Everything about Aegyptus totally explained
In
Greek mythology,
Aígyptos, usually Latinized as
Aegyptus, in
Greek ("supine goat"), descendant of the
heifer maiden,
Io, and the river-god
Nilus, was a king in
Egypt. Aegyptos was the son of
Belus and
Achiroe, a
naiad daughter of Niule. Aegyptus fathered fifty sons, who were all but one murdered by the fifty daughters of Aegyptus' twin brother,
Danaus, eponym of the
Danaans, a name for the
Mycenaean Greeks.
A
scholium on a line in
Euripides,
Hecuba 886, reverses these origins, placing the twin brothers at first in
Argolis, whence Aegyptus was expelled and fled to the land that was named after him. In the more common version, Aegyptus commanded that his fifty sons marry the fifty
Danaides, and Danaus with his daughters fled to
Argos, ruled by
Pelasgus or by
Gelanor, whom Danaus replaced. When Aegyptus and his sons arrived to take the Danaides, Danaus relinquished them, to spare the Argives the pain of a battle; however, he instructed his daughters to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine followed through, but one,
Hypermnestra ("greatly wooed"), refused, because her husband,
Lynceus the "lynx-man", honored her wish to remain a virgin. Danaus was angry with his disobedient daughter and threw her to the Argive courts.
Aphrodite intervened and saved her. Lynceus later slew Danaus as revenge for the death of his brothers. Lynceus and Hypermnestra founded the lineage of Argive kings, a Danaan dynasty. In some versions of the legend, the Danaides were punished in the underworld by being forced to carry water through a jug with holes, or a sieve, so that the water always leaked out.
The story of Danaus and his daughters, and the reason for their flight from marriage, provided the theme of
Aeschylus'
The Supplicants.
The Aegyptus of Greek myth isn't a genuinely Egyptian figure, but a figment of
Egypt in the European imagination.
In the second or third century CE,
Antoninus Liberalis tells of another
Aegyptos, who was a young man of
Thessaly. He was the companion of Neophron, but the lover of Timandra, Neophron's mother; he became the victim of Neophron's revenge, when Neophron arranged a night-time substitution, so that Aegyptos committed involuntary incest with his mother, Bules.
Zeus transformed Egyptos and Neophron into eagles and Timandra into a kite. Many of the transformations in Antoninus' prose compilation are found nowhere else, and some may simply be inventions of Antoninus; this story combines several themes of
Hellenistic Romance. The placement of an
Aegyptus in Thessaly is inexplicable.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Aegyptus'.
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