Who is Clymene?

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

• Barrett, Frank. "Modern Antiques. V. Perseus and Andromeda." Tinsley's Magazine, Volume 20, 1877. pp. 280-292.
• Collard, Christopher and Patrick Dominic O'Sullivan (ed.) Euripides: Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama. 2013.
• Frazer, J. G. (trans.) Pausanias's Description of Greece, Volume 3. MacMillan and Co., 1913.
• Karamanou, Ioanna. Euripides' Danae and Dictys: Introduction, Text and Commentary. 2012.
• Ogden, Daniel. Perseus. Routledge. 2008.
• Zimmerman, John Edward. Dictionary of Classical Mythology. 1971 (original edition 1964)

See Also

• Perseus and Periezade
• Cinderella's Cat Child