Following Athena's guidance, Perseus sought the Graeae, sisters of the Gorgons, to demand the whereabouts of the Hesperides, the nymphs tending Hera's orchard. Perseus and the head of Medusa in a Roman fresco at StabiaeĪthena instructed Perseus to find the Hesperides, who were entrusted with weapons needed to defeat the Gorgon. The brother of Dictys was Polydectes ("he who receives/welcomes many"), the king of the island. Mother and child washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by the fisherman Dictys ("fishing net"), who raised the boy to manhood. Danaë's fearful prayer, made while afloat in the darkness, has been expressed by the poet Simonides of Ceos. įearful for his future, but unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods by killing the offspring of Zeus and his daughter, Acrisius cast the two into the sea in a wooden chest. Soon after, their child was born Perseus-"Perseus Eurymedon, for his mother gave him this name as well". Zeus came to her in the form of a shower of gold, and fathered her son Perseus. In order to keep Danaë childless, Acrisius imprisoned her in a bronze chamber, open to the sky, in the courtyard of his palace: This mytheme is also connected to Ares, Oenopion, Eurystheus, and others. Disappointed by his lack of luck in having a son, Acrisius consulted the oracle at Delphi, who warned him that he would one day be killed by his daughter's son. Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Apparently also the Persians knew the story, as Xerxes tried to use it to bribe the Argives during his invasion of Greece, but ultimately failed to do so. Herodotus recounts this story, devising a foreign son, Perses, from whom the Persians took the name. The native name of this people, however, has always had an -a- in Persian. John Chadwick in the second edition of Documents in Mycenaean Greek speculates about the Mycenaean goddess pe-re-*82, attested on the PY Tn 316 tablet ( Linear B: 𐀟𐀩𐁚) and tentatively reconstructed as *Preswa.Ī Greek folk etymology connected "Perseus" to the name of the Persian people, whom they called the Pérsai (from Old Persian Pārsa "Persia, a Persian"). Graves carries the meaning still further, to the perse- in Persephone, goddess of death. This difficulty can be overcome by presuming a dissimilation from the –th– in pérthein, which the Greeks would have preferred from a putative *phérthein. This corresponds to Julius Pokorny’s *bher-(3), "scrape, cut." Ordinarily *bh- descends to Greek as ph. Hofmann lists the possible root as *bher-, from which Latin ferio, "strike". The further origin of perth- is more obscure.
Pers-eus therefore is a "sacker of cities", that is, a soldier by occupation, a fitting name for the first Mycenaean warrior. 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. Perseus might be from the Greek verb πέρθειν ( pérthein, "to waste, ravage, sack, destroy") some form of which appears in Homeric epithets. In that regard Robert Graves has proposed the only Greek derivation available. There is some idea that it descended into Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.īecause of the obscurity of the name "Perseus" and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists presume that it might be pre-Greek however, the name of Perseus's native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. This article contains special characters. Perses, Heleus, Alcaeus, Sthenelus of Mycenae, Electryon, Mestor, Cynurus, Gorgophone, Autochthe
Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini (1554)Īeacus, Angelos, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Dionysus, Eileithyia, Enyo, Eris, Ersa, Hebe, Helen of Troy, Hephaestus, Heracles, Hermes, Minos, Pandia, Persephone, Rhadamanthus, the Graces, the Horae, the Litae, the Muses, the Moirai
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