Danaë

poems …

Danaë – Moose Bak

our poems HERE …

tardigrades in Space

story in short –
… When the King of Argos, Acrisius, was told by an oracle that he would have no sons but that, despite having no sons, he would still be killed by his own grandson … he had a think and then – to be on the safe side – locked his daughter Danaë up in a tower of brass that nobody could ever enter

What he wasn’t counting on was Jupiter who regarded such things as a minor inconvenience and a challenge to his ingenuity and before long he had found a chink in the wall and got into the tower as a ray of sunshine and then impregnated Danaë, disguised as a shower of gold.

When the king found out that the daughter he had locked into the tower had given birth to a bouncing baby boy he was naturally horrified and would have had them both killed on the spot except that in Argos there were certain taboos against actually murdering your own children and so he had them put in a wooden trunk with the lid nailed down and the box dropped from a ship into the sea.

Obviously he was counting on the box sinking or at least its contents perishing of hunger and thirst or being eaten by sharks – but as luck would have it, it was washed up on a distant beach and the kind fisherfolk there looked after Danaë and her son, Perseus, until he was grown and ready to go off on an Adventure …

… see also Perseus, Medusa, Pegasus

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

BACK – NEXT-

Danaë

The mother of Perseus by Jupiter, and daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos.

Bk IV:604-662. She was raped by Jupiter in the form of a shower of gold, while imprisoned in a brazen tower by Acrisius, who had been warned by an oracle that he would have no sons but that his grandson would kill him. (See Titian’s painting, Museo del Prado, Madrid: See the pedestal of Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus bronze, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, depicting Danaë with the child Perseus: See Jan Gossaert called Mabuse’s panel – Danaë – in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich))

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/MetindexBCD.php

Danae’ by Jan Gossaert