Medusa

The mortal Gorgon

Hesiod places the Gorgons at the far edge of the world, “beyond glorious Ocean, in the frontier land towards Night”, where the Hesperides sing. They are three sisters, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, the old gods of the sea: Stheno, Euryale and Medusa. Two of them are immortal and never grow old; Medusa alone is mortal, and that is why she has a story. Her name means “guardian” or “ruler”, and in the oldest tellings she is not a woman at all but a monster — a round, staring face with tusks, a lolling tongue and snakes for hair, the face that the archaic painters and sculptors put on everything that needed protecting.

Her weapon is her gaze. Whoever looks into the Gorgon's eyes is turned to stone, which is why Perseus cannot simply fight her and why the story is a riddle about seeing: he must reach a creature he is not allowed to look at. Even dead, the head keeps its power, and the hero uses it as a weapon on the way home.

Perseus

The quest is told most fully by Apollodorus. Polydectes, king of Seriphos, wanted Perseus's mother Danaë and wanted her son gone, so he asked him for the one gift no one could bring: the Gorgon's head. Hermes and Athena took the boy in hand. From the Graiai, the grey sisters who shared one eye and one tooth, he learned the way to the nymphs; from the nymphs he had winged sandals, the kibisis — a wallet to carry the head — and the cap of Hades, which makes its wearer invisible; from Hermes a curved sickle of adamant. He came upon the Gorgons asleep. Looking only at Medusa's reflection in the polished bronze of his shield, with Athena guiding his hand, he cut off her head and dropped it in the wallet. Her sisters woke and chased him, but the cap hid him.

From the severed neck sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor, the children of Poseidon she had been carrying. Perseus flew home by way of Ethiopia, where he rescued Andromeda, and on Seriphos he showed the head to Polydectes and his court and left them as stone. Then he gave the head to Athena, who set it at the centre of her aegis. Homer already knows it there: in the Iliad the goddess's aegis carries “the head of the Gorgon, the dread monster, terrible and awful, a portent of Zeus”.

Ovid's Medusa

The Medusa most people know is not Hesiod's monster but Ovid's woman. In the Metamorphoses, written around AD 8, Perseus is asked at a wedding feast why the Gorgon alone had snakes for hair, and answers that she had once been beautiful, her hair her greatest glory, and that many suitors had wanted her. Neptune took her by force in the temple of Minerva. The goddess turned away and hid her face behind her aegis; then, so that the deed would not go unpunished, she changed Medusa's hair into snakes. Ovid's Perseus adds that she still wears those snakes on her breastplate. It is a Roman poet's addition to a Greek story — Apollodorus knows only a rumour that Athena wanted the Gorgon dead because she had matched herself against the goddess in beauty — but it turned the monster into a victim, and later centuries have never let go of it.

The face that guards

Long before anyone told her story, the Gorgon's face was a charm against harm. The gorgoneion — the head alone, staring straight out at the viewer, which almost no other figure in Greek art does — was painted on shields, cups and kilns, stamped on coins, carved over doors, and set in the pediments of temples: the great running Gorgon of the temple of Artemis on Corfu, from about 580 BC, is the oldest stone pediment in Greece. Agamemnon carries the face on his shield in the Iliad, and Athena on her aegis. The grimace was meant to frighten off whatever looked at it.

In the fifth century the sculptors softened her. The Medusa Rondanini, a Roman copy of a Greek original of that age, is a calm, beautiful, sorrowful face with small wings in her hair — a Gorgon one could pity, well before Ovid. Cellini's bronze Perseus in Florence (1554) holds her head aloft by the snakes; Caravaggio painted it screaming on a round shield (1597). She has been a fashion house's emblem and a figure of reclaimed anger; the face still stares straight out, as it did on the Corfu pediment.