Everything about Perseus totally explained
» For other meanings, see Perseus (disambiguation)
Perseus,
Perseos, or
Perseas (
Greek:
Περσεύς,
Περσέως,
Περσέας), the
legendary founder of
Mycenae and of the
Perseid dynasty there, was the first of the mythic heroes of
Greek mythology whose exploits in defeating various archaic monsters provided the
founding myths in the cult of the
Twelve Olympians. Perseus was the hero who killed
Medusa and claimed
Andromeda, having rescued her from a sea monster.
Origin at Argos
Perseus was the son of
Danaë who, by her very name, was the
archetype and eponymous ancestor of all the
Danaans. She was the only daughter of
Acrisius, King of
Argos. Disappointed by his lack of luck, Acrisius consulted the
oracle at
Delphi, who warned him that although destined to remain without a wife, he'd one day be killed by his daughter's son. Danaë was childless and to keep her so, he shut her up in a bronze chamber underground: This
mytheme is also connected to
Ares,
Oenopion,
Eurystheus, etc. Zeus came to her in the form of a shower of gold, and impregnated her. Soon after was born their child Perseus—
"Perseus Eurymedon, for his mother gave him this name as well" (Apollonius of Rhodes,
Argonautica IV).
Fearful for his future but unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods by killing Zeus's offspring and his own daughter, Acrisius cast the two into the sea in a wooden chest. Danaë's fearful prayer made while afloat in the darkness has been expressed by the poet
Simonides of Ceos. Mother and child washed ashore on the island of
Seriphos, where they were taken in by the fisherman
Dictys, who raised the boy to manhood. The brother of Dictys was
Polydectes, the king of the island.
Overcoming the Gorgon
After some time, Polydectes fell in love with Danaë and desired to remove Perseus from the island. He thereby hatched a plot to send him away in disgrace.
Polydectes announced a banquet wherein each guest would be expected to bring him a horse, that he might woo
Hippodamia, "tamer of horses". The fisherman's protegé had no horse but promised instead to bring him some other gift. Polydectes held Perseus to his rash promise. He immediately demanded the head of
Medusa, one of the
Gorgons, whose very expression turns people to stone. The Medusa was horselike in archaic representations, the terrible filly of a mare—
Demeter, the Mother herself—who was in her mare nature when Poseidon assumed stallion form and coveted her. Another version of this story is that Medusa was in fact a mortal woman who had an affair with the god Poseidon. One day Athena caught the two of them in her temple and as punishment turned the poor woman into a hideous monster.
For such a heroic quest, a divine helper would be necessary, and for a long time Perseus wandered aimlessly, without hope of ever finding the Gorgons or of being able to accomplish his mission. According to the iconography of the
vase-painters, the gods
Hermes,
Athena and
Hades came to his rescue. Hermes gave him an
adamantine curved sword, while Athena gave him a highly-polished bronze shield. For his further journey, the version of
Aeschylus, in his lost
tragedy,
The Daughters of Phorcys must have "simplified the journey of Perseus through the realms of thrice-three goddesses and probably left out the first three, the
spring-nymphs.... On an ancient vase-painting we see the nymphs receiving the hero, one bringing him the winged sandals (
talaria), another the helmet of invisibility, the third the wallet,
kibisis, for the Gorgon's head" (Kerenyi 1959:49-50).
They told him to go to the
island of the golden apples to the west. He went there like a swift walker on the air (Nonnus,
Dionysiaca xxv.32) and asked the Hesperidae where the
Graeae were. They told him and made him promise to come back and dance with them. He went to the
Graeae, sisters of the gorgons, three perpetually old women with one eye and tooth among them. Perseus snatched the eye at the moment they were blindly passing it from one to another so they couldn't see him and he wouldn't return it until they'd given him directions. With all this,
"Like a wild boar he entered the cave" (This is the one line of
Aeschylus,
The Phorkides ["TheDaughters of Phorcys"] that survives). After he was done with the Graeae sisters he threw the tooth and the eye into a lake. In the cave he came upon the sleeping Gorgons. By viewing Medusa's reflection in his polished shield, he could safely approach and cut off her head; from her neck sprang
Pegasus and
Chrysaor. The other two Gorgons pursued him, but under his helmet of invisibility he escaped.
Marriage with Andromeda
On the way back to Seriphos, Perseus stopped in the Phoenician kingdom
Ethiopia, ruled by King
Cepheus and Queen
Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia, having boasted herself equal in beauty to the sea Nereids, drew down the vengeance of
Poseidon, who sent an inundation on the land and a sea-monster,
Ceto, which destroyed man and beast. The
oracle of Ammon announced that no relief would be found until the king exposed his daughter Andromeda to the monster, and so she was fastened to a rock on the shore. Perseus slew the monster and, setting her free, claimed her in marriage.
In the classical myth, he flew using the flying sandals.
Renaissance Europe and modern imagery has generated the idea that Perseus flew mounted on Pegasus.
Perseus married Andromeda in spite of
Phineus, to whom she'd before been promised. At the wedding a quarrel took place between the rivals, and Phineus was turned to stone by the sight of the Gorgon's head. Andromeda ("queen of men") followed her husband to
Tiryns in
Argos, and became the ancestress of the family of the
Perseidae through her son with Perseus,
Perses. After her death she was placed by Athena amongst the constellations in the northern sky, near Perseus and Cassiopeia.
Sophocles and
Euripides (and in more modern times
Pierre Corneille) made the episode of Perseus and Andromeda the subject of tragedies, and its incidents were represented in many ancient works of art.
As Perseus was flying in his return above the sands of
Libya, according to
Apollonius of Rhodes, the falling drops of Medusa's blood engendered a race of toxic serpents, one of whom was to kill the Argonaut
Mopsus. On returning to Seriphos and discovering that his mother had had to take refuge from the violent advances of Polydectes, Perseus killed him with Medusa's head, and made his brother Dictys king.
The oracle fulfilled
Perseus then returned his magical loans and gave Medusa's head as a
votive gift to
Athena, who set it on
Zeus' shield (which she carried), as the
Gorgoneion (see also:
Aegis).
The
fulfillment of the oracle was told several ways, each incorporating the mythic theme of exile. In
Pausanias he didn't return to Argos, but went instead to
Larissa, where athletic games were being held.
He had just invented the
quoit and was making a public display of them when Acrisius, who happened to be visiting, stepped into the trajectory of the quoit and was killed: thus the oracle was fulfilled. This is an unusual variant on the story of such a prophecy, as Acrisius's actions did not, in this variant, cause his death.
In
Apollodorus' version, the inevitable occurred by another route: Perseus did return to Argos, but when he learned of the oracle, went into voluntary exile in
Pelasgiotis (
Thessaly). There Teutamides, king of
Larissa, was holding funeral games for his father. Competing in the discus throw Perseus' throw veered and struck Acrisius, killing him instantly.
In a third tradition, Acrisius had been driven into exile by his brother,
Proetus. Perseus turned the brother into stone with the Gorgon's head and restored Acrisius to the throne.
Having killed Acrisius, Perseus, who was next in line for the throne, gave the kingdom to
Megapenthes son of
Proetus and took over Megapenthes' kingdom of
Tiryns. The story is related in Pausanias, which gives as motivation for the swap that Perseus was ashamed to become king of Argos by inflicting death.
In any case, early Greek literature reiterates that manslaughter, even involuntary, requires the exile of the slaughterer, expiation and ritual purification. The exchange might well have been a creative solution to a difficult problem; however, Megapenthes would have been required to avenge his father, which, in legend, he did, but only at the end of Perseus' long and successful reign.
King of Mycenae
The two main sources regarding the legendary life of Perseus—for he was an authentic historical figure to the Greeks— are Pausanias and
Apollodorus, but from them we obtain mainly folk-etymology concerning the founding of Mycenae. Pausanias asserts that the Greeks believed Perseus founded Mycenae. He mentions the shrine to Perseus that stood on the left-hand side of the road from Mycenae to Argos, and also a sacred fountain at Mycenae called
Persea. Located outside the walls, this was perhaps the spring that filled the citadel's underground cistern. He states also that
Atreus stored his treasures in an underground chamber there, which is why
Heinrich Schliemann named the largest
tholos tomb the
Treasury of Atreus.
Apart from these more historical references, we've only folk-etymology: Perseus dropped his cap or found a mushroom (both named
myces) at Mycenae, or perhaps the place was named from the lady Mycene, daughter of
Inachus, mentioned in a now-missing poem, the great
Eoeae.
For whatever reasons, perhaps as outposts, Perseus
fortified Mycenae according to Apollodorus along with
Midea, an action that implies that they both previously existed. It is unlikely, however, that Apollodorus knew who walled in Mycenae; he was only conjecturing. In any case, Perseus took up official residence in Mycenae with Andromeda.
Descendants of Perseus
Perseus and Andromeda had seven sons:
Perses,
Alcaeus, Heleus, Mestor,
Sthenelus,
Electryon and Cynurus, and two daughters,
Gorgophone ("Gorgon Killer") and Autochthoe ("Born in the Land"). Perses was left in
Aethiopia and became an ancestor of the emperors of
Persia. The other descendants ruled Mycenae from
Electryon down to
Eurystheus, after whom
Atreus got the kingdom. However, the Perseids included the great hero,
Heracles, step-son of
Amphitryon, son of
Alcaeus. The Heraclides, or descendants of Heracles, successfully contested the rule of the Atreids.
A statement by the Athenian orator,
Isocrates helps to date Perseus roughly. He said that Heracles was four generations later than Perseus, which corresponds to the legendary succession: Perseus,
Electryon,
Alcmena, and
Heracles, who was a contemporary of
Eurystheus.
Atreus was one generation later, a total of five generations.
Etymology
Because of the obscurity of the name
Perseus and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists pass it by, on the presumption that it might be pre-Greek. However, the name of Perseus’ native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. There is some prospect that it descended into Greek from the
Proto-Indo-European language. In that regard
Robert Graves has espoused the only Greek derivation available.
Perseus might be from the ancient Greek verb,
perthein, “to waste, ravage, sack, destroy”, some form of which appears in Homeric epithets. According to
Carl Darling Buck (
Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin), the
–eus suffix is typically used to form an agent noun, in this case from the
aorist stem,
pers-.
Pers-eus therefore is a sacker of cities; that is, a soldier by occupation, a fitting name for the first Mycenaean warrior.
The origin of
perth- is more obscure. J. B. Hofmann lists the possible root as
*bher-, from which Latin
ferio, "strike". This corresponds to
Julius Pokorny’s
*bher-(3), “scrape, cut.” Ordinarily *bh- descends to Greek as ph-. This difficulty can be overcome by presuming a dissimilation from the –th– in
perthein; that is, the Greeks preferred not to say *pherthein.
Graves carries the meaning still further, to the
perse- in
Persephone, goddess of death.
John Chadwick in the second edition of
Documents in Mycenaean Greek speculates as follows about the goddess pe-re-*82 of
Pylos tablet Tn 316, tentatively reconstructed as *Preswa:
» ”It is tempting to see...the classical
Perse...daughter of
Oceanus...; whether it may be further identified with the first element of Persephone is only speculative.”
A Greek folk etymology connected the name of the
Fars people, whom they called the Persai. The native name, however has always had an -a- in Iranian.
Herodotusrecounts this story, devising a foreign son, Perses, from whom the Persians took the name. Apparently the Persians themselves knew the story, as
Xerxes tried to use it to suborn the Argives during his invasion of Greece.
Cyrus Gordon, known for his daring theories, proposed that Perseus is a Semitic name, from p-r-s, "to cut." Nothing in the lore or the evidence excludes the possibility of Semitic elements among the early Greeks. The Greeks thought that Perseus meant "destroyer", but p-r-s would mean that as well.
Perseus on Pegasus
The replacement of
Bellerophon as the tamer and rider of
Pegasus by the more familiar
culture hero Perseus wasn't simply an error of painters and poets of the
Renaissance. The transition was a development of Classical times which became the standard image during the Middle Ages and has been adopted by the European poets of the Renaissance and later:
Giovanni Boccaccio's
Genealogia deorum gentilium libri (10.27) identifies Pegasus as the steed of Perseus, and
Pierre Corneille places Perseus upon Pegasus in
Andromède.
Modern uses of the theme
In Hermann Melville's Moby-Dick, the narrator asserts that Perseus was the first whaleman, when he killed Ceto to save Andromeda.
Percy (Perseus) Jackson is the title character in the popular childrens series, Percy Jackson & The Olympians. He is able to communicate with Pegasi.
Perseus is the name of a high-end retail clothing store in the game Grand Theft Auto 4.Further Information
Get more info on 'Perseus'.
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