Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After the forty-nine Danaids murdered their cousin-bridegrooms at Argos, classical tradition does not leave their guilt only on earth. Beside Athena and Hermes’s purification and Danaus’s later remarriages of the survivors (Apollodorus), a separate and widely pictured strand consigns the guilty sisters to Hades for futile labor: they must draw water and pour it into a great jar (or pithos) that never fills, because their vessels are sieves or the receiving jar is riddled with holes. Water runs out as fast as it is poured. The task has no end; the vessel never stands full. Ancient interpreters and painters treat the scene as the emblem of wasted effort and of marriage rite turned to slaughter. Plato’s *Gorgias* already uses “water-carriers with sieves” as a moral and eschatological image; Pausanias describes Danaids among the underworld figures in Polygnotus’s painting at Delphi. Hypermnestra, who spared Lynceus, is regularly exempted from the jar-band. The punishment thus marks the difference between kinship mercy and mass kin-murder: one couple founds the Argive line toward Perseus; the rest labor forever at a wedding-jar that will not hold water—an aition of broken nuptial vessels and of blood that cannot be washed clean by ordinary washing alone.