So this lady looks unusually serene, especially in light of the fact that she’s using the blood of her own severed foot (!!!!) to write a letter to her husband. This is the heroine Hypermnestra, and in the Roman poet Ovid’s rendition of her tale, she pleads with her husband to come save her from imprisonment and death. Her father had thrown her into a dark basement prison because she had refused his orders to kill her spouse on their wedding night. Hypermnestra’s loyalty stood out from her 49 sisters, who went through with their father’s command. The deaths were all part of a vendetta between father and uncle — their father pretended to yield to a demand that his daughters marry his brother’s 50 sons, but secretly planned a mass murder. While at least one version of the story has a happy ending for Hypermnestra — she ends up in the heavenly Elysium Fields — the murderous sisters are condemned for eternity to fill up buckets whose water level never rises, for the containers have holes (photo 2). The story of Hypermnestra is illustrative of the ways that ancient cultures extolled female devotion to the male members of their families — the tension between loyalty to one’s father versus spouse is a common one in antiquity. Not made much of in the Ancient tradition is the lack of choice these heroines and female villains have in terms of their marital partners, what happens with their bodies, and their forced involvement in the political affairs of the men in their lives.
Source(s): Ovid, _Heroides_, trans Octavien de Saint-Gelais, Paris c. 1500, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Francais 874, fol 175 v.; John William Waterhouse, _The Danaids_, 1903. See the Perseus project (perseus.tufts.edu, commentary on the Heroides of Ovid).
