(No one knows what Hesiod really looked like.)Īn very early surviving depiction of Medusa As far as Hesiodos is concerned, everything that happened between Medusa and Poseidon was perfectly consensual.ĪBOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” a bronze portrait head dating to the late first century CE discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, believed to be an imaginative representation of Hesiod. Notice that Hesiodos says that Medusa had sexual intercourse with the god Poseidon, but he says that it happened in “a soft meadow amid spring flowers”-not in the temple of Athena-and he never says anything about it being a rape. Now Pegasus flew away and left the earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the deathless gods: and he dwells in the house of Zeus and brings to wise Zeus the thunder and lightning.” And when Perseus cut off her head, there sprang forth great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasos who is so called because he was born near the springs of Okeanos and that other, because he held a golden blade in his hands. “With her lay the Dark-haired One in a soft meadow amid spring flowers. “And again, Keto bare to Phorkys the fair-cheeked Graiai, sisters grey from their birth: and both deathless gods and men who walk on earth call them Graiai, Pemphredo well-clad, and saffron-robed Enyo, and the Gorgons who dwell beyond glorious Ocean in the frontier land towards Night where are the clear-voiced Hesperides, Sthenno, and Euryale, and Medusa who suffered a woeful fate: she was mortal, but the two were undying and grew not old.” Here is what he says in his Theogonia, lines 270–286, as translated by Hugh G. Hesiodos remarks that Medusa’s sisters Sthenno and Euryale were both immortal, but she was born mortal for some reason. No explanation is given for why they are the way they are and it is implied that they were all simply born that way.
In Hesiodos’s version of the story, Medusa and her two sisters are the offspring of the primordial sea deities Keto and Phorkys. One thing we do know for certain, though, is that the oldest surviving version of the story of Perseus and Medusa comes from the poem Theogonia, which was composed in around the eighth century BCE by the Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre. As I will discuss in a moment, it is certainly true that the ancient Greeks did use Medusa’s head as an apotropaic symbol, but it is hard to say which came first: the symbol or the story behind it. The renowned British classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (lived 1850 – 1928) argues in her book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which was originally published in 1903, that the head of Medusa was originally an apotropaic symbol meant to ward off evil and that the story of Perseus and Medusa was only invented to explain the symbol later on. It is unclear exactly how the story arose. 800 BCE), before the invention of the Greek alphabet. The story of Perseus and Medusa seems to have originated during the Early Iron Age (lasted c. Hesiodos’s version of the story from the eighth century BCE Oh, and she apparently also had the four-legged lower body of a horse. In the oldest surviving sources for the Medusa myth, she is seemingly born a Gorgon with the ability to turn people to stone at a glance, she is never raped by Poseidon, and she is never cursed by Athena. This story, however, is actually radically different from the story the ancient Greeks were familiar with.
Then, eventually, the hero Perseus came along and beheaded her. Athena was disgusted by the desecration of her temple, so she cursed Medusa, giving her snakes for hair and making it so that anyone who saw her face would be instantly turned to stone. The story about Medusa that most people today are familiar with holds that she was once an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman, but then she was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena. In order to understand this statue and the controversy surrounding it, we need to talk about the bizarre and fascinating history of how the Medusa myth has evolved over the past 2,800 years or so. Indeed, just yesterday, it was announced that a controversial statue of her would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City. Medusa is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and one who bears a deep contemporary resonance.
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