Polydectes

Apollodorus's Library makes Polydectes and Dictys the sons of Magnes and a Naiad nymph, and says the two brothers settled the island of Seriphos. When Acrisius cast his daughter Danaë and her baby into the sea in a chest, it washed ashore on Seriphos. Dictys took up the boy Perseus and raised him. By then Polydectes ruled the island.

Apollodorus says Polydectes fell in love with Danaë but could not get near her, because Perseus had grown to manhood. So he called his friends together, Perseus among them, on a pretext. He claimed to be collecting gifts toward a bride-price for Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus. Perseus boasted that he would not refuse even the Gorgon's head. Polydectes asked the others for horses. When Perseus brought no horse, the king held him to his word and ordered him to bring the head.

That demand launched the whole quest told in Perseus and Medusa: the Graeae, the nymphs with the winged sandals, and the beheading of Medusa among the Gorgons.

While Perseus was away, Polydectes turned to force. Apollodorus says that on his return Perseus found Danaë and Dictys taking refuge at the altars because of the king's violence. Perseus walked into the palace, where Polydectes had gathered his friends. He turned his own face away and held up the head. Everyone who looked at it became stone, each fixed in the pose he happened to strike. Perseus then made Dictys king of Seriphos. He returned his borrowed equipment to Hermes and gave the head to Athena.

Pindar's Pythian 12 frames the same ending as a grim wedding present. Perseus repaid Polydectes with a deadly wedding gift, the head itself, for the long slavery of his mother and her forced marriage bed. Pythian 10 says Perseus came back bringing stony death to the islanders. Ovid's Metamorphoses gives Polydectes a last scene of his own. The king refuses to believe Perseus ever killed Medusa and calls the feat a fraud. Perseus answers by showing him the proof, and the king's face becomes bloodless stone.

Not every ancient writer made Polydectes a villain. Hyginus's Fabulae, a Latin handbook, gives a gentler story in fable 63. There the fisherman Dictys brings the mother and child to King Polydectes, who marries Danaë and raises Perseus in a temple of Minerva. When Acrisius comes to reclaim them, Polydectes pleads for them. He later dies of no stated cause, and at his funeral games Perseus's discus strikes Acrisius by accident. The very next fable, 64, returns to the familiar plot. Polydectes grows afraid of Perseus's prowess, plots to kill him by treachery, and is turned to stone.

The island kept the story. Strabo's Geography says Seriphos was the scene of the tale of Dictys and the chest. He adds that Perseus turned all the Seriphians to stone, because they had helped the king try to marry Danaë against her will. Strabo adds that comic poets joked the island was so rocky because the Gorgon had made it so. Pausanias saw the scene painted at Athens. In the picture gallery beside the Acropolis gateway, one painting showed Perseus traveling to Seriphos, carrying Medusa's head to Polydectes.