Aeschylus’s drama begins in Egypt but is concerned with relations between Greek mortals and gods (with some characters in the play being directly descended from the gods). Two brothers, Danaus and Aegyptus, have fifty daughters (the Danaids) and fifty sons respectively. When Aegyptus demands his brother’s virgin daughters marry his sons, the women and their father flee from Egypt and supplicate Zeus to intervene and protect them. In serving as the play’s chorus, the fifty young women often speak as one. Another structural device used in the drama is the division into strophe and antistrophe, with one setting forth a theme and the other responding to it.

Speaking together, the Danaids beg Zeus to use his powers to prevent the men from chasing them. They call out for Zeus to drown them at sea before they can assault the women and force them to marry them:

Thrust back their swift-rowed bark again,
Repel them, urge them to the main!
And there, ’mid storm and lightning’s shine,
And scudding drift and thunder’s roar,
Deep death be theirs, in stormy brine!
Before they foully grasp and win
Us, maiden-children of their kin.

One pair of strophe/antistrophe commends Zeus’s clarity and resolve in exercising his will:

strophe 4:

Though the deep will of Zeus be hard to track,
Yet doth it flame and glance,
A beacon in the dark, ’mid clouds of chance
That wrap mankind.

antistrophe 4:

Yea, though the counsel fall, undone it shall not lie,
Whate’er be shaped and fixed within Zeus’ ruling mind—
Dark as a solemn grove, with sombre leafage shaded,
His paths of purpose wind,
A marvel to man’s eye.

Danaus urges his daughters to seek safety in a temple and to illustrate their innocence and mild demeanor. He and the Chorus Leader discuss which of the gods they can call on and why they would help their cause. He likens the women to a flock of doves that aim to avoid hawks—the predatory men whose lewdness he condemns:

. . . Crouch
On holy ground, a flock of doves that flee,
Scared by no alien hawks, a kin not kind,
Hateful, and fain of love more hateful still,
Foul is the bird that rends another bird,
And foul the men who hale unwilling maids,
From sire unwilling, to the bridal bed.
Never on earth, nor in the lower world,
Shall lewdness such as theirs escape the ban.

When Pelasgus, king of Argos, in whose territory they have arrived, speaks with the Chorus Leader, he does not recognize them as being either Greek or from Argos. She reminds him that they are descended from Io and Zeus. Wary of the claim, he suggests they resemble women from foreign places —where such women proved false or even vicious. He even states that if they were carrying bows he would even suspect them of being Amazons, whom he believes are cannibals:

Yea, and the Cyprian stamp, in female forms,
Shows, to the life, what males impressed the same.
And, furthermore, of roving Indian maids
Whose camping-grounds by Aethiopia lie,
And camels burdened even as mules, and bearing
Riders, as horses bear, mine ears have heard;
And tales of flesh-devouring mateless maids
Called Amazons: to these, if bows ye bare,
I most had deemed you like.