The blood of Medusa also spawned the Amphisbaena (a horned dragon-like creature with a snake-headed tail). Furthermore, the poisonous vipers of the Sahara, in the Argonautica 4.1515, Ovid's Metamorphoses 4.770 and Lucan's Pharsalia 9.820, were said to have grown from spilt drops of her blood. In a similar manner, the corals of the Red Sea were said to have been formed of Medusa's blood spilled onto seaweed when Perseus laid down the petrifying head beside the shore during his short stay in Ethiopia where he saved and wed his future wife, the lovely princess Andromeda. Harrison's translation states 'the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon.'Īccording to Ovid, in northwest Africa, Perseus flew past the Titan Atlas, who stood holding the sky aloft, and transformed him into stone when he tried to attack him. The Medusa's head central to a mosaic floor in a tepidarium of the Roman era. In the Odyssey xi, Homer does not specifically mention the Gorgon Medusa:įrom Hades should send up an awful monster's grisly head. the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood.'

Jane Ellen Harrison argues that 'her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head she is in a word a mask with a body later appended. When Perseus beheaded her, Pegasus, a winged horse, and Chrysaor, a golden sword-wielding giant, sprang from her body. During that time, Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon. Since Medusa was the only one of the three Gorgons who was mortal, Perseus was able to slay her while looking at the reflection from the mirrored shield he received from Athena. He received a mirrored shield from Athena, gold, winged sandals from Hermes, a sword from Hephaestus and Hades's helm of invisibility. The gods were well aware of this, and Perseus received help. In most versions of the story, she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphus because Polydectes wanted to marry his mother. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well earned.Ĭoins of the reign of Seleucus I Nicator of Syria, (312-280 BC.) In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, 'the jealous aspiration of many suitors,' but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena's temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of 'fair-cheeked Medusa'. While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. With snakes for hair- hatred of mortal man. Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, which places both trinities of sisters far off 'on Kisthene's dreadful plain': The three Gorgon sisters-Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale-were all children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or 'Phorkys') and his sister Ceto (or 'Keto'), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. In classical antiquity the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the Gorgoneion. Medusa was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head, which retained its ability to turn onlookers to stone, as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. The 2nd-century BCE novelist Dionysios Skytobrachion puts her somewhere in Libya, where Herodotus had said the Berbers originated her myth, as part of their religion. According to Hesiod and Aeschylus, she lived and died on an island named Sarpedon, somewhere near Cisthene. Most sources describe her as the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, though the author Hyginus (Fabulae Preface) makes Medusa the daughter of Gorgon and Ceto.

Medusa gorgon