Opening The Suppliants — Aeschylus in Plato Scroll…
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Aeschylus · Herbert Weir Smyth (Loeb Classical Library, 1926)
[Image: ]“The Danaides” (1903) by John William Waterhouse Io, daughter of Inachus, King of Argos, was priestess of Hera, whose jealousy of her lord’s love for the maiden brought upon her victim marring of mind and body; and she was driven distraught and in the semblance of a heifer made to wander over land and sea until she came to the land of the Nile. There she regained her human form by the mysterious touch of her lover Zeus, and bore a child Epaphus, from whom sprang Libya, and from her Belus and Agenor. Between Belus’s two sons, Aegyptus and Danaüs, strife arose, and the fifty sons of Aegyptus wished to possess by forced marriage the fifty daughters of Danaüs. But the maidens, loathing the violence of their kinsmen, fled amain with their father to Argos, the home of their primal mother, and besought sanctuary from the king of that land, Pelasgus. The hesitation of the king to …
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