Greek heroes tend to be loud. Heracles wrestles lions with his bare hands. Achilles sulks in his tent and then wrecks an army. Theseus clubs highway robbers. Perseus is different, and I don't think people notice how different until they put him next to the others. He doesn't charge anything. He sneaks up on a sleeping monster while looking at her reflection in a shield. He gets his weapons as loans from gods and nymphs. And at the end of his adventure he does something that almost no other hero in myth does, which is return every single item he borrowed. I think that detail is the key to him, and it explains why his story, almost uniquely, ends well.
A boy in a box
Start with how he arrives. Acrisius, king of Argos, is told by an oracle that his daughter's son will kill him. His answer is to lock Danaë in a bronze chamber, so that she can never have a child. Zeus gets in anyway, in the form of golden rain in the usual telling, and Danaë has a son. When Acrisius finds out, he cannot bring himself to kill his own grandchild directly. So he does the next best thing and seals mother and baby into a wooden chest and throws it into the sea.
There is a famous fragment by the poet Simonides in which Danaë sings to the baby inside the chest as it rocks on the waves, telling him to sleep while she holds him. It is one of the most tender passages in early Greek poetry, and what I notice is how little the hero is doing. He is a baby in a box. Everything about his early life is rescue. They drift to the island of Seriphos, where a fisherman called Dictys pulls the chest from the water and takes them in.
That is the starting position. Perseus is somebody who has been looked after by strangers from the very beginning. I think it matters, because it makes his habit of accepting help feel earned.
The dare
The king of Seriphos, Polydectes, wants Danaë and cannot get her while her grown son is around. So he arranges a dinner. Every guest is expected to bring a horse as a gift. Perseus, who has none, is stung, and in the heat of the moment says that he would bring anything, even the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Polydectes takes him at his word.
It is a trap built out of pride. And what happens next is where Perseus stops looking like the other heroes. He doesn't set out alone and trust his strength. The gods Athena and Hermes appear to help him, and from this point on the story is one long chain of favours.
Hermes gives him a curved sword of unbreakable metal. Athena gives him a polished bronze shield. They send him to the Graeae, three old sisters who share a single eye and a single tooth between them, and who know the way to the nymphs who hold the rest of what he needs. Perseus waits until one passes the eye to another, snatches it, and refuses to give it back until they tell him the way. It is a trick, not a fight.
Then the nymphs hand him three things. Winged sandals, so he can fly. A pouch, the kibisis, to carry the head in. And the cap of Hades, which makes the wearer invisible. Notice that every one of these items belongs to someone else. He owns nothing.
How he kills her
The way he kills Medusa is, I think, the most characteristic part. She cannot be looked at directly. So he flies to her island, finds her asleep, and approaches backward, watching her reflection in the shield. Athena guides his hand. He cuts off her head, drops it into the bag, and, wearing the cap, escapes her two immortal sisters, who chase him in a fury. And from her neck spring Pegasus and Chrysaor, her children by Poseidon.
Compare this to how Heracles does things. Heracles goes straight at a problem and breaks it. Perseus goes around it. He looks at everything sideways, through a reflection, a trick, a disguise, someone else's advice. His great skill is not courage, it is indirectness, and the story clearly admires it.
I wrote about Medusa herself in another article, and the point I made there is that the Gorgon face is older than the story that gives her a life. It is worth remembering that Perseus kills a face, in a sense. His achievement is to carry an image that could stop a person's heart, safely, in a bag.
The rescue and the wedding
On the way home, he sees a woman chained to a rock by the sea. This is Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Her mother boasted that she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs, the Nereids, and Poseidon sent a flood and a monster, and the oracle said the only cure was to give up the girl. Perseus kills the sea monster and marries her.
The wedding turns into a brawl, because Andromeda was already promised to someone else, and in Ovid's version Perseus finally wins by pulling out the Gorgon's head and turning his enemies to stone. It is the one time in the story where he uses the thing as a weapon, and it says something that the poet saves it for the last resort.
When he returns to Seriphos, he finds Polydectes feasting in the hall and his mother in hiding. He walks in, tells his friends to look away, and shows the king the head. Polydectes and his court turn to stone. Dictys, the fisherman who saved them, becomes king.
The part nobody remembers
And then comes the detail I most want you to remember. In Apollodorus's account, Perseus gives the winged sandals, the pouch and the cap back to Hermes, who returns them to the nymphs. The Gorgon's head he gives to Athena, who fixes it to her shield.
Everything goes back. The hero walks away from the greatest set of equipment in Greek myth with nothing in his hands. In a tradition where heroes keep trophies, wear lion skins, hang up the weapons they won and boast about them, Perseus returns his loans like a polite houseguest.
I think that is the real moral of his story, and that it is a quiet piece of moral philosophy. Every tool he used was borrowed. He knew that. Whatever greatness he had came from being able to ask, listen and give back. It is a very different idea of heroism from the one in the Iliad.
The one blow he strikes himself
The only violent thing Perseus does completely with his own hands is the one that goes wrong. When he finally decides to visit Argos, his grandfather Acrisius, remembering the oracle, runs away to Larissa. Perseus follows, hoping to reconcile. During the athletic games there, he throws a discus, and it veers into the crowd, blown by the wind in some tellings, and strikes Acrisius dead.
The prophecy comes true, exactly as it was told, by exactly the thing Acrisius tried to prevent. The story has a cruel irony here. The man who sent his grandchild out to sea in a box to avoid his fate is killed by the baby's adult hand, by accident, at a sporting event.
What Perseus does next is the part I like. He is so ashamed that he cannot bring himself to rule Argos, the place of his grandfather's death. He trades kingdoms with another king, Megapenthes, and takes Tiryns instead. Later, Pausanias says, he founded Mycenae, and he gives two possible reasons for the name. Either the cap of his sword scabbard, a mykes, fell off at the spot, or he found a mushroom there, also a mykes, and used it to drink from a spring.
I love that, a city named for a dropped scabbard cap or a mushroom. It is the opposite of a grand origin. It is a founder's story built from small, slightly embarrassing accidents.
Why his story is different
Now put it all together. Heracles ends in a burning shirt on a funeral pyre. Theseus is thrown off a cliff by someone he trusted. Bellerophon, who rode Pegasus, falls from the sky and wanders alone, crippled. Almost every Greek hero comes to a bad end, because they take more than they are given, and they believe the credit belongs to them.
Perseus marries Andromeda, rules in peace, and founds a lineage that includes Heracles himself, since Heracles's mother Alcmene was Perseus's granddaughter. He is one of the few heroes who is allowed a good ending, and I do not think that is an accident. He is the one who knew whose tools he was using.
My theory, in short, is that the Greeks built Perseus as a quiet argument against their own favourite kind of hero. If you want to see what a different kind of greatness looks like, they seem to say, look at the boy in the chest. He asks for help. He avoids a direct fight. And when it is all over, he hands everything back and lets other people keep the credit.
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation.