The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (56 page)

l
. Cepheus and Cassiopeia grudgingly welcomed him as their son-in-law and, on Andromeda’s insistence, the wedding took place at once; but the festivities were rudely interrupted when Agenor, King Belus’s twin brother, entered at the head of an armed party, claiming Andromeda for himself. He was doubtless summoned by Cassiopeia, since she and Cepheus at once broke faith with Perseus, pleading that the promise of Andromeda’s hand had been forced from them by circumstances, and that Agenor’s claim was the prior one.

‘Perseus must die!’ cried Cassiopeia fiercely.

m
. In the ensuing fight, Perseus struck down many of his opponents but, being greatly outnumbered, was forced to snatch the Gorgon’s
head from its bed of coral and turn the remaining two hundred of them to stone.
¹¹

n
. Poseidon set the images of Cepheus and Cassiopeia among the stars – the latter, as a punishment for her treachery, is tied in a market-basket which, at some seasons of the year, turns upside-down, so that she looks ridiculous. But Athene afterwards placed Andromeda’s image in a more honourable constellation, because she had insisted on marrying Perseus, despite her parents’ ill faith. The marks left by her chains are still pointed out on a cliff near Joppa; and the monster’s petrified bones were exhibited in the city itself until Marcus Aemilius Scaurus had them taken to Rome during his aedileship.
¹²

o
. Perseus returned hurriedly to Seriphos, taking Andromeda with him, and found that Danaë and Dictys, threatened by the violence of Polydectes who, of course, never intended to marry Hippodameia, had taken refuge in a temple. He therefore went straight to the palace where Polydectes was banqueting with his companions, and announced that he had brought the promised love-gift. Greeted by a storm of insults, he displayed the Gorgon’s head, averting his own gaze as he did so, and turned them all to stone; the circle of boulders is still shown in Seriphos. He then gave the head to Athene, who fixed it on her aegis; and Hermes returned the sandals, wallet, and helmet to the guardianship of the Stygian nymphs.
¹³

p
. After raising Dictys to the throne of Seriphos, Perseus set sail for Argos, accompanied by his mother, his wife, and a party of Cyclopes. Acrisius, hearing of their approach, fled to Pelasgian Larissa; but Perseus happened to be invited there for the funeral games which King Teutamides was holding in honour of his dead father, and competed in the fivefold contest. When it came to the discus-throw, his discus, carried out of its path by the wind and the will of the Gods, struck Acrisius’s foot and killed him.
¹⁴

q
. Greatly grieved, Perseus buried his grandfather in the temple of Athene which crowns the local acropolis and then, being ashamed to reign in Argos, went to Tiryns, where Proetus had been succeeded by his son Megapenthes, and arranged to exchange kingdoms with him. So Megapenthes moved to Argos, while Perseus reigned in Tiryns and presently won back the other two parts of Proetus’s original kingdom.

r
. Perseus fortified Midea, and founded Mycenae, so called because, when he was thirsty, a mushroom [
mycos
] sprang up, and provided
him with a stream of water. The Cyclopes built the walls of both cities.
¹⁵

s
. Others give a very different account of the matter. They say that Polydectes succeeded in marrying Danaë, and reared Perseus in the temple of Athene. Some years later, Acrisius heard of their survival and sailed to Seriphos, resolving this time to kill Perseus with his own hand. Polydectes intervened and made each of them solemnly swear never to attempt the other’s life. However, a storm arose and, while Acrisius’s ship was still hauled up on the beach, weather-bound, Polydectes died. During his funeral games, Perseus threw a discus which accidentally struck Acrisius on the head and killed him. Perseus then sailed to Argos and claimed the throne, but found that Proetus had usurped it, and therefore turned him into stone; thus he now reigned over the whole of Argolis, until Megapenthes avenged his father’s death by murdering him.
¹⁶

t
. As for the Gorgon Medusa, they say that she was a beautiful daughter of Phorcys, who had offended Athene, and led the Libyans of Lake Tritonis in battle. Perseus, coming from Argos with an army, was helped by Athene to assassinate Medusa. He cut off her head by night, and buried it under a mound of earth in the market place at Argos. This mound lies close to the grave of Perseus’s daughter Gorgophone, notorious as the first widow ever to remarry.
¹⁷

1
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
iii. 286; Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
965; Apollodorus: ii. 2. 1 and 4. 7.

2
. Homer:
Iliad
vi. 160; Apollodorus: ii. 2. 1; Pausanias: ii. 16. 2.

3
. Pausanias: ii. 25. 7; Strabo: viii. 6. 11.

4
. Hyginus:
Fabula
63; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 1; Horace:
Odes
iii. 16. 1.

5
. Aollodorus: ii. 4. 2.

6
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 12.

7
. Pindar:
Pythian Odes
x. 31; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iv. 780; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3.

8
. Euripides:
Electra
459–63; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 12; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1513 ff.

9
. Herodotus: ii. 91; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
836; Strabo: i. 2. 35; Pliny:
Natural History
vi. 35.

10
Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3; Hyginus:
Fabula
64; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iv. 740 ff.

11
. Hyginus:
loc. cit
.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
v. 1–235; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.

12
. Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 9–10 and 12; Josephus:
Jewish Wars
iii. 9. 2; Pliny:
Natural History
ix. 4.

13
. Strabo: x. 5. 10; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3.

14
. Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
953; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 4.

15
. Clement of Alexandria:
Address to the Greeks
iii. 45; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 4–5.

16
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
v. 236–41; Hyginus:
Fabulae
63 and 244.

17
. Pausanias: ii. 21. 6–8.

1
. The myth of Acrisius and Proetus records the foundation of an Argive double-kingdom: instead of the king’s dying every midsummer, and being succeeded by his tanist for the rest of the year, each reigned in turn for forty-nine or fifty months – namely half a Great Year (see 106.
1
). This kingdom was later, it seems, divided in halves, with co-kings ruling concurrently for an entire Great Year. The earlier theory, that the bright spirit of the Waxing Year, and his tanist twin, the dark spirit of the Waning Year, stand in endless rivalry pervades Celtic and Palestinian myth, as well as the Greek and Latin.

2
. Two such pairs of twins occur in
Genesis
: Esau and Jacob (
Genesis
xxiv. 24–6), Pharez (see 159.
4
) and Zarah (
Genesis
xxxviii. 27–30), both of whom quarrel for precedence in the womb, like Acrisius and Proetus. In the simpler Palestinian myth of Mot and Aleyn, the twins quarrel about a woman, as do Acrisius and Proetus; and as their counterparts do in Celtic myth – for instance, Gwyn and Gwythur, in the
Mabinogion
, duel every May Eve until the end of the world for the hand of Creiddylad, daughter of Llyr (Cordelia, daughter of King Lear). This woman is, in each case, a Moon-priestess, marriage to whom confers kingship.

3
. The building of Argos and Tiryns by the seven Gasterocheires (‘bellies with hands’), and the death of Acrisius, are apparently deduced from a picture of a walled city: seven sun-disks, each with three limbs but no head (see
23.
2
), are placed above it, and the sacred king is being killed by an eighth sun-disk, with wings, which strikes his sacred heel. This would mean that seven yearly surrogates die for the king, who is then himself sacrificed at the priestess’s orders; his successor, Perseus, stands by.

4
. The myth of Danaë, Perseus, and the ark seems related to that of Isis, Osiris, Set, and the Child Horus. In the earliest version, Proetus is Perseus’s father, the Argive Osiris; Danaë is his sister-wife, Isis; Perseus, the Child Horus; and Acrisius, the jealous Set who killed his twin Osiris and was taken vengeance on by Horus. The ark is the acacia-wood boat in which Isis and Horus searched the Delta for Osiris’s body. A similar story occurs in one version of the Semele myth (see
27.
6
), and in that of Rhoeo (see 160.
7
). But Danaë, imprisoned in the brazen dungeon, where she bears a child, is the subject of a familiar New Year icon (see
43.
2
); Zeus’s impregnation of Danaë with a shower of gold must refer to
the ritual marriage of the Sun and the Moon, from which the New Year king was born. It can also be read as pastoral allegory: ‘water is gold’ for the Greek shepherd, and Zeus sends thunder-showers on the earth – Danaë. The name ‘Deicterion’ means that the Gorgon’s head was shown there to Perseus.

5
. Dynastic disputes at Argos were complicated by the existence of an Argive colony in Caria – as appears both in this myth and in that of Bellerophon (see
75.
b
); when Cnossus fell about 1400
B
.
C
., the Carian navy was, for a while, one of the strongest in the Mediterranean. The myths of Perseus and Bellerophon are closely related. Perseus killed the monstrous Medusa with the help of winged sandals; Bellerophon used a winged horse, born from the decapitated body of Medusa, to kill the monstrous Chimaera. Both feats record the usurpation by Hellenic invaders of the Moon-goddess’s powers, and are unified in an archaic Boeotian vase-painting of a Gorgon-headed mare. This mare is the Moon-goddess, whose calendar-symbol was the Chimaera (see
75.
2
); and the Gorgon-head is a prophylactic mask, worn by her priestesses to scare away the uninitiated (see
33.
3
), which the Hellenes stripped from them.