Dictys rescued him from the beach at Seriphos, where the flood tide had cast him up. When Acrisius heard of Danae's seduction he refused to believe in its divine origin and put her and her baby into a chest which he left to its fate on the sea. Some say that her uncle Proetus was the culprit, but the majority attribute the deed to Zeus who seduced her in the form of a shower of gold which fell through a crack in the roof and thereby into her womb. In order to thwart the oracle's prediction, Acrisius had an underground room built of bronze, where he kept Danae under strict guard, but it was ineffective in preventing Danae from being seduced. He wanted to have a son and consulted the oracle, who told him that his daughter would bear a son, but that the latter would kill him. At this point the brothers decided to come to an agreement whereby Acrisius reigned at Argos and Proetus at Tiryns, thus dividing the kingdom of the Argolid into two equal parts.Īcrisius had a daughter, Danae, by his wife Eurydice, the daughter of Lacedaemon. Her father King Iobates, at the head of a Lycian army, restored Proetus to the Argolid and set him up at Tiryns, which the Cyclops had fortified for him with huge stones. Eventually, after a long struggle, victory went to Acrisius, who expelled his brother the latter went to Lycia where he married Anteia, who was known to the tragic poets as Stheneboea. The story goes that it was during this war that round shields, which were destined to be so widely used in warfare in antiquity, were first invented. They openly declared war on each other to find out which of them should succeed to the throne of Argos, which their father had left them at his death. The two children, who were a reincarnation of the hatred between their ancestors Aegyptus and Danaus, fought each other while they were still in their mother's womb, and when they grew up their antagonism was as strong as ever.
Abas, king of Argos, the son of Lynceus and Hypermestra, was the father of twin sons, Proetus and Acrisius ( Table 31).
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