Akrisios, the king of Argos, had already reached an advanced age without having male progeny. As he desired a son, he consulted the Delphian oracle, but this warned him against male descendants, and informed him that his daughter Danae would bear a son through whose hand he would perish. In order to prevent this, his daughter was locked up by him in an iron chamber, which he caused to be carefully guarded. But Zeus penetrated through the roof, in the guise of a golden rain, and Danae became the mother of a boy.[39] One day Akrisios heard the voice of young Perseus in his daughter’s room, and in this way learned that she had given birth to a child. _He killed the nurse_, but carried his daughter with her son to the domestic altar of Zeus, to have an oath taken on the true father’s name. But he refuses to believe his daughter’s statement that Zeus is the father, and _he encloses her with the child in a box,[40] which is cast into the sea_. The box is carried by the waves to the coast of Seriphos, where _Diktys, a fisherman_, usually called a brother of King Polydektes, _saves mother and child by drawing them out of the sea with his nets_. Diktys leads the two into his house and keeps them as his relations. Polydektes, however, becomes enamoured of the beautiful mother, and _as Perseus was in his way, he tried to remove him_ by sending him forth to fetch the head of the Gorgon Medusa. But against the king’s anticipations Perseus accomplishes this difficult task, and a number of heroic deeds besides. In throwing the discos, at play, he accidentally kills his grandfather, as foretold by the oracle. He becomes the king of Argos, then of Tiryath, and the builder of Mykene.[41] GILGAMOS Aelian, who lived about 200 A.D, relates in his “Animal Stories” the history of _a boy who was saved by an eagle_.[42]