Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Acrisius, king at Argos, asked the oracle how he might obtain male children. The god answered that no son would be born to him, but that his daughter would bear a son by whose hand Acrisius himself would die. In fear of that prophecy he built an underground chamber of bronze and confined Danaë there under guard, intending that no child should ever be begotten of her. Yet she was not kept from a lover. Some said her uncle Proetus entered the chamber and lay with her, and that this outrage sparked the long quarrel between the brothers Acrisius and Proetus. The dominant classical line, however—shared by Pherecydes, Apollodorus’s main telling, Pindar, and Homeric allusion—holds that Zeus desired the girl and came to her as a stream of gold that poured through the roof into her lap; from that union Perseus was conceived and born. When Acrisius later learned that Danaë had a child, he refused to believe that Zeus was the father. The sequel of exposure in the chest belongs to the next entry; this unit ends with the prophecy, the bronze prison, and the birth of the destined grandson. Pherecydes adds domestic texture that Apollodorus abridges: Acrisius had married Eurydice daughter of Lacedaemon; Danaë’s nurse was shut in with her; Zeus’s visit is told as gold pouring through the roof; and when the child was discovered, Acrisius killed the nurse and questioned Danaë at an altar of Zeus Herkeios before she named the god as father. Those details enrich the same Argive–Pherecydian version rather than a rival plot.