Danaus

Great-great-grandson of Epaphus by Io, co-ruler of Egypt with his brother Aegyptus and father of fifty daughters (the Danaides) by multiple wives. Warned by an oracle that one of Aegyptus's fifty sons would kill him if the cousin-cousin marriages went ahead, he built a fifty-oared ship and fled west with his daughters (Apollod. 2.1.4). After a stopover on Rhodes, where he founded the sanctuary of Athena at Lindos (Diod. Sic. 5.58.4 + the Lindian Chronicle — Hdt. 2.182 is about Amasis's votive offerings centuries later, not the Danaid foundation), he arrived at Argos, supplicated King Pelasgus (the dramatic action of Aesch. *Suppl.*), and was recognised as the rightful king by descent from Io. When Aegyptus's sons followed and claimed their brides, Danaus instructed his daughters to kill them on the wedding night; forty-nine obeyed. The eponym of the Danaoi — the Homeric Greeks — and the mythic armature of the Greek-Egyptian kinship tradition that Herodotus 2.91 inherits through the Perseus-at-Chemmis cult genealogy (Danaus and Lynceus as Egyptian Chemmites).

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