The Roman poet Ovid included Medusa in his epic collection of Metamorphoses. In fact, she had once been a great beauty. She was so hideous that the mere sight of her could cause a man to be petrified into solid stone.Īccording to one famous writer, however, Medusa was not always the most grotesque of the three monstrous sisters. While her sisters were immortal man-eaters, Medusa was the only one of the three who could be killed.ĭespite her mortality, Medusa was the deadliest of the three. This is what made it impossible for centuries of artists and poets to ignore her.Medusa was one of three Gorgon sisters who lived in a cave at the edges of the known world. She's mortal, but her image lives on forever. "She's beautiful and grotesque," says Syropoulos. Perhaps no character from Greek myth personified that dual nature better than the "monster" Medusa. In Greek culture, the world was composed of complementary dualities - day and night, Mount Olympus and Hades - and both good and evil could exist at the same time, even within the gods. A monster was any creature that transgressed human perception, including the beautiful, winged horse Pegasus (born from Medusa's blood after her beheading by Perseus). To the Greeks, monsters weren't seen as inherently evil or ugly. "Nobody doubted that Hercules went to the underworld and brought back the three-headed dog, Cerberus, or that Jason went to the other side and retrieved the Golden Fleece." "They couldn't put a date on it, but the ancient Greeks didn't doubt that something real had taken place 'once upon a time,'" says Syropoulos. Today, we view Greek mythology as entertaining stories of fictional gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters, but the ancient Greeks saw myth as true stories from a distant past. That type of protective talisman is called "apotropaic," which explains why Medusa's image is found on everything from ancient funeral jars to the roof tiles of temples, where she scared off evil spirits (similar to gargoyles on medieval cathedrals). The colossal statue known as Athena Parthenos, once the centerpiece of the Parthenon, depicted Athena with two gorgoneia, one on her shield and another on her breastplate. In Greek art, Athena and other gods often carry shields adorned with the protective image of Medusa. But there's much more wickedness in the goddess Athena than in the blameless girl, Medusa." "There's never-ending violence in this story, a perpetuation of evil and wickedness. "Medusa was returned to the goddess who had made her into a monster, and then became an unwilling victimizer herself," says Syropoulos. Perseus unveiled it to petrify his mother's captor and then delivered Medusa's head to Athena, who attached the gorgoneion to her shield to terrify her enemies. "But that's how the gods behaved in Greek mythology - petty, vindictive and cruel."Įven after she was dead, Medusa's head was used as a weapon. "Instead of punishing the god, Athena punished the mortal, which was unfair," says Syropoulos. Poseidon raped Medusa in the Temple of Athena, and the goddess of wisdom and war was so angry that she transformed Medusa's flowing hair into "loathsome snakes." The Roman poet Ovid, writing around the time of Christ (first century C.E.), said that Medusa wasn't a monster at first, but a maiden with "lovely hair" who caught the eye of lustful Poseidon, god of the sea. Later stories doubled down on the unfairness of Medusa's fate. Writing a century after Hesiod, Greek poet Stasinus of Cyprus described Medusa and her Gorgon sisters as "fearful monsters who lived in Sarpedon, a rocky island in deep-eddying Oceanus." The word Gorgon comes from the Greek gorgos meaning "terrible." Greek playwright Aeschylus, writing in the fifth century B.C.E., filled in the details of the Gorgons' horrific appearance: "three winged sisters, the snake-haired Gorgons, loathed of mankind, whom no one of mortal kind shall look upon and still draw breath." "Not to mention that she was born from a 'monstrous' relationship." "There's something monstrous and unfair in that Medusa's the only mortal," says Syropoulos. Medusa's fate was "a sad one," wrote Hesiod, because she was mortal while her sisters Sthenno and Euryale were ageless and lived forever.
The oldest myths cast her as a monster from birth, while the later stories describe an innocent young maiden punished for the sins of the gods.Īccording to the Greek poet Hesiod, writing in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., Medusa was one of three sisters known as the Gorgons born to the primeval gods Ceto and Phorcys, who were mother and son. As with much of Greek mythology, there are several versions of Medusa's origin story.
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