aegyptus now sent his sons to Argos, forbidding them to return until they had punished Danaus and his whole family. On their arrival, they begged Danaus to reverse his former decision and let them marry his daughters-intending, however, to murder them on the wedding night. When he still refused, they laid siege to Argos. Now, there are no springs on the Argive citadel, and though the Danaids afterwards invented the art of sinking wells, and supplied the city with several of these, including four sacred ones, it was waterless at the time in question. Seeing that thirst would soon force him to capitulate, Danaus promised to do  what the sons of Aegyptus asked, as soon as they raise the siege.
j. A mass-marriage was arranged, and Danaus paired off the couples-his choice being made in some cases because the bride and bridegroom had mothers of equal rank, or because their names were similar-thus Cleite, Sthenele, and Chrysippe married Cleitus, Sthenelus, and Chrysippus-but in most cases he drew lots from a helmet.

k. During the wedding-feast Danaus secretly doled out sharp pins which his daughters were to conceal in their hair; and at midnight each stabbed her husband through the heart. There was only one survivor-on Artemis’s advice, Hypermnestra saved the life of Lynceus, because he had spared her maidenhead; and helped him in his flight to the city of Lyncea,  sixty furlongs away. Hypermnestra begged him to light beacon as a signal that he had reached safety, undertaking to answer with another beacon from the citadel; and the Argives still light annual beacon-fires in commemoration of this pact. At dawn, Danaus learned of Hypermnestra’s disobedience, and she was tried for her life; but acquitted by the Argive judges. She therefore raised an image to Victorious Aphrodite in the shrine of Wolfish Apollo, and also dedicate a sanctuary to Persuasive Artemis.
l. The murdered men’s heads were buried at Lerna, and their bodies given full funeral honours below the walls of Argos; but, although Athene and Hermes purified the Danaids in the Lernaean Lake with Zeus’s permission, the Judges of the Dead have condemned them the endless task of carrying water in jars perforated like sieves.
m. Lynceus and Hypermnestra were reunited, and Danaus, deciding to marry off the other daughters as fast as he could before noon on the day of their purification, called for suitors.  He proposed a marriage race starting from the street now called Apheta: the winner to have fast choice of a wife, and the others the next choices, in their order of finishing the race. Since he could not find enough men who would risk their lives by marrying murderesses, only a few ran; but when the wedding night passed without disaster to the new bridegrooms, more suitors appeared, and another race was run on the following day. A descendants of these marriages rank as Danaans; and the Argives still celebrate the race in their so-called Hymenaean Contest. Lynceus later killed Danaus, and reigned in his stead. He would willingly have killed his sisters-in-law at the same time, to avenge his murdered brothers, had the Argives permitted this.
n. Meanwhile, Aegyptus had come to Greece, but when he learned of his sons’ fate, fled to Aroe, where he died, and was buried at Patrae, in a sanctuary of Serapis.
o. Amymone’s son by Poseidon, Nauplius, a famous navigator, discovered the art of steering by the Great Bear, and founded the city of Nauplius, where he settled the Egyptian crew that had sailed with his grandfather. He was the ancestor of Nauplius the Wrecker, who used to lure hostile ships to their death by lighting false beacons.

1. This myth records the early arrival in Greece of Helladic colonists from Palestine, by way of Rhodes, and their introduction of agriculture into the Peloponnese. It is claimed that they included emigrants from Libya and Ethiopia, which seems probable. Belus is the Baal of the Old Testament, and the Bel of the Apocrypha; he had taken his name from the Sumerian Moon-goddess Belili, whom he ousted.
2. The three Danaids, also known as the Telchines, or ‘enchanters’, who named the three chief cities of Rhodes, were the Triple Moon-goddess Danaë. The names Linda, Cameira, and Ialysa seem to be worn-down forms of linodeousa (‘binder with linen thread’), catamerizousa (‘sharer out’), and ialemistria (‘wailing woman’); they are, in fact, the familiar Three Fates, or Moerae, otherwise known as Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, because they exercised very same functions. The Classical theory of the linen-thread was that the goddess tied the human being to the end of a carefully measured thread which she paid out yearly, until the time came for her to cut it and relinquish his soul to death. But originally she bound the wailing infant with a linen swaddling band on which his clan and family marks were embroidered and thus assigned him his destined place in society.
3. Danaë’s Sumerian name was Dam-kina. The Hebrews called her Dinah (Genesis), also masculinized as Dan. Fifty Moon-priestesses were the regular complement of a college, and their duty was to preserve the land watered by rain-making charms, irrigation, and well- digging; hence the Danaids’ name has been connected with the Greek word danos-‘parched’, and with danos-‘a gift’, the first of which is sometimes long and sometimes short. The twinship of Agenor and Belus, like that of Danaus and Aegyptus, points to a regal system at Argos, in which each co-king married a Chief-priestess and reigned for fifty lunar months, or Great Year. Chief-priestesses were chosen by a foot race (the origin of Olympic Games), run at the end of the fifty months, or of forty-nine in alternate years. And the New Year foot race at Olympia, Sparta, Jerusalem (Hooke: Origin of Early Semitic Rituals), and Babylon (Langdon: Epic of Creation) was run for the sacred kingship, as at Argos. A Sun-king must be quick.

4. The Hydra, destroyed by Heracles, seem to have personified this college of water- providing priestesses, and the myth of the Danaids apparently records two Hellenic attempts on their sanctuary, the first of which failed signally. After the second successful attempt, the Hellenic leader married the Chief-priestess and distributed the water-priestesses as wives among his chieftains. ‘The street called Apheta’ will have been the starting-point in the girls’ race for the office of Chief-priestess; but also used in the men’s foot race for the sacred kingship. Lynceus, a royal title in Messene too, means ‘of the lynx’-the caracal, a sort of lion, famous for its sharp sight..
5. ‘Aegyptus’ and ‘Danaus’ seem to have been early titles of Argive co-kings; and since it was a widespread custom to bury the sacred king’s head at the approaches of a city, and thus protect it against invasion, the supposed heads of Aegyptus’s sons buried at Lerna are probably those of successive sacred kings. The Egyptians were Melampodes (‘black feet’) because they paddled about in the black mud during the sowing season.
6. A later, monogamous, society represented the Danaids with leaking water-pots as undergoing eternal punishment for matricide. But in the icon from which this story derived, they were performing a necessary charm: sprinkling water on the ground to produce rain showers by sympathetic magic. It seems that the sieve, or leaking pot, remained a distinguishing mark of the wise woman many centuries after the abolition of the Danaid colleges: Philostratus writes (Life of Apollonius of Tyana) of ‘women with sieves in their hands who go about pretending to heal cattle for simple cowherds.’
7. Hypermnestra’s and Lynceus’s beacon-fires will have been those lighted at the Argive Spring Festival to celebrate the triumph of the Sun. It may be that at Argos the sacred king was put to death with a long needle thrust through his heart: a comparatively merciful end.
8. The Thesmophoria (‘due offerings’) were agricultural orgies celebrated at Athens, in  the course of which the severed genitals of the sacred king, or his surrogate, were carried in a basket; these were replaced in more civilized times by phallus-shaped loaves and live serpents. Apollo Lycius may mean ‘Apollo of the Light’, rather than ‘Wolfish Apollo’, but the two concepts were connected by the wolves’ habit of howling at the full moon.