ABSTRACT
It was in the tragedies of Classical Athens that Perseus’ family saga received its most influential elaboration. Prior to this, it had been known that Zeus had fathered Perseus by Danae since at least ca. 700 bc: ‘I fell in love with Danae of the fair ankles, the daughter of Acrisius, who bore Perseus, distinguished amongst all warriors’, the god declares in the Iliad (14.319-20). And Perseus had been enmeshed in the remainder of what was to become his familiar genealogy by at least the mid-sixth century bc ([Hesiod] Catalogue of women fr. 129.10-15 and fr. 135 MW, Stesichorus fr. 227 PMG/ Campbell). The comic playwright Menander, writing at the end of the fourth century bc, implies that Zeus’ corruption of Danae had by then become a hackneyed theme on the tragic stage: ‘Tell me, Niceratus, have you not heard the tragedians telling how Zeus once became gold and flowed through the roof, and had adulterous sex with a confined girl?’ (Samia 589-91).
