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from them either incompletely or not at all. They are mostly girls who, to the delight of their parents, have persisted in all their childish love far beyond puberty. It is most instructive to find that it is precisely these girls who in their later marriage lack the capacity to give their husbands what is due to them; they make cold wives and remain sexually anaesthetic. We learn from this that sexual love and what appears to be non-sexual love for parents are fed from the same sources; the latter, that is to say, merely corresponds to an infantile fixation of the libido (1905: 225227, cf. Freud 1918: 203 and Yates 1930: 173). |
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Development of this interpretation requires analysis of two key issues: the relationship of the Danaids to their father Danaos, and their relationship to their ancestress Io. Although the Danaids' relationship with their father appears to lack the typical oedipal wishes present in normal development, it might be possible to find a trace of libidinal cathexis in the extreme dependence of the girls on their father. This dependence, however, seems to exist much more in what the Danaids say than in what they do. Although they address their father as  ('father, advisor, and leader', 1112), and as  ('father Danaos, brave and wise advisor', 969970), in actual fact the girls themselves are left to their own resources in the major confrontations of the play. Upon the entrance of Pelasgos, king of Argos, Danaos, who up to this point has been voluble enough, becomes a mute character and remains so until the issue has been decided and the king is preparing to leave (a silence of 257 lines). Subsequently, after he himself has seen the arrival of the Egyptian ships, he gives his daughters rather specious advice about the difficulties involved in landing a fleet, and with that goes off to the city, leaving them defenseless.10 |
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Garvie, after rejecting views which imply that Aeschylus was forced (by incompetence, inexperience, or the exigencies of nascent tragedy) to characterize Danaos as he does, suggests that "it is possible that the second actor was already so much an accepted stage convention that Aeschylus could not dispense with his presence for this play. Danaos moreover was provided by the myth, and could hardly be omitted from any treatment of the story" (1969: 136). As Kitto said, in discussing the belief that the tragic poet is sooner or later forced by the mythological data to write not what he wishes but what he must, "This myth about Myth should be exploded. It does us little credit, since all the evidence points the other way, and it renders us no service beyond that of exempting us from taking seriously all that we find in a play" (1966: 29). |
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Garvie goes on to explain the role of Danaos as a result of the exchange of function: |
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10 The arguments supporting Wilamowitz' description of Danaos as an "Annex seiner Töchter" are summarized by Garvie (1969) 127. |
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