Seriphos in 218 B.C.

Seriphos — Spring 218 BC · The Island Turned to Stone.

A small, rugged, rocky island of the western Cyclades — the island of the Perseus legend. Here, men say, the chest bearing Danaë and her infant son Perseus came ashore and was taken up by the fisherman Dictys; and here, returning, Perseus showed the Gorgon’s head to the tyrant Polydectes and his followers and turned them and the whole island to stone — which the Greeks tell to explain its barren, petrified look. In 218 BC it is one of the independent island poleis of the Cyclades, with iron in its hills and little else.

Of all the small islands that orbit sacred Delos, few wear their bareness so strikingly as Seriphos — a rugged, rocky isle whose stony face the Greeks explain by the oldest of its stories. To this shore, they say, the sea carried the chest of Danaë and the infant Perseus; from this island the hero set out for the Gorgon; and to this island he returned to turn the tyrant and his people — and the land itself — to stone. In 218 BC Seriphos is a humble, independent polis living off its iron, its myth older and grander than anything that happens on it now.