Читать книгу The Myth of the Birth of the Hero - Ранк Отто - Страница 10

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Akrisios, the king of Argos, had already reached an advanced age without having male progeny. As he desired a son, he consulted the Delphian oracle, but this warned him against male descendants, and informed him that his daughter Danae would bear a son through whose hand he would perish. In order to prevent this, his daughter was locked up by him in an iron chamber, which he caused to be carefully guarded. But Zeus penetrated through the roof, in the guise of a golden rain, and Danae became the mother of a boy.39 One day Akrisios heard the voice of young Perseus in his daughter’s room, and in this way learned that she had given birth to a child. He killed the nurse, but carried his daughter with her son to the domestic altar of Zeus, to have an oath taken on the true father’s name. But he refuses to believe his daughter’s statement that Zeus is the father, and he encloses her with the child in a box,40 which is cast into the sea. The box is carried by the waves to the coast of Seriphos, where Diktys, a fisherman, usually called a brother of King Polydektes, saves mother and child by drawing them out of the sea with his nets. Diktys leads the two into his house and keeps them as his relations. Polydektes, however, becomes enamoured of the beautiful mother, and as Perseus was in his way, he tried to remove him by sending him forth to fetch the head of the Gorgon Medusa. But against the king’s anticipations Perseus accomplishes this difficult task, and a number of heroic deeds besides. In throwing the discos, at play, he accidentally kills his grandfather, as foretold by the oracle. He becomes the king of Argos, then of Tiryath, and the builder of Mykene.41