A Wisdom Archive on dictys

Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, Acrisius asked an oracle if this would change. The oracle told him that one day he would be killed by his daughter's child. Danae was childless and, meaning to keep her so, he shut her up in a brazen chamber underground. But Zeus came to her in the form of a shower of gold, and impregnated her. Soon after, their child Perseus was born. Not too happy, but unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods by killing his offspring, Acrisius cast the two into the sea in a wooden chest. They washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by Dictys, the brother of king ...

Read more here: » Perseus: Encyclopedia II - Perseus - Origin at Argos

Acrisius was a mythical king of Argos, and a son of Abas and Ocalea (or Aglaea, depending on the author). He quarrelled constantly with his twin brother Proetus, inventing bucklers in the process, and in the end expelled him to Tiryns. His daughter, Danaë, was prophesied to have a son that would kill him, so Acrisius locked her in a bronze tower (or a cave) when she became fertile. Zeus had intercourse with her in the form of a shower of gold. She became pregnant with Perseus. Acrisius put the child and Danae in a chest and th ...

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In Greek mythology, Danaë (Greek: Δανάη, "parched") was a daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Eurydice (no relation to Orpheus' Eurydice). She was the mother of Perseus by Zeus. She was sometimes credited with founding the city of Ardea in Latium. Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, Acrisius asked an oracle if this would change. The oracle told him to go to the Earth's end where he would be killed by his daughter's child. She was childless and, meaning to keep her so, he shut her up in a bro ...

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Perseus, or Perseos (Greek: Περσεύς, Περσέως), was the son of Danae, and the only grandchild of Acrisius king of Argos. He became the legendary founder of Mycenae and first of the Perseid dynasty there. Perseus - Name. Because of the obscurity of the name and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists pass it by, on the presumption that it might be pre-Greek. However, the name of Perseus’ native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives ... Including:

• Perseus - Name
• Perseus - Origin at Argos
• Perseus - Adventures with the Gorgons
• Perseus - Marriage with Andromeda
• Perseus - King of Tiryns
• Perseus - King of Mycenae
• Perseus - Miscellaneous adventures
• Perseus - Modern uses of the theme

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One legend goes that Perseus turned Atlas the Titan into Atlas the mountain using the head of Medusa when he refused to give Perseus shelter. Perseus had a daughter called gorgophone, whose name means "Gorgon Killer". Abas was a good friend of Perseus. ...

Read more here: » Perseus: Encyclopedia II - Perseus - Miscellaneous adventures

After some time, Polydectes fell in love with Danae and desired to remove Perseus from the island. He thereby hatched a plot to send him on a suicide mission. Polydectes placed some strong hints that he would love to have the head of Medusa, one of the gorgons whose very expression turns people to stone. He then announced that he would woo Hippodamia and so needed the others to provide him with horses (a different myth). Shamed at having nothing to give, Perseus left to get him Medusa's head. This was of course not easy, and for a long time he wandered aimlessly, without hope of ever finding h ...

Read more here: » Perseus: Encyclopedia II - Perseus - Adventures with the Gorgons

Perseus then returned his tools and gave Medusa's head as a gift to Athena. There are a few variants of the story of what happened next. In Pausanias (12.16.1) he did not return to Argos but went instead to Larissa, where athletic games were being held. He had just invented the quoit and was making a public display when Acrisius, who happened to be visiting, stepped into the trajectory of the quoit and was killed. In the Apollodorus version (2.4.4), Perseus did return to Argos, but when he learned of the oracle, went into voluntary ex ...

Read more here: » Perseus: Encyclopedia II - Perseus - King of Tiryns

Telemachus was born on the day that his father was called to fight in the Trojan War. Attempting to renege on his oath to defend Helen, Odysseus sowed salt into his fields in feigned madness. The emissary Palamedes, who was sent to call Odysseus to battle, placed the infant Telemachus before the plow. Odysseus stopped, proving his sanity and obliging himself to the war. After his father had been gone for nearly 20 years, young Telemachus was visited by Athena, who disguised herself as Mentor and advised him to travel in search of news ...

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Because of the obscurity of the name and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists pass it by, on the presumption that it might be pre-Greek. However, the name of Perseus’ native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. There is some prospect that it descended into Greek from Indo-european. In that regard Robert Graves has espoused the only Greek derivation available. Perseus might be from the ancient Greek verb, perthein, “to waste, ravage, sack, destroy”, some form of which appears in Home ...

Read more here: » Perseus: Encyclopedia II - Perseus - Name

The two main sources regarding the quasi-historical life of Perseus are Pausanias and Apollodorus, but from them we obtain mainly folk-etymology concerning the founding of Mycenae. Pausanias (2.15.4, 2.16.3-6, 2.18.1) asserts that the Greeks believed Perseus founded Mycenae. He mentions the shrine to Perseus that stood on the left-hand side of the road from Mycenae to Argos, and also a sacred fountain at Mycenae called Persea. Located outside the walls, this was perhaps the spring that filled the underground cistern. He states also that Atreus stored his treasures in an underground chamber there, which is why Heinrich Schliemann named the ...

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Ray's first book, the Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (1660, followed by appendices in 1663 and 1685), was written in conjunction with his amicissimus et individuus comes, John Nid. The 626 plants are listed alphabetically, but a system of classification differing little from Caspar Bauhin's is sketched at the end of the book; and the notes contain many references to other parts of natural history. The locations of the plants are minutely described; and Cambridge students still gather some of their rarer plant ...

Read more here: » John Ray: Encyclopedia II - John Ray - Works

Harlem Renaissance - A New Black Identity. The Harlem Renaissance was so successful that it proceeded to bring the Black experience into the corpus of American cultural history. The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance--not only on the cultural but also on a sociological level--is that it redefined how America, and the world, viewed the African-American population. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African-American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan s ...

Read more here: » Harlem Renaissance: Encyclopedia II - Harlem Renaissance - Impact of the Harlem Renaissance

Show Boat - Integration. Show Boat boldly portrayed racial difficulties, and for a 1927 show it was quite progressive in doing so. It was the first racially integrated musical, in that both black and white performers appeared on-stage together [3]. Ziegfeld’s Follies allowed single African American performers like Bert Williams, but would never have had an African American woman in the chorus. However, S ...

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