I will admit that, from a young age, I
enjoyed stories about Perseus because he could fly. For my money there are
simply not enough people zipping around with wings in this fantasy world we
call classical mythology. Most of the gods have flying chariots (which they
occasionally lend out to people like Medea), there’s a flying horse named
Pegasus, there’s a pair of human twins who can fly, Daedalus builds artificial
wings for Icarus, and Perseus has his flying sandals. In a world where gods
occasionally float down from the sky and hand out magic items, I’d like to see
more heroes performing marvelous feats while soaring though the air. Instead,
everyone just travels around on foot, and Hercules for one is so
technologically backward that his primary weapon is a wooden club (he hasn’t
even adopted metallurgy yet!).
At any rate, I’m a fan of Perseus. Perseus
comes from a family with a lot of backstory, but let me strip it down to the
relevant details here. Before Perseus was born, Perseus’ grandfather, a typical
evil king, received a prophecy that he would be killed by his grandson. Like
all the fools in mythology, he thought he could circumvent this prophesied
misfortune by means of careful precautions. First the king tried to isolate his
daughter and thereby prevent her from getting pregnant. That failed in an
unexpected way (Zeus falls in love with and impregnates a lot of beautiful
young virgins in mythology, and he often morphs into unusually virile animals
to get access to them (to see this amusingly illustrated, scroll down to “First Date”
here, SFW), but this is the only incident I know of where Zeus transforms
into an inanimate object, namely a shower of gold. Which never struck me as an
efficient form for seducing/impregnating someone? But maybe I shouldn’t
overthink it), so the king condemned the daughter and her infant son (Perseus)
to death. Yes, it’s that old tactic of ‘I’ll kill him before he kills me,’ much
beloved of evil tyrants throughout folklore, and always totally ineffective at
circumventing prophecies like this. The king’s methods of execution left
something to be desired: he had them put to sea in a wooden chest, which
predictably floated to a nearby island, where the lovely young woman and her
newborn son arrived unharmed.
Unluckily for them, the island where they
arrived happened to be ruled by a king as evil as the one who had tried to execute
them. The new evil king fell in love with Perseus’ mother and tried to pursue a
sexual relationship with her. This is the point where one of those unrealistic
time gaps (so
common in mythic stories) intervenes: Perseus objects to the relationship
between his mother and the new evil king, even though he ought to have been a
newborn when the king met his mother. But we’ll hand-wave that away, because it
gave the new evil king the opportunity to propose a deal for Perseus, a great
example of the supposedly impossible quest: the king offered to leave Perseus’
mother alone if Perseus would kill a monster for him. (Note to evil kings everywhere:
as methods of killing heroes go, this is almost as ineffective as setting
someone adrift in a floating wooden chest.) The monster that Perseus was sent
to kill was the gorgon Medusa, a hideous woman with snakes for hair who could
turn people to stone with her gaze. Medusa has her own interesting backstory.
Originally she was a beautiful woman with gorgeous hair, but she was raped by
Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and Athena was so offended at the defilement of
her temple that she…took out her anger on Medusa. She couldn’t take out her
anger on Poseidon very easily, since he was a powerful god, but she sure could
take out her anger on a vulnerable woman. So Athena made beautiful Medusa a
hideous monster as punishment for being raped in the wrong place. Later, seeing
the monster as a danger to his kingdom, the evil king sent Perseus to kill her.
To pursue this quest, Perseus acquired a
special sword, a helmet of invisibility, a magic Medusa-proof bag for carrying back
her severed head, and those flying sandals that impressed me so much when I was
young. He killed Medusa with aplomb and prepared to go hassle the evil king
about their deal, except that he got distracted by a few side quests. Namely,
to prove that he did kill Medusa, he had cut off her head and put it in his
magic bag. (Lest you assume that Medusa was less sexually active as a hideous
monster than she was as a beautiful woman, n.b. that she was pregnant when
Perseus arrived, and when Perseus sliced her open, two new children burst out:
a two-headed hound, and a giant known as “the man with the golden sword.”) Nevertheless,
the head had retained its power to turn people to stone, so Perseus discovered
that he had an enormously powerful weapon that could kill anyone at long range.
In short, he went on a killing spree, destroying anyone who disagreed with him,
demonstrating a sort of “Maslow’s Gorgon’s
Head” mentality (‘When the only tool you have is a gorgon’s head, every
problem looks like someone who can be killed with a gorgon’s head’). When he
decided he wanted to marry a particular princess, he killed the princess’ fiancé
(blithely failing to notice any parallel to his mother, the king who made an
unjustified sexual claim on her, and the king’s attempt to kill Perseus when he
opposed that claim). He returned home and used Medusa’s head to kill not only
the evil king who posed a sexual threat to his mother, but also all of the king’s
supporters en masse. After he had killed everyone who dared to interfere with
him, he surrendered the gorgon’s head to Athena, but he still went on to kill
his grandfather without it (although not on purpose this time), thus fulfilling
the prophecy. He accidentally hit his grandfather, that stupid evil king who
thought he could outsmart fate, with a discus in an athletic competition.
Even if I admire the cinematic panache of
his transportation methods, Perseus is not the kind of person I’d want in my
life. He was irresponsible. He did manage to marry that princess whose fiancé
he killed (far off in Ethiopia), but after he sired a child on her, he went
back to Greece, and, as far as I can tell, never bothered to go back. I hope
she wasn’t lonely. He intentionally killed far more people than he had to, in
addition to his grandfather, and he never developed any useful skills in
diplomacy or problem-solving. After he killed his grandfather he claimed his
throne as the rightful heir, but he was so ashamed of having murdered a family
member (and the rightful king, too) that he persuaded a nearby king to switch
kingdoms with him, as if royal lineage matters far more for leadership ability
than experience with responsibility or practical knowledge of the place and
population you’re supposed to be ruling. He was perhaps puzzlingly controlling
of his mother’s sex life, and yet also ineffective at controlling it (okay, usually
sources on the myth make clear that she didn’t want sexual attention from the
second evil king, so it may be reasonable for Perseus to ward off the king for
his mother’s sake, but Perseus took no precautions to fend off this attention
from her while he was away for several years killing monsters and marrying
princesses). If it’s any consolation, his many murders eventually caught up
with him, and Perseus himself was murdered to avenge one of his victims. Overall,
when I think of Perseus, I prefer to imagine his daring airborne combat with the
sea monster, and forget about all of his bad decisions over the rest of his
life.
No comments:
Post a Comment