HAD TO START WITH THIS GUY. After all, he's my namesake. We've got different godly fathers, but my mom liked Perseus's story for one simple reason: he lives. Perseus doesn't get hacked to pieces. He doesn't get damned to eternal punishment. As far as heroes go, this dude gets a happy ending. Which is not to say that his life didn't suck. And he did murder a lot of people, but what are you gonna do? Perseus's bad luck started before he was even born. First, you gotta understand that, back in the day, Greece wasn't one country. It was divided into a gazillion different little kingdoms. Nobody went around saying 'Hi, I'm Greek!' People would ask you which city-state you were from: Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Zeusville or whatever. The Greek mainland was a huge piece of real estate. Every city had its own king. Sprinkled around the Mediterranean Sea were hundreds of islands, and each one of them was a separate kingdom, too.