Herakles, the Hero of Thebes, and Other Heroes of the Myth / Adapted from the Second Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece

by Mary E. Burt; Zénaïde A. Ragozin

Less than sixty miles in a straight line to the southwest of Athens there is a barren, swampy plain. It is in the Peloponnesos and is bounded on all sides by mountains except to the south, where it is bounded by the sea. In this plain lies the market-town, Argos, at the foot of a lofty hill, its acropolis, Larisa. There is a citadel on this acropolis which looks off to a high mountain at the north near the Isthmus of Corinth, and the white-streaked hills beyond. And nearer to the citadel, on the north, is a higher mountain, the highest of the Peloponnesos, where the people used to pray to Zeus and Hera for rain. To the southeast the Larisa looks over a great prison on a fortified mountain.

We have said that the Peloponnesos was the shape of a man’s hand. The thumb of this hand is a peninsula pointing toward the east and south. In more ancient times this thumb was called the peninsula of Argos. The town, Argos, shares its name with the barren plain in which it is situated, and in olden times it shared it with the peninsula also. The peninsula of Argos was quite separate from a larger district, called Argolis, until the Romans conquered Greece. But now it is one with the entire district, and Argos the town, and Argos the plain, and Argos the peninsula, are all in Argolis.

Hera, wife of Zeus and goddess of the heavens, was the patron deity of Argos. It is said that she had a contest with Poseidon to see which should name the land, and as she brought the most valuable gift, the honor fell to her. The river Inachos flows through Argos the plain. The first king of Argos was a son of the river-god, Inachos, and the ocean-nymph, Melia, was his mother.

The earliest people of Argos must have worked hard to keep the country rightly irrigated. They were called Danaæ, doubtless because their work resembled that of the Danaïds, who were said to be punished in the lower world by carrying water in pitchers to fill a broken cistern. As fast as they poured water in the cistern it ran out through the cracks at the bottom. So, too, the Danaæ carried water to the sandy soil, but it ran into the earth without doing very much good.

The Danaæ came from Egypt and were accustomed to farming in the sand. They knew the unsparing pains that must be taken to conquer it, and kept at work until the land became fertile enough to repay them. But in modern times the plain has lost its fertility because the farmers do not take the same trouble in cultivating the soil.

One of the earliest of the Argive kings, Danaos, sent his daughters out to search for springs as he would have sent them to bring water from the Nile if they had remained in Egypt. Poseidon, seeing how fair one of them was, loved her and caused a spring to flow at Lerna, and it is called by her own name, Amyone, to the present time. It was this spring that created the marsh where the terrible Hydra was slain by Herakles.

Danaos had many descendants, one after another succeeding him as king. The fifth successor was Akrisios and he had a daughter, Danäe. Some oracle had told him that he would be slain by a son of Danäe if she ever had one. This worried the king and he determined that she should never marry. He built a high tower of brass and shut her up in it so that no one could get to her.

Danäe grew very lonely, shut up in the tower, and she used to watch from the window to try to catch a glimpse of the people below. No one looked up to notice her, but Zeus saw her from his abode in the heavens and was struck with her beauty and loneliness. He sent a golden shower of sunbeams to console her in her prison, and a little babe was born to her, and she called him Perseus, the son of Light.

Akrisios, the king, heard the child’s voice and called his daughter to a holy sanctuary and bade her tell the truth about the babe. This she did, but the king would not believe her. He put her into a box and the child with her and cast the box into the sea to sink or float. The box did float and the kind waves carried it to the island of Seriphos. A good old fisherman caught it in a net and took it to his own little hut, and thus Danäe and her babe were saved.

Perseus grew up to be a strong, handsome lad, and was often seen with his beautiful mother wandering over the island. As Perseus grew older he became his mother’s protector and champion and could never do enough for her. They continued to live at the cottage of the fisherman, who had adopted them as members of his own family.