Perseus

Summary

Perseus is the Gorgon-slayer of Greek myth, son of Zeus by Danaë, daughter of the king of Argos, and the forefather of Heracles. His fullest account is in the Library ascribed to Apollodorus, and Ovid tells it at length in books four and five of the Metamorphoses.

His story begins before his birth. Acrisius, king of Argos, asked the oracle how he might have a son, and was told that his daughter would bear a son who would kill him. So he built a bronze chamber underground and shut her in it. Zeus came to her as a stream of gold that poured through the roof into her lap, and she bore Perseus. Her father would not believe the child was Zeus's, so he put mother and son in a chest and threw it into the sea. The chest came ashore on Seriphos, where Dictys took the child and raised him. Later Polydectes, king of the island and brother of Dictys, wanted to marry Danaë, and Perseus, now grown, stood guard over her. The king gathered his friends to collect gifts, Perseus said he would not stop short even of the Gorgon's head, and the king held him to his word.

Hermes and Athena led him to the Graiae, the daughters of Phorcys, old from their birth, who shared one eye and one tooth; he took both until they showed him the way to nymphs who kept winged sandals, a wallet and the cap of Hades, whose wearer sees without being seen. Hermes gave him a sickle of adamant. He flew to Ocean and found the Gorgons asleep, stood over them while Athena guided his hand, looked at the image of Medusa in a bronze shield instead of at her, and cut off her head; out of her neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and Chrysaor. He put the head in the wallet and went back, and her sisters could not see him because the cap hid him. Ovid adds that on the way he stopped with Atlas in the far west to ask for lodging, Atlas drove him off for fear of an old prophecy, and Perseus showed him the head and he became a mountain.

In Ethiopia, where Cepheus was king, he found the king's daughter Andromeda bound to a rock in the sea. Her mother Cassiopeia had boasted that she was more beautiful than the daughters of the sea, so Poseidon, angry on their behalf, sent a flood and a monster on the land, and the oracle said the plague would not lift until the daughter was given to the monster. Perseus loved her, swore to her father that he would kill the monster if he could marry her, killed it and set her free. Then Phineus, the king's brother and her first betrothed, plotted against him, and Perseus showed him the head and he and his companions became stone. Back on Seriphos he found his mother taking refuge at the altar from Polydectes's violence; he walked into the palace, turned his face away and held up the head, and everyone in the hall became stone in the posture he had struck. He made Dictys king, gave the sandals, the wallet and the cap back to Hermes, and gave the head to Athena, who set it in the middle of her shield.

Then he went to Argos to see his grandfather, and Acrisius, afraid of the oracle, fled from him to Larissa. Games were held there, Perseus entered them, threw the discus, struck his grandfather on the foot and killed him. He buried him, and ashamed to inherit a kingdom whose king had died by his hand, he exchanged the rule of Argos with Megapenthes, son of Proetus, for that of Tiryns, and fortified Midea and Mycenae. Among his descendants was Alcmene, mother of Heracles.

The idea his story turns on is that what is planned to stop fate becomes its road. Acrisius locked his daughter away and the gold came down through the roof; he threw the child into the sea and the sea carried him to the man who raised him; he fled from his grandson and the discus found him in another city. And Perseus himself does not win by his own strength but by what is lent to him: sandals, wallet and cap from the nymphs, a sickle from Hermes, a hand guided by Athena, and a sideways look into a shield. When his work is done he gives everything back to its owners and the head to Athena.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Περσεύς, Perseus, ends in -eus, the ending of heroes' names, which changes in the epic genitive, Περσῆος. What stays is Περσ-, and Greek π answers Arabic f, so the name is faras. This is the Greek essay's reading: Perseus is "the predator horseman, the cutter, the one who cut off Medusa's head". In Lane, a lion farasa its prey when it broke its neck, and Lane calls this the root's primary sense; the verb was then said of any killing, and the farīsa is the prey. On this reading Perseus is the one who breaks the neck, which is what the story makes him: the man who cut Medusa's neck and brought back her head. The same root gives firāsa, in the dictionary the discerning of what is inward by looking at outward signs, and Perseus won by a look at an image, not at the face itself.

Linguistic Root

Perseus and faras

Lane: a lion farasa its prey when it broke its neck, "this is the primary signification"; the verb was then said of any killing, and farasa al-dhiʾbu al-shāta is "the wolf seized the sheep and broke its neck". From the root come the fāris, the horseman, and firāsa, the perceiving of a thing's inward state by looking at its outward signs.

The sounds: Arabic f answers f and p in the European languages, here π; r is r, s is s, and the name's ending -eus drops. So the three letters of f-r-s stand in order in Περσ-. The same reading, faras, is given on this wiki to the opening of Persephone's name, following the Roman essay's reading of her Latin name Proserpina.

Greek has a verb πέρθω whose future πέρσω and aorist ἔπερσα carry the same letters; it means to sack and destroy a city, and Pindar and Sophocles use it of slaying men. The dictionary does not derive the name from this verb, but the two words meet in their letters and in the sense of destroying, and faras meets them both.

The essay's second reading

The essay gives a second reading, baratha, "to split and cut". The Arabic dictionaries give barth as soft, level ground, not cutting, and its th would answer Greek θ, while the name has s. So faras remains the reading that keeps both the letters and the sense.

Key Mythic Narratives

Andromeda in Ovid

Ovid adds that when Perseus saw Andromeda bound to the rock he would have taken her for a marble statue, had the breeze not stirred her hair and her tears not been flowing. He makes the quarrel with Phineus a battle in the wedding hall in which Perseus kills many with his sword before he raises the head, and then two hundred men become stone.

Andromeda's rock on the Levantine coast

Writers did not agree on where the rock was. Strabo says some placed Andromeda at Joppa, and Pausanias says that near Joppa, in the land of the Hebrews, there is water red as blood, and the people there say Perseus washed off the monster's blood in it after killing it.

His son Perses and the Persians

The Library says that before he came home Perseus left a son, Perses, with Cepheus, and that the kings of Persia are said to descend from him. So the Greeks derived the name of the Persians from the name of Perseus's son.

In the sky

Perseus is also the Greek name of a constellation, which Aratus names in his poem on the stars, along with Andromeda, Cepheus and Cassiopeia.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" does not read Perseus himself; it reads Medusa, whom he killed. It sets her in its table of natural phenomena and reads the turning to stone of whoever looks at her as an image of lava cooling into rock, or of the fear that paralyses. Taken this way, Perseus is the one who guards against that danger by looking at it from afar, in a mirror.

In the texts themselves the hero carries his enemy's head as a weapon and then gives it to the goddess of the city, so that the head becomes a guard on her shield, and the Gorgon-slayer becomes the founder of the citadel of Mycenae, which Pausanias says he built. The story ends in a city and a royal line, from which Heracles comes.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Perseus cut off the Gorgon's head, put it in a wallet and gave it to Athena, as Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut off the head of Humbaba, whose "look is death", put it in a leather bag and carried it to Enlil. The comparison is set out on the Medusa page.

The monster Poseidon sent with the flood on Ethiopia, which Perseus killed at Andromeda's rock, is one of the monsters from the sea in divine combat with sea and serpent. The closest story to Andromeda's is that of Susanoo in Japan: he found an old couple weeping over the last of their daughters, because the serpent Yamata no Orochi ate one every year; he asked for the girl as his wife, killed the serpent and married her. In both a daughter is given to a monster, and a stranger makes marriage to her his condition and then kills the monster.