Medusa- Greek CreatureCreature · Monster"The Gorgon"

The Gorgon at the Edge of the World

In Hesiod's Theogony, Medusa was born a monster. She and her sisters Stheno and Euryale were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ancient powers of the deep sea. Stheno and Euryale were immortal. Medusa alone could be killed.

The Shield of Heracles gives them serpent-scaled heads and boar's tusks, bronze hands and golden wings that bore them over the battlefield. Anyone who looked upon them turned to stone. They dwelt beyond the stream of Oceanus, near the Hesperides and the land of Night, at the farthest edge of the known world. The petrified forms of men and animals stood around their dwelling, frozen in the postures of their final moments.

Hesiod adds one quiet detail among the horrors: Poseidon lay with Medusa "in a soft meadow among spring flowers." She was carrying his children when Perseus came for her head.

The Temple

Ovid tells a different story. In the Metamorphoses, Medusa was a young woman whose suitors competed for her hand, drawn above all by her hair. She served as a priestess in Athena's temple, bound to chastity. Poseidon forced himself on her within the sanctuary itself, under the goddess's own roof. Ovid writes that Athena turned away and hid her face behind her aegis.

Athena's punishment fell on Medusa, not on Poseidon. The goddess turned the priestess's celebrated hair into a nest of living serpents and cursed her face: anyone who met her gaze turned instantly to stone. Medusa was driven from the temple and out of civilization, exiled to the remotest edge of the world where her sisters already dwelt.

These two traditions never merged. In one, Medusa was always a Gorgon. In the other, she was made one.

Perseus

Perseus, son of Zeus and the mortal Danaë, was sent to fetch the Gorgon's head by King Polydectes of Seriphos. Polydectes desired Danaë and wanted her son removed. Perseus boasted he could bring back the head, and Polydectes held him to it. The quest was meant to kill him.

Athena gave him a polished bronze shield. Hermes provided winged sandals and a kibisis, a bag that could contain the head without its gaze leaking through. From the realm of the dead came Hades' cap of invisibility. But Perseus still needed to find the Gorgons. He tracked down the Graeae, three ancient women who shared a single eye between them, and snatched it as it passed from hand to hand. He refused to give it back until they told him where the Gorgons slept.

Apollodorus describes what followed. Perseus found the three sisters asleep among stone figures, the petrified remains of those who had come before him. He approached Medusa backward, watching her reflection in the bronze shield, guided by the image rather than sight itself. Athena steadied his sword arm. He severed her head with a single stroke of the harpe, a curved blade like Kronos's own sickle, and thrust it into the kibisis before the dead eyes could find him. Stheno and Euryale awoke shrieking with grief. Pindar says Athena later invented the aulos, the double pipe, to recreate the sound of their lamentation. Perseus was already gone, invisible and airborne.

What Sprang from the Blood

From Medusa's severed neck, two beings leapt into the world: Pegasus, the winged horse, and Chrysaor, a giant who carried a golden sword. Both were children of Poseidon, conceived in the meadow or the temple, born only at the moment of their mother's death. Hesiod names them both in the Theogony. Pegasus sprang skyward at the instant of birth.

Medusa's blood held contradictory power. In Euripides' Ion, Athena sealed two drops in a golden bracelet and gave it to Erichthonius: blood from the left veins was deadly poison, blood from the right could cure any wound. Apollodorus tells it differently: Athena gave the blood to Asclepius, who used it to raise the dead. Zeus struck him down for it.

Drops of blood fell on the Libyan desert as Perseus flew home and became the venomous serpents that infested that country. Lucan, in the Pharsalia, named the asp and the two-headed amphisbaena among the creatures born from those drops. Where the blood dripped into the sea, soft weed stiffened into coral at its touch.

The Aegis

On his way home, Perseus used the head. He found Andromeda chained to a sea cliff as an offering to Poseidon's sea monster, and turned the creature to stone with a flash of the Gorgon's face. Back in Seriphos, he walked into Polydectes's hall and petrified the king and his entire court. His mother was free.

Then he gave the head to Athena. She set it on her aegis, the divine shield she carried into battle. In the Iliad, Homer places the Gorgon's face at the center: grim, awful, a portent of Zeus. Greek craftsmen carved the same face on temple walls and warriors' shields: the Gorgoneion, wide-eyed and baring its teeth, turned outward to keep harm at bay.