Acrisios

Alright so Acrisios is the king of Argos, a Greek city or city state type place. Everything is going great for him until a prophetess tells him that if his wonderful daughter Danaë ever has a son, that boy will kill him. Rough. Acrisios panics and puts Danaë in a dungeon so she’ll never meet anyone. This is a strong plan except that Zeus (king of the gods) works out that if he turns himself into golden rain he can just casually drip into the dungeon. So he does. Zeus likes Danaë, Danaë likes Zeus and months later Acrisios can’t believe it when he hears a baby crying from the dungeon. This baby is Perseus and he is no joke. 

Acrisios continues to make shocking decisions and puts his daughter and grandson in a timber chest and throws them into the ocean. Because this is a Greek myth, instead of sinking the chest floats to a different island, Seriphos, and a real first class citizen called Dictys opens it. He finds Danaë and Perseus. Danaë is amazing and Dictys offers to marry her and raise her son as his own. This goes great for quite a while. 

Multiple years later Dictys takes his incredible family to meet his brother, who is also the king of Seriphos - Polydectes (this guy is no good). Polydectes agrees that Danaë is sensational and decides to attempt to steal her from his brother. The only issue is that her son is a demigod. 

As a complete set up style, impossible mission, Polydectes says something like this: “Perseus, as king of Seriphos I command you to find and slay the gorgon Medusa” (this is dangerous because a single glance at a gorgon’s snakes-for-hair head turns you into stone). Perseus is into it though, so he goes. Using craft, a shiny reflective shield and old world brutality Perseus waits until night, sneaks in backwards while looking at the reflection in his shield and severs Medusa’s sleeping head. He tosses it into a sack and gets back on his ship. 

Ok there are only 3 or 4 new characters and names to remember. Let’s keep going.

On the way back to Seriphos, Perseus noticed there was a brilliant young lady chained to a cliff. This was Andromeda and it was not going great. Andromeda looked amazing and her mother Cassiopeia was so pumped that she started telling people that Andromeda was more beautiful than all the nymphs in the sea. This was a problem because the sea nymphs and their dad Poseiden heard this and they were not pleased. Poseiden sent a flood and the sea monster Ketos to terrorise Queen Cassiopeia and King Cepheus. Cepheus consulted an oracle who said the only way out was to sacrifice Andromeda to the sea monster.

This was going on when Perseus sailed by. As I said he thought she was brilliant and so he charged in and killed Ketos (a giant sea serpent). Filled with gratitude, and probably still some pride, Cassiopeia and Cepheus enthusiastically agreed to the marriage Perseus and Andromeda had decided on. 

When Perseus made it home, with a new wife and a gorgon head in a sack, there was turmoil. Danaë (mum) and Dictys (cool step dad) were hiding in a temple because Polydectes (King, uncle, greedy bastard) had organised some guys and they were coming to steal Danaë. Perseus didn’t approve and pulled out his gorgon head which turned Polydectes to stone. Job done. 

With the king gone, Dictys and his wife Danaë become the king and queen. Things were good. People started to hear about how great Perseus was and he began getting invites to travel around the Greek world. One time he was competing in some Olympic activities in Thessaly. He threw a discus and shanked it into the crowd by mistake. It hit Acrisios (remember him from paragraph one?) in the back of the head and killed him. 

Hectic.