But if this dread were dreadful too to thee,
Then wouldst thou lend thy listening ear to me;
Therefore I cry,—Sleep babe, and sea be still,
And slumber our unmeasured ill!’”
The Nereids, charmed with the beauty of the child, guided the chest safely into the net of the fishermen of the little island of Seriphos. Perseus, on his return to Argos, went up to Larisa, to which Acrisius had retired, and while displaying his skill with the quoit accidentally killed his grandfather. Thus was fulfilled the doom to avoid which Acrisius had shut up Danaë in the bronze tower at Argos. Perseus, ashamed at this homicide, and perhaps disliking Argos by reason of his mother’s ill-treatment, persuaded the son of Prœtus to change kingdoms with him, and so he came to live at Tiryns, and from there went up the plain and founded Mycenæ where a mushroom (mykes) that he pulled up when thirsty gave him a draught of water. The greater antiquity of Tiryns implied in this legend is not inconsistent with archæological evidence, and the fable that Prœtus[Prœtus], the first king of Tiryns, imported from Lycia seven Cyclopes as builders is a vague record of the foreign contribution made to this ancient centre. The Cyclopean walls in Argolis, often alluded to in the fifth century, were at least as conspicuous at Tiryns as elsewhere, and this acropolis near the sea would fit the situation in the “Trojan Women” of Euripides where the captive, lamenting her dead husband deprived of burial rites, anticipates with dread the landing at Nauplia:—
“Belovèd, O my husband dear,
Thou’rt wandering, a spectral fear,
Unburied and unlaved.
But me the hull that cleaves the sea
Shall bear with spread wings far from thee