[…] The murder of the bridegrooms probably took place in the second play, and the trial in the third. A few lines from a speech by Aphrodite in the Danaides have been preserved: The pure Sky yearns with love to wound the Earth, The loving Earth yearns likewise to be wed, And from the heavenly bridegroom showers descend Upon the bride , who brings forth for mankind The grazing cattle and Demeter’s corn, With precious moisture ripening fruits To autumn fullness. In this I too have part. These words were evidently spoken by the goddess of love in vindication of Hypermnestra, who, we are told in the Prometheus, was moved by love to spare her husband. Aphrodite is to Hypermnestra what Apollo is to Orestes. The daughter who chose to cleave to her husband rather than obey her father is justified at law, and in this way the institution of matrimony, involving the subordination of the woman to the man, is formally established. It follows that the defendant at the trial must have been Hypermnestra and not Danaos. This does not mean, as Robertson supposes, that Aeschylus regarded her sisters as either obviously guiltless or obviously unpardonable. The struggle between the Danaides and their suitors was not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two rights, one old and the other new. The acquittal of Hypermnestra does condemn her sisters by implication, and that, in Robertson’s opinion, would be ”a lame conclusion.” But in the first place, we cannot be sure that it was the conclusion, because the insistence in the first play on the idea of the judgement of the dead suggests the possibility that the trilogy concluded with a reference to the fate of the Danaides in the other world. And, in any case, the important thing is not the condemnation of the others, who acted, like the Erinyes, on a principle which has only now been superseded, but the acquittal of Hypermnestra, who is vindication, like Orestes, by an appeal to historical expediency.
- Aeschylus and Athens by George Thomson pg. 307
