 I haven't been able to devote the time I would have liked to this blog over the past year or so - mostly just life getting busy, but also because I've been focusing on my fiction writing!
Many of my posts were written as I looked for writing inspiration and found myself going down rabbit holes to learn more about history and folklore. Well, here's one of those projects! The blurb: A false prophet. A forgotten prince. A prison no mortal can escape. In ancient Crete, under the rule of a tyrannical king, Manto survives by fraud and fortune-telling. Until the day her father flees accusations of treason, and she’s sentenced in his place. Thrown into the vast underground Labyrinth, she must now serve the mysterious prince known as the Minotaur. Some call him a monster. Others worship him as a god. As she plots her getaway, Manto discovers the truth: he’s a shy young man under a terrible curse. But if they combine her wits and his strength, they may be able to escape to another kingdom. A fresh start for Manto; a chance at humanity for the Minotaur. Meanwhile, aboveground, a deadly power struggle brews between those who would use the Minotaur or destroy him. Manto has no intention of being drawn in, but for the first time in her life, she’s starting to care about someone other than herself. And she’ll have to use every trick she knows to keep them both alive. Because the Labyrinth is no ordinary maze. It’s changing, and soon they’ll be lost forever… Liar's Labyrinth was born of my interest in Greek mythology and lots and lots of "Beauty and the Beast," but by now it's kind of its own thing, a "what if" reimagining of the myth of Theseus. The cover art is by the fantastic Digital Dreams Designs, with elements inspired by the story's setting in ancient Minoan Crete. The book releases on October 8, and the ebook is available for preorder right now. If you've enjoyed my blog, I hope you'll check it out! I'm also trying out a newsletter on Beehiiv. If you're interested in updates on how things are going, check it out over at Singing Apple, Speaking Bird (a fairy tale reference, of course).
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 Danaë, by John William Waterhouse In the myth of Perseus, he and his mother Danaë are cast into the sea in a chest - a theme that's come up a lot in the fairytales I've been examining lately. In this case, they're pulled ashore in the nets of a fisherman named Dictys. He takes them in as family and becomes their protector and a father figure to Perseus. Dictys may not be active for much of the story, but he plays a pivotal role. His brother Polydectes happens to be the king of Seriphos, who desires Danaë against her will. To get rid of Perseus, now a young adult, Polydectes sends him off to slay the Gorgon. At the end of the story, after getting rid of the scheming Polydectes, Perseus sets Dictys up as the new king.
Other than this, there isn't much information about Dictys. His name literally means "Netter" - very simple. A few different parentages have been given for him, and he has a wife named Clymene. Or does he? Clymene appears in one source, Pausanias's Description of Greece, which mentions “an altar of Dictys and Clymene, who are called the saviours of Perseus.” Pausanias does not say that they are married – and in fact, for centuries it seems that scholars presumed Clymene and Dictys weren't personally connected to each other at all (see for example Frazer, 1913). Clymene (“Fame”) is a name for multiple characters in Greek mythology, several of whom are ocean goddesses. An Oceanid named Clymene, daughter of Ocean and Tethys and mother of Atlas, is named in Hesiod's Theogony. Another Oceanid Clymene was the mother of Phaethon by Helios. In the Iliad, a Clymene appears among the Nereids who grieve with the sea goddess Thetis. Many scholarly sources point one of these Clymenes being Perseus’s savior, suggesting that she was a sea goddess or nymph who “brought Perseus’ chest safely into Dicty’s fishing net” (Ogden p. 107). Along similar lines, Lucian’s Dialogues in the Sea (ca. 170 AD) has Thetis and a Nereid named Doris push the chest into the nets (Ogden p. 25). One theory holds that Lucian might have gotten this plot point from Euripides’ lost play Dictys (Karamanou pp. 48, 50, 52, 54, 155). Nereids have a place in the story of Perseus; Clymene is a Nereid. So Clymene and Dictys, the saviors of Perseus, are the goddess who protected him in the sea and the fisherman who pulled him ashore. With that explanation being fairly well-established, where did Clymene as Dictys’ wife come from? Wikipedia will inform you that they were a married couple - and anything stated on Wikipedia, once released into the wild, is near-impossible to slow down. Dictys has an unnamed wife in some modern children's storybooks, those being The Heroes Or, Greek Fairy Tales for my Children by Charles Kingsley (c.1856) and Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang (1907); also an anonymous retelling in The Theosophist from 1909. Alternately, one revisionist version has some absolutely wild takes, with Dictys being secretly married to Danaë and thus Perseus' biological father - avoiding any hint of the hero being illegitimate (Barrett 1877). The first source I can find where Dictys and Clymene are identified as spouses is John Edward Zimmerman’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology from 1964, with a very brief mention that Dictys "was the husband of Clymene" (Zimmerman, p. 86). No elaboration. Zimmerman must have gotten the link from Pausanias, but he cites Apollodorus, who did not mention Clymene. However, in the first book of his Library, Apollodorus described Dictys's mother as a "Naiad nymph," and in the second book, shortly before the story of Perseus, Apollodorus mentions a Clymene, daughter of Catreus and wife of Nauplius. Could a wire have gotten crossed here? Either way, the trend really seems to have picked up in the 21st century; it appears in Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities from 2013, and Patrick Hogan’s A Student Commentary on Pausanias Book 2 (2018, p. 128). In Susan Sales Harkins' 2008 children's book Perseus, a kindly Dictys and Clymene serve as adoptive parents to Danaë and grandparents to Perseus (pp. 16-17), very similar to Kingsley's and Lang's versions from the early 1900s. And in Claire Heywood's angsty The Shadow of Perseus (2023), Klymene is Diktys' wife and the mother of his children; her friendship with Danae grows strained when Diktys dies and her family can no longer provide for Danae and her son.* Also worth a mention: in the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, Danaë dies and Perseus is raised by a family of fisherfolk (although his adoptive parents are named Spyro and Marmara). conclusion With Dictys' and Clymene's names mentioned in tandem, it does make sense that someone might imagine they were married. A wife for Dictys would fall in line with folktales about a fisherman and his wife receiving a marvelous infant from the sea. Plus, although Dictys acts as Perseus’s father figure, and although he is exiled royalty much like Danaë , he does not marry her. Polydectes sees her as eligible for marriage, and Perseus, not Dictys, is the male protector he needs to get rid of. Yes, Danaë was loved by Zeus, but plenty of Zeus’s lovers went on to have husbands. One explanation could be that Dictys is much older than Danaë; he steps into the role of father that she didn’t get from Acrisius. Similar, and overlapping, is the idea that Dictys could already be married. It's even possible that Clymene could be a Nereid and the wife of a fisherman; I've mentioned the genealogy where he's the son of an unnamed Naiad (Apollodorus, 1.9.6). And although much later, a 12th-century work references him as a son of Poseidon (Tzetzes on Lycophron, Alexandra 838). On the other hand, maybe Danaë did marry Dictys. One reconstruction suggests that Euripides' play ended with Dictys and Danaë as king and queen of Seriphos (Collard and O'Sullivan, 256). That's theoretical. More importantly: Clymene is mentioned in only one source, and she isn't even identified as Dictys's wife there. Nowhere else does Dictys appear with a female companion, let alone a wife. This doesn't seem to become a trend at all until the Victorian era. Also, a minor note, but Dictys the fisherman, who catches Perseus's chest in his net, is named "Netter." Polydectes, the king who demands many wedding gifts including Medusa's head, is "Receiver of many/much" (Ogden, p. 50). With such on-the-nose names, why would the humble fisherman's wife be named "Fame"? Notes * Heywood’s novel casts Perseus as a toxic, violent man-child. It’s not the first or the last retelling to villainize Perseus. Also, it removes all supernatural elements, which means it follows in the steps of other rationalizations – like Pausanias’s 2nd-century explanation where Medusa is a Libyan war leader, and Fulgentius’s 5th-century explanation where Perseus is a pirate and Medusa a wealthy queen, and John Malalas' 6th-century Chronicle where Perseus is a power-hungry wannabe wizard and Medusa is a random wild-haired maiden who becomes a passing victim of his rampages. Perseus becomes a brute and a thug in basically all of the rationalized versions, because when you take away Medusa being a Gorgon she is left as an ordinary, even innocent, woman (Ogden, 125). So although I personally dislike the approach, Heywood is still following in an established thought pattern. Sources
See Also  Periezade will turn to stone if she looks back - illustration by John D. Batten in Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights I’ve been on a Perseus research kick lately, and read through Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Legend of Perseus, an exhaustively researched, occasionally surprisingly sarcastic three-volume series examining the concepts of this story and similar fairy tales across the world.
The myth basically goes like this: a king named Acrisius hears a prophecy that his daughter Danae’s child will kill him, so he locks Danae in a bronze chamber. However, the god Zeus visits her in the form of a shower of gold, and fathers her son, Perseus. When Acrisius discovers this, he shuts his daughter and grandson in a chest which he casts into the sea. But they survive; the chest washes ashore and a fisherman rescues them. Years later, the local king sets his sights on Danae, and tries to get rid of Perseus by sending him off to fight the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns people to stone. Perseus receives advice and magical weapons from the gods, sneaks up on Medusa by using a shield as a mirror, and slays her. On the way back, he runs across a princess named Andromeda, who’s being served up as human sacrifice to a sea monster named Cetus after her family angered Poseidon. Perseus slays Cetus as well as Andromeda’s wicked suitor Phineus, and takes Andromeda as his bride. Returning home, he uses Medusa’s head to petrify Danae’s unwanted bridegroom. As for Acrisius, his prophecy comes true via a freak frisbee accident. This is one of the few Greek myths that’s actually pretty positive all around, and probably the most fairytale-like one out there. The villains are punished, and the heroes are decent people who get a happy ending. (The one bump is the backstory of Medusa; the earliest variants indicate that she’s simply a horrifying monster, the offspring of even more ancient and horrifying monsters, but the Roman writer Ovid wrote up a version in which she was a beautiful girl changed into a beast for the crime of being raped (!). Even though it's probably not at all what the older storytellers envisioned, this version - which makes Medusa a sympathetic and tragic figure - is currently the most well-known backstory.) The myth has given rise to quite a few big-name adaptations:
One of the most interesting facts about the Perseus myth, though, is that it seems to be two separate stories mushed together. There's Perseus's birth, and there's his quest to slay Medusa, which serves as an origin myth for protective amulets known as gorgoneia. But the Andromeda sequence feels random - not connected to the rest of the plot at all. Different versions are super inconsistent on whether Perseus kills the sea monster with a sword or with Medusa's head. Plus, the major players in the Andromeda segment, and only the Andromeda segment, have constellations named for them - Perseus, Andromeda, Cetus the sea monster, and Andromeda's parents. Nobody else gets a constellation, unless you count Pegasus the winged horse. The Andromeda story is a star origin myth! Maybe these were separate stories about Perseus that eventually got combined; we don't know. Tumblr user amorphousbl0b pointed out the star connection and also an interesting key similarity - through both parts, Perseus is a defender of women. In the Medusa story, he protects his mother from an unwanted suitor; similarly in the Andromeda segment, he saves Andromeda from her cowardly and vicious fiancé Phineus (who also happens to be her uncle). This myth is full of classic fairy tale tropes. The wonder child with the miraculous conception, an unwanted child who survives being thrown out into the water, a prince raised in poverty, the princess and the dragon, otherworldly helpers with advice and magical gifts, and monsters. There are some fairy tales which hit all the same plot beats as Perseus; Hartland recounts one from Tuscany where there's a witch in place of Medusa, a helpful old man with a flying horse in place of Athena and Hermes, and one-eyed women who are pretty much exactly the Graeae (pp. 11-13). However, remember that there are kind of two halves to the Perseus story - and there's an answer to this too in some popular folktale types. The Blood Brothers In ATU tale type 303, "The Blood Brothers," a childless couple is blessed with the birth of twins (or, occasionally, triplets) after the wife ingests magical water, fish, or fruit. Sometimes the blood brothers are identical boys born from different women who both ate the magical food. (For example, in the Brothers Grimms' "The Gold-Children", a fisherman gives his wife and horse pieces of a talking golden fish to eat, after which the wife gives birth to golden twin boys, the horse gives birth to golden twin foals, and two pieces of fish buried in the earth produce two golden lilies.) As young men, the brothers set out to make their fortunes. One brother discovers a city where a princess is about to be sacrificed to a dragon. He, of course, slays the dragon and marries the princess. At this point, things go wrong; he may run up against a rival for the princess’s hand, or be captured by a witch. (In "The Gold-Children," a witch turns him to stone.) However, his brother had a token to warn him if any danger occurred, and comes to the rescue. At first Hartland's description of this story seemed like a stretch to me, but there are real parallels. First is the supernatural birth. According to Hartland, because the mother in this story is married, the miraculous birth has to be more remarkable to have the same impact; so where in some stories we might have a virgin birth like Danae’s, in others we have a married woman giving birth to twins or triplets. Often the boys are the sons of a fisherman, or have some link to water or the ocean; compare Perseus and his mother being rescued from the sea by a fisherman. There’s often a gold or celestial motif, with the boys having golden markings or stars on their foreheads, or being born after the wife eats a golden fish, which matches with Zeus appearing as a golden shower. Or sometimes there is a mysterious supernatural father. This story follows the Andromeda track, with a wonder child growing up to save a princess from a dragon. If there’s a rival who tries to kill the hero and/or steal the credit for the dragon-slaying, this parallels Phineus, Andromeda’s other suitor. The Three Golden Children Then, on the Medusa track, there's ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children." Here, a king overhears three sisters gossiping. The youngest boasts that if she married the king, she would bear wonderful children with stars on their foreheads, golden hair or arms, or other markings along those lines. The king takes her up on it and makes her his queen. However, when her prediction comes true, her jealous sisters frame her for infanticide or claim that she has given birth to animals. From here, there are typically three routes the story can take (Goldberg, 2016). In one route, the children are actually killed, but come back in a transformation sequence. In another, typical of Slavic variants, the mother and her son(s) are thrown into the sea together in a barrel like Danae and Perseus, and wash up on an island where the son or sons later build a palace to get their father’s attention. In the third route, the sisters steal the children and cast them into the water in boxes or baskets; then, the queen is imprisoned on the sisters' false accusations. However, the children are rescued and raised by a servant, or merchant, or fisherman, etc. The children (in the most famous variants, two brothers and a sister) grow up, but then an old woman (usually sent by their wicked aunts) tells the girl of magical treasures such as a singing tree and a talking bird. The girl begs her brothers to get her these items, and they agree, leaving her with tokens that will tell her if they're in danger. A magical helper typically shows up along the way to offer advice (an equivalent to Athena, Hermes, and the Graeae). However, the treasure is guarded by magic which turns the two older brothers to stone. Back home, the younger sister sees their tokens change, and charges out, guilt-stricken, to rescue them. In "The Sisters Envious of Their Cadette," from Antoine Galland's edition of The Arabian Nights, phantom voices mock and threaten anyone who climbs a certain mountain. When the brothers turn around to fight or flee, they are turned into black stones. On the way to save them, younger sister Periezade wisely plugs her ears. Compare Perseus looking in a mirror to fight Medusa – it's the same effect of don’t turn around, no matter what. In the end, the sister wins the treasures and restores her brothers along with all the other adventurers who were petrified. The siblings return home with their trophies, which serve the additional purpose of leading them to the king, revealing the truth, and vindicating and saving their mother. In this story, too, there’s a woman at the heart of the quest. For Perseus, there's Danae threatened with forced marriage. For ATU 707, there's the little sister tricked into asking for magical items, and - although the siblings don't know it yet - the falsely-imprisoned mother. I've always been fond of both Perseus and Periezade as fairytale heroes, and was delighted to realize that their stories have these parallels. One interesting note is that both ATU 303 and ATU 707 have the plot of the "life-token" and the sibling rescue, which Perseus doesn't really have a match for. And so on These are widespread stories, with infinite variations. An Irish version seemingly combines Medusa and Perseus's grandfather Acrisius. The mythical Balor was a giant with an eye that destroyed everything he looked at, and there are many folktales of how he was defeated. In one specific folktale collected in the 19th century, Balor locks up his daughter Eithne in a tower to keep her from bearing a son prophesied to kill him. One of his enemies gains access to Eithne anyway; Balor tries to drown the resulting baby triplets, but one survives and grows up to kill him. Or sometimes Medusa is the love interest! This seems to be a minor trend in ATU 707 variants from Eastern and Southeast Europe, where the brother is the main hero, and the final task is to fetch a beautiful woman with magical powers who becomes his bride and helps reveal the truth about their family origins. In a variant from Epirus (a region now part of modern Greece and Albania) "the beauty of the land" (E Bukura e Dheut, a stock character from Albanian lore) lives on the other side of a river; many have pursued her, only to turn to stone. With help from his winged horse, the hero takes her home and marries her. This story gives the vibe that the beauty is somehow trapped in this isolated state, and is grateful to the hero when he frees her (Von Hahn, 287, notes to story no. 69). In a Nogai tale, "Sarygyz, Mistress of the Djinni", the final quest is to fetch the titular character, who lives near a cemetery and turns people to stone. With advice from a talking horse, the boy wins her as his bride. In a note reminiscent of Medusa’s serpent hair, the key is to arrive while Sarygyz is washing her hair; then she revives her victims by shaking her hair. I've found some references to similar sorceress-brides in a Dargin version, "Арц-Издаг" ("Silver Izdag"), and in a story from Chechnya where "Malkha-Azani" is a sorceress with an enchanted mirror, living beyond nine mountains, who petrifies any men who approach her palace. More research needed - probably with some translation services - but it's very intriguing to see how a Medusa figure can play a different role. The same thing happens in the Greek story of the Tzitzinæna, although she takes a more motherly role to the heroes once she's tamed (Legrand, p. 77ff). In these variants, there is a theme that the hero must call the sorceress and get her to acknowledge him, and this is the most dangerous part of his journey where he might turn to stone. A winged horse is also common in these types - similar to Pegasus. These stories are incredibly widespread, and with Perseus you can get just a hint of how ancient they are, too. Editing to add: We know that the classical myth of Perseus has signs of being two separate myths about Perseus combined. Maybe there is a clue how that happened in these fairytale types – one about a miraculously born child who grow up to slay a dragon and save a princess, and the other about a miraculously born child who survives drowning and goes on a quest for a magical item to save his mother. SOURCES
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