Danaïds.

    The fifty daughters of Danaus, known as Danaïds, were given in marriage to the fifty sons of Aegyptus, Danaus’ brother, with whom Danaus had a long-standing quarrel. Danaus ordered his daughters to kill their husbands on their wedding night, supplying them with knives for the deed. All but one did so; Hypermnestra spared her husband, Lynceus, and they founded a line that produced Perseus and other Argive kings. Hypermnestra's filial disobedience allowed for the survival of the lineage that produced eventually Heracles himself.
    The remaining forty-nine Danaïds were purified of their sins by Athena and Hermes, but as punishment for the murders they were condemned in Hades to carry water in sieves or jars (amphorae) with holes in the bottom.
    Aeschylus’s tragedy The Suppliants relates an early episode in the tale, when the Danaïds have fled to Argos to escape marriage to the sons of Aegyptus. In the postclassical period the subject has been particularly manifest in opera. Treatments of the theme in the fine arts most commonly depict the Danaïds carrying their porous water jars.
    
    Vergil adapts the myth of Hypmnestra and Lynceus so as to figure into the final scene of Aeneid 12. Pallas wore into battle against the Rutulians a decorated baldric which his father Evander had given him. The baldric bore the depiction of the slaughtered sons of Aegyptus, caesa manus iuvenum foede thalamique cruenti. (10.498) Bearing this stripped armor, Turnus encounters Aeneas in the epic's closing lines. The baldric's depiction enrages Aeneas' mind which becomes frenzied at the saevi monimenta doloris (12.945) and triggers Aeneas to "found" (condit, 950) his blade in Turnus' chest. Inasmuch as Hypermnestra and Lynceus represent the thin, bleak hope of Argos and its lineage, the epic's final bloody deed is a response to Turnus' Argive descent. — RTM