by Laura Gill
I have to confess that one of my favorite films is the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. As much as I love the exploits of Perseus, and the love story with Andromeda, I have always been curious about the story of Perseus’ mother, seen briefly at the beginning of the film being thrust with baby Perseus into the wooden chest, and later breastfeeding him on a beach among a community of fishermen. By the time young Perseus grows into Harry Hamlin, Danaë is deceased; she rates a passing mention in an early scene between Perseus and unemployed playwright Ammon.
The 2010 remake treats Perseus’s backstory and the figure of Danaë with even less respect. Here, Danaë is a Cretan queen rather than a princess of Argos, and married to King Acrisius, who in myth is actually Danaë’s father, the king of Argos. In this version, Danaë is dead when the fisherman Spyros pries open the lid of the wooden chest and discovers baby Perseus nestled in her arms.
Both films treat the Perseus-Andromeda dynamic as the central set-piece, rewriting the original mythology to make the Medusa quest a progression of the love story: Perseus must save Andromeda, his affianced bride, when her foolish mother, Cassiopeia, offends the gods by comparing her daughter’s beauty (or her own, in some versions) to that of the immortal goddesses, thus incurring their terrible wrath. Perfect material for Hollywood, not so faithful to the myth.
Hollywood only tells half the story. Screenwriters always leave out the Danaë-Diktys-Polydektes dynamic of the story because the Perseus story, the hero’s journey aspect, sells. The ancient Greeks, however, were accustomed to their hero tales having many episodes and plenty of back-story. Modern audiences know that Danaë is impregnated by Zeus, and that after Perseus is born she and her infant are locked in the wooden chest and cast out to sea to die. The story continues offscreen: she and Perseus rescued by and taken in by the fisherman Diktys, whose brother, Polydektes, is the king of the island. Polydektes desires Danaë because she is beautiful, but she rebuffs him, and for some reason he cannot have her because of young Perseus. Why or how a mere infant could obstruct the king of Seriphos is a question never answered. I often think that the Greeks had a body of folk tales about Perseus, Danaë, and his adventures that were lost.
Polydektes waits and schemes, and then when Perseus is grown he plays on the youth’s pride and tricks him into fetching Medusa’s head. With Perseus out of the way, presumably for good, Polydektes pursues Danaë. In the most popular version, Perseus returns just in time to thwart the wedding by turning Polydektes and his followers to stone; Danaë must not have been in the room at the time, because the story never explains how she avoids a similar fate. In another version, Perseus returns to find his mother and Diktys seeking refuge in a sanctuary to escape Polydektes, who is then turned to stone with his followers. Perseus makes Diktys king of Seriphos and either gives his mother to him in marriage, or takes her and Andromeda with him to Argos.
Why would Polydektes not simply seize Danaë when he first encounters her? Why does she not simply marry Diktys earlier? Marriage to the king’s brother would offer some protection from Polydektes’ advances. Is Diktys married to someone else when he rescues Danaë and Perseus? Possibly, Danaë has become so infatuated with Zeus that she wants no one else, and only marries Diktys at the end because Perseus commands it.
Perseus’s adoptive father is probably the most enigmatic figure in the entire Perseus cycle. Why does he live as a humble fisherman rather than as a royal kinsman in the palace? His absence from court hints at an estrangement from Polydektes that I knew I would have to address. I would also have to address the strange dynamic between him, Danaë, and Polydektes.
Danaë’s portrayals in art oscillate between two extremes of interpretation: the sober virgin who calmly accepts Zeus’s unorthodox method of impregnation—a pre-Christian version of the Annunciation—to a venial hussy who throws her head back in obvious pleasure as she receives her divine lover. As interpretations go, the latter is so hard to shake off that when researching public domain images to incorporate into the cover artwork, I found precious few that did not sexualize Danaë. My heroine is a woman who lives a hard life far from the palaces of Mycenaean Greece. She is frightened, confused, and determined. I did not want to mislead readers by sexualizing her on the cover.
If Danaë existed, she would have lived sometime in the mid-fourteenth century B.C., several generations before the Trojan War. She is the daughter of King Acrisius, but the myth varies as to her mother’s name; she is either Eurydike of Sparta, or Aganippe. Rather than choose one, I decided to give Danaë a fairy-tale solution, a stepmother. Aganippe became the biological mother, the “good queen.” Readers of my novels might recognize Aganippe’s father, Minos Lakhuros, as a very minor character in Knossos.
One of the most fantastical of all the elements of the Danaë story is that Acrisius, upon learning about the dreadful prophecy that he will die at the hands of Danaë’s son, locks her in either a tower or underground chamber of bronze. Acrisius is hardly likely to have wasted valuable bronze, used for household implements and weapons, on securing his virgin daughter, so I had to find a more reasonable alternative.
The underground chamber—and later the wooden chest—point to themes of death and burial. I reasoned that a fourteenth century B.C. Acrisius might have sent his only daughter to serve as a virgin priestess in a sacred cave so carefully guarded by other women that she could not possibly encounter any men. I wanted my Acrisius to be more complex and torn than in typical portrayals. This virgin priestess option humanizes him in that he spares Danaë from a crueler fate, though one could argue that later condemning his daughter and infant grandson to be drowned or suffocated in a wooden chest undoes whatever prior good he might have done. The ancient Greeks, of course, would have seen this very differently. Acrisius dares not kill Danaë and baby Perseus directly for fear of the blood pollution the slaughter of two innocents would incur, so he takes the next available option, which is to let the gods determine their fate. Taken together with what the myths say about Acrisius’s lack of male heir, and the dynastic conflict between him and his brother Proitus, I see Acrisius as a very troubled, embittered, and frightened man.
The sacred cave/priestess element let me introduce the self-sufficient Women of the Mountain, worshippers of the Mother Goddess. I knew that my Danaë would need both practical skills and determination/a strong sense of self-worth to survive life in a fishing village on Seriphos, but I did not necessarily want to rely on the tropes made familiar by the feminism of the Mother Goddess in fiction. Danaë can throw a punch when needed, and she is afraid of men, especially after her terrifying encounter with Zeus, and therefore rejects Diktys. As she matures, however, she comes to realize that “men and women need each other to make the world work.”
That Danaë would be afraid rather than accepting of Zeus is not impossible. The ancient Greeks regarded their deities with terror and reverence. Gods were there to be appeased and negotiated with; they were not as approachable as, say, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. A benevolent goddess could make babies healthy and crops grow, but an angry god could curse a king with childlessness or destroy an island like Santorini in a single day and night.
One reason I chose not to make Danaë as accepting of Zeus’s attentions is based in the myths themselves. Dealing with this part of the myth also forced me to consider how Danaë could conceivably prove that Perseus is a divine child, and she innocent of breaking her vows, rather than the product of an illicit liaison with a mortal stranger. Well, I reasoned, if Leda can carry Helen in an egg, and Athena can spring fully grown from Zeus’s forehead, then Danaë can have an accelerated pregnancy. To further the notion that Danaë is an innocent in the matter of Perseus, neither she nor her son is persecuted by Hera. I wanted to show Hera in a more benevolent light, rather than as the jealous and vengeful spouse she is usually portrayed as. Thus in my novel, it is Hera, not Zeus or Poseidon, who ultimately rescues Danaë and Perseus from death in the wooden chest. As for restoring Danaë’s virginity, that i
dea comes from both Danaë’s early, medieval association with the Virgin Mary, and from the myth describing how Hera annually renewed her own virginity by bathing in the sacred spring of Kanathos, in Argolis.
In the process of researching the novel, I discovered an obscure reference to the name “Perseus Eurymedon.” “Perseus” means “sacker of cities,” an unlikely name for an infant. Apollonius of Rhodes specifically mentions in the fourth book of his Argonautica that Danaë initially called her young son Eurymedon; that she had a younger brother with the same name is strictly my invention. I felt rather sympathetic to Acrisius and wanted to give him a son, albeit a short-lived one.
How old was Danaë when she became the mother of Perseus? Hollywood makes her at least eighteen for legal reasons, but in realistic terms, in an age when a woman’s average life expectancy was twenty-nine, she probably would have been much younger, about thirteen or fourteen years old. Modern audiences have to keep in mind that several of the Greek heroes, including Herakles and Jason, were teenagers when they first started out. Perseus would have been about fifteen or sixteen when he undertook the Medusa quest and married Andromeda.
Danaë’s fate after she marries Diktys or returns with Perseus to Argos is not known; the myths remain silent on her old age and death. Since childbirth was the most common killer of women in this period, and Danaë had no other known children, she might have lived long enough to meet her great-grandchildren. It is not improbable speculation to say that she encountered her great-granddaughter Alkmene, the future mother of Herakles, or that an elderly Danaë might even have been present when Herakles was born.
Contrary to Hollywood interpretation, Perseus seems to have gotten a bit trigger-happy with Medusa’s head, exactly what one might expect from a red-blooded, half-divine teenager who comes into possession of such an awesome weapon. Taking all versions of the myth into account, he unleashes the Gorgon’s head a grand total of six times. I allude to this tendency in Perseus’s evening conversation with Danaë and Diktys late in the novel, where he describes how he turned Andromeda’s fiancé and uncle, Phineus, into stone.
A word about the Mycenae featured in the epilogue. A settlement already existed on the site of Mycenae when Perseus arrived; he merely fortified the location. So readers are not confused, Perseus’s citadel is not the one tourists visit today. That citadel, including the famous Lion Gate, was, according to legend, the work of the later Atreid kings, who also extended Mycenae’s fortifications and brought Grave Circle A inside the citadel. Archaeology supports this tradition to some extent; the inhabitants associated with Grave Circle A lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries B.C., a few generations too early for Perseus’ family.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Gill has a passion for Mycenaean and Minoan culture. She has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from California State University, Northridge, and has worked as a secondary school teacher and florist. Previous works include Helen’s Daughter, Knossos, and The Orestes Trilogy.
