Perses

He led her to his house. That is the only thing Perses is ever recorded as doing.

The line sits in the middle of Hesiod’s Theogony, delivered in passing, the way a poem clears its throat before the part it actually cares about. Asteria of happy name, whom Perses once led to his great house to be called his dear wife. Then she conceives, and the poem turns to the daughter and never comes back to the father. He does not fight, travel, quarrel, boast, transform, get bound in Tartarus, or die. He marries, and he is finished.

His own beginning is at least given a setting. His mother was Eurybia, a daughter of Pontus, the sea itself, and Hesiod says she has a heart of flint inside her. She came to Crius, and the three sons she bore him have the sound of a storm forecast: Astraeus the starry one, who fathered the winds; Pallas, whose name reaches for a brandished spear; and Perses. Salt and cold and hard weather run in that family. Whatever else the Greeks thought about these three, they did not think of them as gentle.

The name is the interesting problem. Perses comes from the verb used of cities taken and stripped in war, the word for sacking, ravaging, laying waste. It should belong to something that arrives with fire. And then Hesiod, in the same breath in which he names him, calls Perses foremost among all in wisdom, and offers not one word of explanation. A destroyer, praised for his mind. Nobody in antiquity seems to have felt the need to reconcile those two things, and nobody since has managed it convincingly.

Modern reference works have filled the silence by making him the Titan god of destruction, complete with a domain, as though he presided over ruin the way Poseidon presided over the sea. No ancient source says this. It is a title reverse-engineered from an etymology, and it is worth knowing that the confident phrase in the encyclopedia entry rests on nothing but the meaning of the word. There is no altar to Perses, no festival, no priesthood, no votive stone with his name cut into it, no vase that shows him. Of the appearance of Perses the record has nothing at all: not a beard, not a height, not a garment. He is one of the few figures in Greek myth for whom the imagination was never even asked to do any work.

What survives instead is a threshold. A great house, in the archaic sense, with a hearth at its centre and smoke going up through the roof, and a Titan bringing home a bride whose name means starry. Asteria was the daughter of Coeus and Phoebe and the sister of Leto, and later poets would send her fleeing across the sky as a falling star and a quail before she became an island. In Hesiod she does none of that. She crosses the doorway, and the house closes behind her.

The child of that marriage is Hecate, and the moment she is born the poem stops behaving normally. Hesiod devotes more than forty consecutive lines to praising her, the longest such passage given to any single deity in the Theogony, so long and so strange that editors spent a century arguing that somebody must have inserted it later. Zeus honoured her above all, the poem says, and gave her splendid gifts: a share of the earth, a share of the barren sea, a share of the starry heaven. He took away nothing that she had held under the older gods. She sits beside kings while they give judgement. She stands at a man’s shoulder in the line of battle and hands him the victory if she feels like it. She is there in the byre with Hermes when the herds increase, and out on the grey water with the Earth-Shaker, where she fills the nets and then empties them again, easily, once the catch has already been seen, if that is what she wants.

That last detail is the key to her, and it explains her father. Whenever a man burns a proper sacrifice and prays according to custom, Hesiod says, he calls upon Hecate, and whether the prayer works depends on whether she receives it kindly. Her power is not a department. It is the margin of luck laid across everyone else’s department, the reason two identical prayers get different answers. And her right to that margin comes from her descent. She is an only child, mounogenes, a word Hesiod applies to her twice and which he elsewhere uses of a son who inherits the whole estate because there is no one to divide it with. Her portion came down to her from the Titans, intact, and the new king of the gods chose to confirm it rather than seize it. For that inheritance to exist, she needed a father from the old order. Perses is that father. He is a legal fact.

His brother did rather better out of the settlement. Pallas married Styx, and Styx came first to Olympus with her children on the day Zeus called the gods together and promised that anyone who fought beside him would keep his honours and anyone who had gone without would be given some. Her children were Zelus, Nike, Cratos and Bia, Emulation, Victory, Strength and Force, and they have lived beside the throne of Zeus ever since. Two brothers, two houses, and the offspring of both ended up woven into the new regime. Only one of the brothers got anything for himself.

What became of Perses in the war, no text says. He is not listed among the Titans hurled into Tartarus and he is not listed among those who kept their place. The record simply loses interest in him. Whatever force the name promised, no story ever shows it used, and that is the whole of his weakness: he was never given anything to do.

The name outlasted him anyway, attached to somebody else. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, when Persephone screams and no god and no mortal hears her, one goddess catches the sound from inside her cave, and the poem identifies her as bright-coiffed Hecate, the daughter of Persaeus. Lycophron calls her the maiden daughter of Perses, Brimo of three forms. Ovid sends Medea to the ancient shrine of Perseis, and Seneca’s Medea calls on Perseis by name as the torches go past. For eight hundred years the word does duty as a patronymic for a daughter who long ago outgrew the man it belonged to.

Two other figures share the name and cause most of the confusion around it. One is the son Perseus left behind in Ethiopia with Cepheus, from whom Herodotus reports the Persians took their name, a piece of Greek folk etymology that Xerxes is said to have tried to trade on when he wanted Argos neutral. The other is the brother of Aeetes who seized the throne of Colchis and was killed for it when Medea came home. Neither is the Titan, and neither is related to him.

There is one more coincidence, and it has tempted people. The Works and Days is addressed by Hesiod to his brother, a grasping, litigious man who would rather go to law than to work, and that brother’s name is Perses. Someone noticed that the poet who stopped his own theogony to praise Hecate had a brother who shared her father’s name, and pressed the point hard. Nothing came of it. There is no evidence, and the reading persuaded almost nobody. What remains is what was there at the start: a Titan called the Destroyer, credited with wisdom for reasons no one wrote down, who crossed a threshold once with a woman named for the stars.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Perses in Greek mythology?

Perses is a second-generation Titan, the son of Crius and Eurybia, who married the Titaness Asteria and fathered the goddess Hecate. He is named in Hesiod’s Theogony and in the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, but no myth is told about him. His marriage and his fatherhood are effectively the entire record.

Was Perses the father of Hecate?

Yes. Hesiod’s Theogony states that Asteria bore Hecate to Perses, and Pseudo-Apollodorus repeats the same parentage. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter calls Hecate the daughter of Persaeus, an alternative form of the name, and later poets including Ovid and Seneca refer to Hecate simply as Perseis, meaning daughter of Perses.

What was Perses the god of?

No ancient source assigns Perses a domain. The common description of him as a Titan god of destruction is a modern inference drawn from his name, which comes from a Greek verb meaning to sack or lay waste. There was no cult of Perses, no temple, and no recorded ritual anywhere in the Greek world.

Who were the parents and brothers of Perses?

His parents were the Titan Crius and Eurybia, a daughter of the sea god Pontus whom Hesiod describes as having a heart of flint. His brothers were Astraeus, who fathered the winds and the stars, and Pallas, who married Styx and fathered Zelus, Nike, Cratos and Bia.

Are there other figures in Greek myth named Perses?

Yes, and they are frequently confused with the Titan. One is Perses the son of Perseus and Andromeda, left in Ethiopia with his grandfather Cepheus, whom Herodotus names as the ancestor of the Persians. Another is Perses the brother of Aeetes, who usurped the throne of Colchis and was killed after Medea returned home. Neither is connected to the Titan.

Related Entries

Hecate, Asteria, Crius, Astraeus, Pallas, Coeus, Phoebe, Leto, Cronus, Zeus, Titan, Persephone, Demeter, Hermes, Poseidon, Perseus