THE LEGEND OF PERSEUS

CHAPTER I.
THE LEGEND OF PERSEUS AS PRESERVED IN CLASSICAL WRITERS. ITS THREE TRAINS OF INCIDENT. THE DANAE TYPE OF THE STORY IN MODERN FOLKLORE.

In The Earthly Paradise William Morris has made English the Doom of King Acrisius in such lovely wise, and in the main with such close adherence to the story as told by Ovid and other classical writers, as to render thankless the task of repeating it at length. But in undertaking an inquiry into the foundations and history of the legend of Perseus, it is needful to bear in mind its salient features. I shall therefore ask the reader’s patience for a summary of these.

Acrisius, the son of Abas and king of Argos, having been warned by an oracle that he should die by the hands of his daughter Danae’s son, built a tower of brass in which he imprisoned the maiden, that he might keep her celibate and so frustrate the oracle. Jupiter, however, visited her in a shower of gold; and she bore a son, Perseus. By the king’s orders, mother and babe were enclosed in a chest and cast into the sea. The chest came to land on the island of Seriphos, and was drawn ashore by a fisherman named Dictys. Polydectes, the king of the island, took Danae under his protection, and in process of time desired to marry her. For this purpose he found it necessary first to get rid of her son. He accordingly set him the task of cutting off and bringing to him the head of Medusa, the only mortal of the three Gorgons, hoping, of course, that he would perish in the attempt. But the youth had friends in high places. Pallas provided him with a buckler brightly polished as a mirror, Pluto with a helmet of invisibility, Mercury with his own winged shoes, and Vulcan with a sword. Thus equipped, he set out on his adventure. Reaching the dwelling of the Graiæ, he possessed himself of the single eye which these three hideous sisters owned among them and passed from hand to hand, and thus compelled them to direct him where he might find the Gorgons. The chief danger of the expedition was Medusa’s power of turning to stone with a glance all who approached her. Perseus escaped this danger by coming upon her asleep, and by regarding her in his shield while he swept off her head with his sword. On his way back, with the prize deposited safely in his wallet, he visited Atlas, the giant king of Libya; but, receiving scant hospitality, he repaid it by trying the power of the Gorgon’s head on the king and his servants, and so converted them into the mountain range on whose huge top the heaven with all its stars (so the gods willed) has ever since reposed. Flying thence over land and sea, he descried Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, king of Ethiopia, and of his wife, Cassiope, bound to the rock. He descended, and learned that she was thus exposed to a marine monster to be devoured, in obedience to an oracle of Jupiter Ammon. The monster had been sent by Neptune to ravage the country, in order to revenge a boast by Cassiope that she herself was equal to the Nereids in beauty. Perseus fought and killed the instrument of divine vengeance, and wedded Andromeda. The wedding feast, however, was disturbed by Cepheus’ brother, Phineus, to whom Andromeda had been betrothed, and who, though he had stood by while she was being bound and made no effort to save her, now came with a band of followers to claim his bride from her deliverer. He attacked Perseus and broke up the banquet with a bloody fight, described in much detail by Ovid, which was only ended by the hero’s producing Medusa’s head and petrifying his foes. Perseus, with his bride, afterward sailed for Argos, where he restored his grandfather, who had been dethroned by Proetus, his own brother; and, passing on, he reached Seriphos just in time to save his mother, Danae, from Polydectes. He turned the tyrant to stone, and gave the realm to the faithful Dictys. The oracle in reference to Acrisius was fulfilled later, at Larissa, on the occasion of the funeral games celebrated by Teutamias, king of Thessaly, for his father. Perseus, throwing a quoit in one of the contests, accidentally struck his grandfather on the head and killed him.[3.1]

This is the substance of the story that engaged the genius of some of the greatest poets of antiquity. I have followed in the main Ovid’s narrative; but the only parts he deals with at length are the episodes of Atlas and Andromeda. The absurdities and impossibilities of the tale were as obvious as its beauties to the ancients themselves; and many were the attempts to rationalise it. We need not concern ourselves with these. For our immediate purpose the interest lies in the localisation of the different scenes and the variations we can trace of its episodes.

Perseus, like other Greek national heroes, was the object of worship. The chief seat of his cult seems to have been the isle of Seriphos, where it was believed that not only Polydektes, but also most of the inhabitants with him, were petrified by the dead Gorgon’s glances. The later coinage of the island exhibited Medusa’s head; and the peasants, when they find such coins now, relate that they are the coins of the first queen of the island, who dwelt in the mediæval castle upon the scarped hill above the port of Livadhi.[4.1] Next to Seriphos, Argos and Mykene honoured, as was natural, the hero. He had ruled the one and founded the other. The name of Mykene was believed to record the place where he dropped the sheath of his sword; and a fountain, which bore his name, marked the spot where it fell. A different derivation of the name of Mykene is given in the lost work of Ctesias the Ephesian on Perseus. He there attributes it to the bellowing (μυκηθμὸς) made by Stheno and Euryale, the sisters of Medusa, in their impotent rage against the hero, whom they pursued as blood-avengers to this spot, and here finally abandoned the pursuit as hopeless.[4.2] At Argos his tomb was shown; and in the forum there, beneath a barrow of earth, it was claimed that the awful trophy of his victory over the Gorgon lay—the trophy which, according to another version of the legend, was for ever fixed in Athene’s shield, the most dangerous of her weapons. Elsewhere the Argives showed a subterranean building containing a brazen bedchamber, said to have been that made by Akrisios for his daughter—a variation from the brazen tower of the story usually current.[5.1]

But Argos and Seriphos were not allowed to monopolise the sacred scenes of Perseus’ life. The city of Ardea in Latium disputed with Seriphos the honour of being the refuge of Danae ‘pregnant with almighty gold.’ From her, according to Vergil, Turnus, who competed with Æneas for Lavinia’s hand, derived his lineage.[5.2] Although Andromeda’s father is described as king of Ethiopia, the general consent of antiquity laid the scene of her rescue at Joppa. Near that town was a fountain wherein the hero washed away the stains of the combat, and whose water was coloured ever after by the monster’s blood.[5.3] Upon the rocks which bounded the haven were pointed out the marks left by the maiden’s chains; and Marcus Scaurus, when ædile, brought from Joppa, and exhibited at Rome, the bones of the monster. A rumour of this event seems to have reached the forger of Sir John Maundeville’s travels, for he relates that the place was still shown where the great giant Andromeda was fastened with chains before the Flood, and not only the place where he was confined, but one of his ribs measuring forty feet in length![5.4] It is evident that he took pains to ascertain the exact truth.

In Egypt and in Persia, the Father of History found traditions of a personage identified with Perseus. “According to the Persian story,” he tells us, “Perseus was an Assyrian who became a Greek; his ancestors, therefore, according to them, were not Greeks. They do not admit that the forefathers of Akrisios were in any way related to Perseus, but say they were Egyptians, as the Greeks likewise testify.” And elsewhere he represents Xerxes as telling the Greeks that Perses, from whom he claimed descent, was the child of Perseus, the son of Danae, and of Andromeda, the daughter of Kepheus—a statement apparently accepted by the historian, as well as by other Greek writers.[6.1] Both these stories probably were Assyrian in origin, and obtained currency, first among the Persians and afterwards among the Greeks, from political causes. In the latter story Kepheus is presented as the son of Bel. It is unlikely that the Achæmenian kings of Persia would have claimed descent from him, had they not been conquerors of Babylon. The Assyrian hero equated with Perseus in the former story we are fortunately enabled by recent discoveries to identify. He is no other than Gilgames, whose name was at one time transliterated as Izdubar, the hero of the epos from the library of King Assurbanipal, preserved in an imperfect form in the British Museum. The fragments we have of the tablets do not include the hero’s birth. Upon this, however, the solution of the characters embodying his name has thrown unexpected light. For Ælian the rhetorician, writing in the third century of the Christian era, has transmitted to us an account of the birth of Gilgamos, whom he styles King of the Babylonians. According to this account, the Chaldeans predicted to a monarch, whose name is variously read as Sakchoros, Senéchoros and Enéchoros, that his daughter would have a son who would deprive his grandfather of the kingdom. Fearing this, he ordered her to be kept in close confinement. His precautions were vain, for fate was cleverer than the Babylonian king. His daughter bore a son whose father was unknown. No sooner was the infant born than her guards threw it down, for fear of the king, from the citadel wherein she was immured. But an eagle, beholding the falling child, darted beneath it, and, receiving it on its back, bore it gently to the ground in a certain garden. The gardener found the boy, and adopted him for his beauty. “If anybody think this a fable,” says the rhetorician, eager to shuffle off all responsibility for it, “I admit I don’t believe it myself; yet I am told that Perses the Achæmenian, from whom the noble stock of the Persians is derived, was an eagle’s nursling.” On examining the epos of Gilgames we recognise none of the adventures as those of Perseus. This may be owing to its imperfect preservation, or to its being a literary recension wherein only those parts of the story proper to the writer’s purpose are combined. It can hardly be that the sole resemblance is in the circumstances of the hero’s birth. On the other hand, the career of Gilgames has many points of likeness to that of Herakles.[7.1] He rejoices in a divine origin and in the favour of the gods; he conquers lions and monsters; he triumphantly accomplishes a journey to the other world. Now, a story of the rescue of a maiden similar to that by Perseus was told of Herakles. When Laomedon, king of Troy, had bound his daughter Hesione to a rock, to be devoured by a sea-monster sent by Poseidon, Herakles undertook her deliverance, and sprang full-armed into the fish’s throat, whence he hacked his way forth again after three days’ imprisonment, hairless.[8.1] We are left to conjecture that, if we had the traditions of Gilgames fully presented to us, we should not only have his birth as told by Ælian, but also some other features of his story linking it to that of Perseus—features that perhaps would at the same time explain why the king his grandfather is called an Egyptian.

Herodotus seems to have attached more credit to the tale he found in Egypt. He describes the temple to the hero at Chemmis in the canton of Thebes, and mentions the games celebrated in his honour. The Chemmites, he says, claimed Perseus as Chemmite by descent, and related that on his way from the slaughter of the Gorgon he paid a visit to their city, acknowledged them for his kinsfolk, and instituted the games. They declared that he was in the habit of appearing to them, sometimes in his temple, at other times in the open country, and that one of the sandals he had worn was often found, measuring two cubits in length; and it was a sign of prosperity to the kingdom. There was also a watch-tower called by the name of Perseus near the Canopic mouth of the Nile.[8.2]

But, with regard both to the Persian and to the Egyptian tales, it must be borne in mind that all classical writers had a light-hearted way of calling foreign gods and heroes by the names of their own divinities, whenever they could get an excuse for so doing in the resemblances they traced, or fancied, either in attributes or legends. This practice has introduced endless confusion into their accounts, perfunctory at the best and often contemptuous, of the mythologies of other nations. If we learn little from the historian’s references to the Persian, or Assyrian, tradition, we know less of that of the Egyptians; and, with all our discoveries, we have yet to find the clew to the object of veneration at Chemmis, and the legends clustered about him.