Divine justice
Hera was enraged at Athamas
and Ino, and Nephele persisted
in demanding they should be
punished, so the goddess sent
one of the Furies, Tisiphone,
to torment the guilty couple.
CLASSICAL ANTIHEROINESCLYTEMNESTRA
The wife of Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae, Clytemnestra had four
children by her husband: Iphigenia, Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes.
Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia to the gods in order to ensure a fair wind
for the Greek fleet sailing for the Trojan War.
When Clytemnestra discovered her daughter’s death, she
vowed revenge. She took a lover, Aegisthus, and placed
him on the Mycenaean throne in Agamemnon’s
absence. When the king returned from the war,
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus trapped and killed
him and many of his supporters. Her son, Orestes,
escaped the carnage and went into exile. He later slew
his mother to avenge his father’s murder. After her death,
Clytemnestra’s ghost, with the support of the Furies, tried
to punish Orestes, but the gods (or in some versions of
the story, a human court) eventually
decided that what he had
done was justified.INO
King Athamas of Boeotia was married to Nephele, but left
her for Ino, the daughter of Cadmus. Ino resented her
stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle, and devised a plot to
dispose of them. She lit a fire beneath the granary and dried
up all the seeds so that they would not germinate, thereby
causing a famine. When Athamas sent a messenger to the
oracle at Delphi to ask for a solution, Ino bribed the messenger
to say that Athamas should sacrifice Phrixus. The king was
about to kill his son when Hera sent a golden ram to carry of
his children. Although Phrixus survived, Helle fell from the
ram’s back and drowned in the sea, which was named the
Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles) after her. Nephele
wanted Athamas punished, so according to some versions of
the story, Hera sent one of the Furies to drive him and Ino mad.
Later, Athamas made Ino
jump of a clif into the
sea, where she drowned.THE DAUGHTERS
OF DANAUS
Danaus, a grandson of Poseidon, had 50 daughters,
while his brother, Aegyptus, had 50 sons. The two
brothers quarrelled over their father’s lands after his
death, until Aegyptus ofered to marry his sons to
Danaus’s daughters to unite the family. But an oracle
had once told Danaus that Aegyptus planned to kill
him and his daughters, so he ran away with his
family. Aegyptus gave chase, besieging them in the
city of Argos until they ran out of food and were
forced to agree to the marriages. Danaus gave each of
his daughters a hairpin and asked them to kill their
husbands with it. All
the daughters except
one carried out their
father’s instructions, for
which they were severely
punished after their death.The murder of Agamemnon
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus trapped Agamemnon in a net and
brutally killed him with an axe. Some accounts of his death say
that Agamemnon was defenceless, in his bath, cleaning away
the dirt of his long journey home, when the murder took place.The punishment of Orestes
The Furies, seen here holding Clytemnestra’s corpse, attacked
Orestes with thunderbolts. Later, Orestes’s faithful sister,
Electra, nursed him and helped him recover from his wounds.Eternal punishment
When the guilty daughters died, they
went to the Underworld, where they
were forced to pour water into a
large vessel that perpetually leaked,
so their task was never-ending.53