Perseus
Slayer of the Gorgon
PUR-see-us
Set an impossible task by a king who wanted him gone, and equipped for it by half of Olympus.
The Story
Shut in a chest with his mother and thrown into the sea as an infant, Perseus grew up on Seriphos under a king who wanted Danaë and wanted her son out of the way. The Gorgon's head was supposed to be a fatal errand; Athena and Hermes turned it into an outfitting.
He came back with it and used it, on a sea monster to save Andromeda, and on the king. The prophecy that had put him in the chest still landed: years later he threw a discus at a games and killed his grandfather in the crowd, exactly as foretold.
Did You Know?
- The Perseid meteor shower every August radiates from his constellation, which is why they are his.
- Algol, the star marking Medusa's head, dims noticeably every 2.87 days because it is an eclipsing binary. Its Arabic name means the ghoul, and cultures with no contact with each other flagged that star as ominous.
- He was claimed as the founder of Mycenae, which makes the great Bronze Age citadel of Greek legend his city rather than Agamemnon's by origin.