Perseus

The child Acrisius shuts away

Acrisius locks his daughter Danae in a bronze chamber because an oracle says her son will kill him. The prison cannot prevent conception. When Perseus is born, Acrisius seals mother and child in a chest and casts them into the sea, choosing exposure rather than killing them by his own hand. The chest reaches Seriphos, where the fisherman Dictys takes them in.

The oldest surviving mention is far shorter. In the Iliad, Zeus names Danae among his mortal lovers and calls Perseus pre-eminent among warriors. Apollodorus supplies the connected life, while the Shield of Heracles already imagines Perseus in flight with the Gorgons behind him, winged sandals on his feet and Hades’s cap on his head. The oracle remains the carrying threat: every attempt to prevent it moves Perseus towards the life that will fulfil it.

Where the sources disagree

Apollodorus records two accounts of how Danae conceived Perseus and does not choose between them. “As some say,” she was seduced by Proetus, the twin brother her father Acrisius had already driven out of Argos in an earlier quarrel over the throne. “But some say” Zeus came to her as a stream of gold that poured through the roof of the bronze underground chamber Acrisius had built to keep her from any man at all.

What became of the oracle

Acrisius had shut Danae away because an oracle told him her son would kill him. Apollodorus reports that the fear proved founded and unintended at once: years later, competing in the pentathlon at funeral games held by Teutamides of Larissa, Perseus threw the discus, struck his grandfather’s foot and killed him on the spot. Ashamed to return to Argos and claim the throne of a man he had killed, Perseus exchanged kingdoms with Megapenthes, son of Proetus, taking Tiryns for himself and, in Apollodorus’s account, fortifying Midea and Mycenae besides.

The two stories Pausanias heard about Mycenae

Pausanias gives two explanations for how the city Perseus founded got its name, and says he had heard both himself. In the first, the cap (myces) fell from the pommel of Perseus’s sword on the site, and he took it as a sign to found a city there. In the second, Perseus was thirsty, picked up a mushroom (also myces) from the ground, and named the place for the water that ran out from under it when he drank. Pausanias saw parts of the city wall still standing, including a gate with two lions carved above it, which he attributes to the same Cyclopes credited with the wall built at Tiryns for Proetus; he also names a fountain among the ruins, Persea, after Perseus. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture’s own account of the site lists the Lion Gate and the Cyclopean walls among what still stands there today.

A claim made far from Argos

Herodotus records a cult of Perseus with no connection to the Argolid at all. At Chemmis in Egypt he was shown a square temple to “Perseus son of Danae,” with a shrine and an image of the hero inside it, where the people held Greek-style games in his honour and offered animals, cloaks and skins as prizes. They told Herodotus that Perseus was one of their own: his ancestors Danaus and Lynceus, they said, had left Chemmis for Greece before him, and Perseus, once grown, came back to Egypt for the Gorgon’s head and recognised all his relatives there. Herodotus repeats what he was told without endorsing it.