1000 Classical Characters Briefly Described

Who was Iphigenia? What did Cincinnatus do? A thousand gods, heroes and tyrants of the classical world, each explained in the time it takes to read a text message.

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Aegyptus

Son of Belus, and brother to Danaus, gave his fifty sons in marriage to the fifty daughters of his brother. Danaus, who had established himself at Argos, and was jealous of his brother, obliged all his daughters to murder their husbands on the first night of their nuptials. This was done, Hypermnestra alone sparing her husband, Lynceus. The poet Horace, in one of his odes, refers to Hypermnestra, whom he calls Splendide mendax.

Aegyptus (Egypt). A country in the northeast corner of Africa, bounded on the north by the Mediterranean, on the east by Palestine, Arabia Petraea, and the Red Sea, on the south by Aethiopia, the division between the two countries being at the First or Little Cataract of the Nile, close to Syene, and on the west by the Great Libyan Desert.

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