The punishment is madness, and it falls on three king's daughters who thought too well of themselves. In the served witness, Proetus of Tiryns has three girls — Lysippe, Iphinoe, and Iphianassa — of whom, once they were grown, "they went mad". The record offers two reasons side by side: according to the archaic poet Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) "because they would not accept the rites of Dionysus," and according to the early Greek genealogist Acusilaus (c. 500 BCE) because they had disparaged "the wooden image of Hera." Either way the offence is slight and the sentence enormous — impiety answered with unreason.

The madness spreads like contagion. The stricken sisters "roamed over the whole Argive land," and soon the "maidens raved more than ever," pulling the other women of Argos out with them until they abandoned their homes, "destroyed their own children," and fled into the wilderness. Only the seer Melampus can lift it. Named "the first to devise the cure by means of drugs and purifications," he haggles hard for a third of the kingdom, chases the women down from the mountains with shouts and a frenzied dance, and purifies the survivors — though not before Iphinoe, "the eldest of the daughters, expired" in the chase. A verdict of madness is undone, at a steep price, by a physician-prophet.

Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) is the one witness on the shelf here. The record files this madness-as-sentence among Irish, Jewish, and Indian traditions too, but none of those is wired to served text; only the Greek telling can be read. If a goddess must drive women out of their minds to answer a snub, whose weakness does the madness finally expose — theirs, or the god's?