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.”