Perses is a shadowy second-generation Titan, son of Crius and Eurybia, whose name is connected with the verb perthein, to sack or destroy, and who survives almost entirely as the father, by his cousin Asteria, of Hecate. That single descent gives him what importance he has, for Hesiod devotes an unusually long and warm passage to Hecate, a goddess of the crossroads, magic and the restless dead whom he says Zeus honoured above all others, allowing her a share in earth, sea and sky. Perses himself has no cult and no story of his own. He should be distinguished from the hero Perseus and from other bearers of the name, including a son of the sun-god in the tale of Circe and Medea.
Perses himself is never the subject of any surviving narrative and receives no cult; Hesiod's brief mention of him exists solely to establish Hecate's paternity, and later mythographers add nothing beyond repeating the same bare genealogical line, making Perses one of the clearest examples in Greek myth of a figure who exists in the tradition purely as a connecting name between two more important generations. He belongs to a set of three brothers, sons of the Titan Crius, Astraeus, Pallas and Perses, whom Hesiod's Theogony uses chiefly as a genealogical bridge between the archaic Titan generation and later, more storied figures, the winds and stars through Astraeus, Victory and her siblings through Pallas, and Hecate through Perses, so that this whole branch of the family tree exists to connect rather than to be worshipped in its own right.