A wooden box was floating on the sea, and inside were a young woman and a newborn child. The lid had been nailed down from the outside.
Acrisius, king of Argos, had done that, having heard an oracle saying he would die at the hand of his grandson. He could not kill his daughter and grandson, so he pushed them out onto the water.
The waves carried the box up onto an island called Seriphos, and a fisherman hauling in his nets opened it. The name of the baby was Perseus.
The Child Raised on an Island
Dictys the fisherman took the two of them home. Perseus grew up in that house, running between the sea and the rocks.
The king of the island was Polydectes, the brother of Dictys, and he wanted to make Danae, the mother of Perseus, his wife. Danae refused him every time.
As the king saw it, there was one thing in the way: a grown son who stayed by his mother. He needed a way to get him off the island.
A Promise Made Carelessly
The king held a feast and said to the people, “I am to be married soon. Each of you bring me a horse.” The young men promised a horse apiece.
Perseus had no horse, and the king knew it and stood him up in front of everybody. “And what will you bring?”
The young man went red in the face. “A horse or anything else. I will bring whatever you want.” The king spoke as though he had been waiting. “Then the head of Medusa.”
Only after the words were out did Perseus understand that it was an errand nobody had ever come back from alive. But words said in front of people cannot be swallowed again.
Borrowed Sandals and a Borrowed Helmet
Two gods came to him where he sat alone on the shore. Athena and Hermes. “You cannot do this by yourself. So do not go by yourself.”
Hermes gave him winged sandals and a blade curved like a sickle, while Athena handed him a shield polished like a mirror. “You must not look into her eyes. Look at her in this.”
The rest was held by the nymphs, they said: the helmet of Hades that makes you unseen, and a bag to carry the head in. The trouble was that nobody knew where those nymphs were.
“Only three know that. Three old sisters who share one eye between them.” Perseus went looking for those three, away to the far west.
Three Who Shared One Eye
The three old women were sitting among the rocks, and with only one eye, two of them could not see while one of them did. They passed a single tooth around between them too.
Perseus lay down behind a rock and waited. There was a moment when the eye passed from one hand to another, and in that short gap he reached out and took it.
The three sisters said, “Give it back and we will tell you the way.” Perseus heard the way first and gave the eye back after.
The nymphs handed over the helmet and the bag, and now he had four things. Not one of the four was his.
The Face in the Shield
The place the Gorgons lived was all stone, and the stones had once been people. Some of them still had an arm out in front of them.
Perseus put on the helmet and disappeared, then turned his back and held the shield up in front of him. In the shield he could see three sisters asleep.
The middle one of the three was Medusa, and snakes moved slowly among her hair. He backed towards her without taking his eyes off the shield.
The blade went across once. Without looking, he put the head into the bag. Out of the cut a winged white horse rose up and went off into the sky.
Today, Borrowed Hands
Perseus came back and kept his promise, protecting his mother and later returning to Argos as well. The oracle came about as oracles do, but that is another story.
There is not much in this story that he did by his own strength, and the sandals, the helmet, the bag and the shield were all borrowed. What he did was use borrowed things at the right time in the right way.
And he did not look straight at the monster, but worked out where her power came from and went in at the angle it could not reach. That is mostly where courage parts from recklessness.