Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Apparently also the Persians knew the story, as Xerxes tried to use it to bribe the Argives during his invasion of Greece, but ultimately failed to do so. Herodotus recounts this story, devising a foreign son, Perses, from whom the Persians took the name. The native name of this people, however, has always had an -a- in Persian. John Chadwick in the second edition of Documents in Mycenaean Greek speculates about the Mycenaean goddess pe-re-*82, attested on the PY Tn 316 tablet ( Linear B: 𐀟𐀩𐁚) and tentatively reconstructed as *Preswa.Ī Greek folk etymology connected "Perseus" to the name of the Persian people, whom they called the Pérsai (from Old Persian Pārsa "Persia, a Persian"). Graves carries the meaning still further, to the perse- in Persephone, goddess of death.
This difficulty can be overcome by presuming a dissimilation from the –th– in pérthein, which the Greeks would have preferred from a putative *phérthein. This corresponds to Julius Pokorny’s *bher-(3), "scrape, cut." Ordinarily *bh- descends to Greek as ph. Hofmann lists the possible root as *bher-, from which Latin ferio, "strike".
The further origin of perth- is more obscure. Pers-eus therefore is a "sacker of cities", that is, a soldier by occupation, a fitting name for the first Mycenaean warrior.
According to Carl Darling Buck ( Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin), the –eus suffix is typically used to form an agent noun, in this case from the aorist stem, pers. Perseus might be from the Greek verb πέρθειν ( pérthein, "to waste, ravage, sack, destroy") some form of which appears in Homeric epithets. In that regard Robert Graves has proposed the only Greek derivation available. There is some idea that it descended into Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language. Because of the obscurity of the name "Perseus" and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists presume that it might be pre-Greek however, the name of Perseus's native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives.
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