He married her and they went on to have seven sons and two daughters. Abandoned by her parents to placate a sea monster, the princess was found by Perseus on a rock by the ocean. Perseus earned himself a constellation after a number of epic adventures across the Mediterranean and Near East that included the frequently illustrated murder of the Gorgon sister, Medusa.Īnother of Perseus’s celebrated acts was the rescue of the princess Andromeda. Perseus was a legendary figure with a fine family pedigree – he was the mythical son of Zeus and Argive princess Danaë (she of the golden rain).
The meteor shower is named for the Perseidai (Περσείδαι), who were the sons of the ancient Greek hero Perseus. Perseus flees after cutting off Medusa’s head in this water jar depiction. In his epic poem, the Aeneid, Virgil describes how “a star appeared in the daytime, and Augustus persuaded people to believe it was Caesar”. This portentous event was frequently celebrated in the ancient sources. Caesar’s adopted son Octavian (soon to be the Emperor Augustus) made much of the comet, which burned in the sky during the funerary games held for Caesar. In the spring of 44BC, a comet that appeared was interpreted as a sign of the deification of Julius Caesar, following his murder. The arrival of a comet could herald the birth of a great figure, and some people have even argued that the star in the sky which the Persian Magi followed to Bethlehem to see the newborn Jesus was actually a comet. They were signs that something good or bad had happened or was about to happen. The Greeks and Romans believed that the appearance of comets, meteors and meteor showers were portentous. But without science and space exploration to aid understanding of what these chunks of rock and ice are, ancient cultures often turned to myth and legend to explain them. Comets and meteors have fascinated the human race since they were first spotted in the night sky.
0 kommentar(er)
