Disappointed by his lack of luck in having a son, Acrisius consulted the Oracle at Delphi, who warned him that he would one day be killed by his daughter's son. Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Apparently the Persians also knew that story, as Xerxes tried to use it when bribing the Argives during his invasion of Greece, but ultimately failed to do this. Herodotus recounts this story, devising a foreign son of Andromeda and Perseus, Perses, from whom the Persians took the name. However, the native name of the Persians – Pārsa in Persian – has always been pronounced with an -a. Ī Greek folk etymology connected Perseus to the name of the Persian people, whom they called the Pérsai (from Old Persian Pārsa 'Persia, a Persian'). Ventris & Chadwick speculate about a Mycenaean goddess pe-re-*82 ( Linear B: 𐀟𐀩𐁚), attested on tablet PY Tn 316, and tentatively reconstructed as *Preswa. Graves carries the meaning still further, to the Perse- in Persephone, goddess of death. This difficulty can be overcome by presuming a dissimilation from the -th- in pérthein, which the Greeks would have preferred from a putative *phérthein. Ordinarily *bh- descends to Greek as ph. This corresponds to Pokorny’s *bher-(3), 'scrape, cut'. Hofmann lists the possible root as *bher-, from which Latin ferio, 'strike'. The further origin of perth- is more obscure. Pers-eus therefore is a 'sacker ' that is, a soldier by occupation, a fitting name for the first Mycenaean warrior. According to Buck, the -eus suffix is typically used to form an agent noun, in this case from the aorist stem, pers. In that regard Graves proposed the only Greek derivation available: Perseus might be from the Greek verb πέρθειν ( pérthein, 'to waste, ravage, sack, destroy') some form of which is familiar in Homeric epithets. There is some idea that it descended into Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language. He was the son of Zeus and the mortal Danaë, as well as the half-brother and great-grandfather of Heracles (as they were both children of Zeus, and Heracles' mother was descended from Perseus).īecause of the obscurity of the name 'Perseus' and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists presume that it might be pre-Greek however, the name of Perseus's native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. He beheaded the Gorgon Medusa for Polydectes and saved Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus. He was, alongside Cadmus and Bellerophon, the greatest Greek hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. Perseús) is the legendary founder of the Perseid dynasty. In Greek mythology, Perseus ( US: / ˈ p ɜː r.

Hercules son of zeus simbolo symbol