Acrisius

Apollodorus's Library makes Acrisius one of twin sons of Abas, king of Argos, and Aglaia. He and his brother Proetus quarrelled while still in the womb. When they grew up they fought a war for the kingdom, and in that war they were the first to invent shields. Acrisius won and drove Proetus out of Argos. Proetus came back with a Lycian army from his father-in-law and seized Tiryns. The brothers then divided the Argive land, Acrisius ruling Argos and Proetus Tiryns. Pausanias saw a pyramid-shaped monument on the road from Argos toward Epidauria, carved with Argive shields. He was told it marked this battle, the first fought with shields. His informants, however, said the fight ended in a draw and a reconciliation.

Acrisius had one child, a daughter, Danae, by Eurydice, daughter of Lacedaemon. According to Apollodorus he asked an oracle how he could get male children. The god answered that his daughter would bear a son who would kill him. In fear, Acrisius built a bronze chamber under the ground and kept Danae guarded in it. Pausanias was shown the underground building at Argos over which that chamber had stood, until the tyrant Perilaus pulled it down.

The chamber did not work. Apollodorus reports two explanations. Some said Proetus seduced Danae, and that this began the quarrel between the brothers. Others said Zeus reached her as a stream of gold pouring through the roof into her lap. When Acrisius learned that she had a son, Perseus, he refused to believe Zeus was the father. He shut mother and child in a chest and threw it into the sea. The chest came ashore on Seriphos, where Dictys raised the boy.

The oracle was fulfilled after Perseus came home from killing the Gorgon, the adventure told in Perseus and Medusa. Apollodorus says Perseus hurried to Argos with Danae and Andromeda to see Acrisius. The old king, dreading the oracle, left Argos for the Pelasgian land. At Larissa, King Teutamides was holding games in honor of his dead father. Perseus entered the pentathlon, and his discus struck Acrisius on the foot and killed him at once. Seeing the oracle fulfilled, Perseus buried him outside the city. Ashamed to claim Argos from the man he had killed, he exchanged kingdoms with Megapenthes, son of Proetus, and ruled Tiryns instead.

Pausanias tells the ending with a different motive. In his account Acrisius heard that Perseus was alive and doing great deeds, and withdrew to Larissa on the Peneus. Perseus followed him there wanting to greet his grandfather with kind words and deeds, not to claim anything. Proud of the discus, which Pausanias says Perseus himself invented, he gave displays before everyone. Acrisius stepped unnoticed into the discus's path. Pausanias then draws the lesson plainly: the god's prediction was fulfilled, and Acrisius's precautions against his daughter and grandson did not prevent his fate. The story is one of the clearest Greek cases of a prophecy fulfilled through the very steps taken to avoid it, a pattern traced across other myths in oracles and fate and bound up with the Moirai.

Ovid's Metamorphoses gives Acrisius a second fault. It says Acrisius, son of Abas, alone resisted Bacchus. He barred the god from the walls of Argos and took up arms against him, denying he was a son of Jupiter. He likewise refused to accept that Perseus was Jupiter's son by Danae and the shower of gold. Ovid adds that Acrisius soon regretted both insults, to the god and to the grandson he had failed to acknowledge.

Herodotus uses Acrisius in a genealogical argument about the Spartan kings. He traces the Dorian kings back to Perseus and notes that counting upward from Danae, daughter of Acrisius, their forebears would prove to be Egyptians. He also reports a Persian claim that Perseus was an Assyrian, and that the ancestors of Acrisius had no kinship with him.