Acrisius

A carpenter in a short tunic is drilling a hole in the lid of a large wooden chest. The king leans on his staff and gestures. Behind the chest his daughter lifts her hand in protest, and on the far side a nursemaid holds a baby who has no idea what the box is for. An Athenian painter put that moment on a water jar around 490 BC, and the jar is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Another painter, a generation later, put the same scene on a lidded storage jar now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the names Perseus and Akrisios written beside the figures so nobody could mistake who was about to go into the sea.

Acrisius was a king of Argos, and he was famous for one thing. He was afraid of his grandson.

The trouble began in the womb. Apollodorus, the mythographer of the second century AD, says that Abas, king of Argos, had twin sons by Aglaia, daughter of Mantineus, and that Acrisius and his brother Proetus were already quarrelling before they were born. When they grew up they went to war over the kingdom, and in the course of that war they became the first men to invent the shield. Acrisius won and drove Proetus out. Proetus went to Lycia, married the king’s daughter, whom Homer calls Anteia and the tragic poets Stheneboea, and came back with a Lycian army. He took Tiryns, whose walls the Cyclopes built for him, and the brothers split the Argolid between them: Acrisius in Argos, Proetus in Tiryns. Pausanias, travelling in the second century AD, tells the battle differently. He saw a building shaped much like a pyramid on the road from Argos to Epidaurus, carved with Argive shields in relief, and was told that the fight for the throne had ended in a draw, that the brothers were reconciled because neither could win, and that the dead of both sides lay there in one common tomb, since they were fellow citizens and kinsmen. Apollodorus’s translator, J. G. Frazer, set the unborn quarrel beside Esau and Jacob in Genesis.

Acrisius had one child, a daughter named Danae. Her mother was Eurydice, daughter of Lacedaemon, in Apollodorus, and Aganippe in the Latin handbook of Hyginus. Wanting sons, Acrisius asked an oracle how to get them. The god gave him an answer to a different question: his daughter would bear a son, and that son would kill him.

So he built a bronze chamber under the ground and put Danae in it under guard. Hyginus calls it a stone-walled prison. Either way it was a cold, closed room with a roof, and the roof turned out to be the weak point. Some said that Proetus seduced his niece, and that this, not the throne, was the real cause of the brothers’ feud. The better-known story says Zeus came through the ceiling as a stream of gold that poured into Danae’s lap. The oldest mention of the family is in the Iliad, where Zeus himself, listing the women he has loved, names “Akrisios’ daughter” Danae. Pausanias saw an underground building in Argos over which, the locals said, the bronze chamber had once stood, until the tyrant Perilaus pulled it down.

When Acrisius found out that his daughter had a son, he did not believe a word about Zeus. He shut Danae and the infant Perseus in a chest and cast it into the sea. Apollonius of Rhodes, a poet of the third century BC, calls it a father’s mad rage. Aeschylus, in a satyr play that survives in scraps of papyrus, has Danae, hauled ashore on Seriphos and cornered by satyrs, wish that no one may ever put her to sea again, “neither a lascivious beast nor a father”. The chest came ashore at Seriphos, where the fisherman Dictys hauled it in and raised the boy.

That should have been the end of the danger. It was only the middle. Perseus grew up, went out after the Gorgon, came back with Medusa’s head, and set off for Argos with Danae and Andromeda to see his grandfather. Acrisius heard that he was coming, remembered the oracle, and left. He went north to Larissa on the river Peneus, in what Apollodorus calls the Pelasgian land. Pausanias says Perseus followed him there on purpose, meaning to greet the old man with kind words.

At Larissa the king Teutamides was holding funeral games for his dead father, and Perseus entered the pentathlon. He threw the discus. The heavy disc left his hand, and Acrisius was struck on the foot and died on the spot. Pausanias puts it more sadly: Perseus, proud of having invented the discus, was showing it off before everyone, and Acrisius, as luck would have it, stepped unnoticed into its path. The oracle was fulfilled, Pausanias adds, and none of the precautions against daughter and grandson had made any difference.

Hyginus tells a softer and stranger version. In his account Acrisius set out for Seriphos after Danae and Perseus, King Polydectes pleaded for them, and Perseus swore an oath that he would never kill his grandfather. A storm kept Acrisius on the island, Polydectes died, and at the funeral games the wind caught a discus from Perseus’s hand and carried it into the old man’s head. What Perseus would not do of his own will, Hyginus says, the gods did for him.

Ovid adds one more charge against him. In the Metamorphoses Acrisius, son of Abas, is the one king left who bars Dionysus from the walls of Argos, denying that the god was a son of Jupiter, just as he denied that Perseus was. He came to regret both. Elsewhere Ovid reverses the usual ending: Proetus has driven his brother out and seized the citadel of Argos, and Perseus returns and turns Proetus to stone with the Gorgon’s head, restoring the grandfather who had never deserved him.

Perseus buried Acrisius outside Larissa, though another report, which Frazer traces to Clement of Alexandria, put the grave inside the temple of Athena on the city’s acropolis. Then Perseus did something that says a great deal about how the Greeks weighed an accidental killing. Ashamed to take the throne of a man who had died by his hand, he went to Megapenthes, son of Proetus, at Tiryns and traded kingdoms with him. Megapenthes took Argos. Perseus took Tiryns and went on to fortify Midea and found Mycenae.

Acrisius had no power except a king’s power, and he used all of it: a vault, guards, a carpenter, the open sea, a long road north. His one real weakness was that he believed the oracle completely and trusted nothing else, not his daughter, not a god’s claim, not his grandson’s goodwill. Every step he took to escape the prophecy moved him closer to the discus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Acrisius in Greek mythology?

Acrisius was a king of Argos, the son of Abas and the twin brother of Proetus. He was the father of Danae and the grandfather of the hero Perseus. He is best known for trying to escape an oracle that said his grandson would kill him.

Why did Acrisius lock up Danae?

Acrisius asked an oracle how he could have sons, and was told instead that his daughter would bear a son who would kill him. To prevent this he shut Danae in a bronze chamber under the ground, or in Hyginus a stone-walled prison. Zeus reached her anyway as a stream of gold, and she bore Perseus.

What did Acrisius do to Danae and Perseus?

When Acrisius learned that Danae had a son, he refused to believe the father was Zeus. He shut Danae and the baby Perseus in a wooden chest and cast it into the sea. The chest washed up on the island of Seriphos, where the fisherman Dictys found them.

How did Acrisius die?

Acrisius was killed by a discus thrown by his grandson Perseus, fulfilling the oracle. In Apollodorus and Pausanias it happened at funeral games at Larissa, where Acrisius had fled, and the discus struck him on the foot. In Hyginus it happened at funeral games on Seriphos, when the wind carried the discus into his head.

Who was Acrisius’s brother?

Acrisius’s twin brother was Proetus, who later ruled Tiryns. Apollodorus says the twins quarrelled even in the womb and later fought a war over Argos in which they invented the shield. Some accounts said Proetus, not Zeus, was the father of Danae’s child, and that this was the cause of their feud.

Related Entries

Danae, Perseus, Zeus, Medusa, Gorgon, Graeae, Cetus, Dionysus, Athena, Cyclops, Io, Atreus, Thyestes, Oedipus, Cronus, Moses