Medusa by Three Lamps

In the archaeological museum on Corfu, a stone Gorgon taller than any visitor runs towards you without moving. She once filled the centre of the west pediment of a temple of Artemis, carved early in the sixth century BCE: wings at her back, snakes knotted at her waist, tongue thrust out between tusks, eyes fixed straight ahead. Beside her stand her children, the winged horse Pegasus and the youth Chrysaor, although in the story they are born only after her death. That small contradiction is a good way in. Medusa has never been one figure. Bring three lamps near her face, one after another, and you see three different creatures.

First lamp: a Gorgon at the edge of night

Hesiod’s Theogony, from around 700 BCE, gives Medusa a family before it gives her a face. Her parents are Phorcys and Ceto, ancient sea powers who also produced a brood of monsters. Her sisters, Stheno and Euryale, live with her “beyond glorious Ocean, at the edge towards night”, near the clear-voiced Hesperides. And Hesiod adds the line that shapes everything later: Medusa suffered a grievous fate, because she alone was mortal while her sisters were deathless and ageless.

That is nearly all. The dark-haired god, Poseidon, lay with her in a soft meadow among spring flowers. When Perseus cut off her head, the giant Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus sprang out, the horse named, Hesiod says, from the springs, pēgai, of Ocean beside which he was born. There is no description of her looks and no petrifying stare. Hesiod’s Medusa is defined by where she lives, at the frontier of the ordered world, and by the fact that she can die.

The terror belonged to her head from the start. Homer, who never tells her story, already knows the Gorgon’s face as an image of fear. It sits on Athena’s aegis, and Agamemnon’s shield bears a grim-eyed Gorgon flanked by Terror and Rout. In the Odyssey the hero leaves the land of the dead in a hurry, afraid that Persephone might send the Gorgon’s head up against him. By Pindar’s time, early in the fifth century BCE, Perseus brings “stony death” to his enemies with it. Yet Pindar also calls Medusa “fair-cheeked”, and imagines Athena inventing the music of the pipes to copy the wailing of the surviving sisters. Beauty and grief were attached to her long before Rome.

Second lamp: Ovid’s wronged girl

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, finished early in the first century CE, gives Medusa a biography, and it does so in an uncomfortable setting. Perseus himself tells the story at his wedding feast. He describes stealing the single eye shared by the Gorgons’ sisters, the Graeae, walking past fields of men and animals turned to stone, and looking at Medusa only in the reflection of his bronze shield as he cut off her head while she and her snakes slept. Then a guest asks why she alone, of the three sisters, had snakes in her hair.

Perseus explains. Medusa was once famous for her beauty and sought by many suitors, and nothing about her was lovelier than her hair. The lord of the sea raped her in Minerva’s temple.

The goddess turned aside and hid her virgin eyes behind the aegis; and so the outrage would not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon’s lovely hair to loathsome snakes.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

The goddess punishes the victim, not the god. Ovid does not comment. He lets the killer narrate, and the silence is part of the effect. Other ancient writers gave other reasons. Apollodorus, after the usual list of winged sandals, a cap of invisibility and a curved blade, adds that some say Athena wanted Medusa dead because the Gorgon claimed to rival her in beauty. Pausanias, touring Argos in the second century CE, was shown a mound in the marketplace said to cover Medusa’s head, and he recorded a rationalised version in which she was a queen in Libya, killed by Perseus in a night attack.

Third lamp: the face that keeps watch

Long before Ovid, Greek craftsmen had settled what Medusa was for. The gorgoneion, the Gorgon’s face on its own, is among the commonest images in Greek art and one of its strangest. Most Greek figures are drawn in profile. The Gorgon stares out at you head-on: round eyes, a broad grin, tusks, a lolling tongue, sometimes a beard, snakes curling round the face.

Painters and smiths put her wherever danger needed to be turned away. She glares from shield blazons and breastplates, from the eaves of temples, from roof tiles and coins. She waits at the bottom of drinking cups, rising into view as the drinker tips back the last of the wine. Athena wears her at the centre of the aegis, the head that Perseus gave to the goddess, so the most protective of the Olympians carries a monster’s stare as armour. In the great Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii, the king rides into battle with a Gorgon on his chest.

The idea is called apotropaic, from a Greek verb meaning “to turn away”. A face that kills by looking becomes, when pointed outwards, the best guard a house or a warrior could have. Over time the face softened. Hellenistic and Roman artists made a “beautiful” Medusa, calm and sorrowful, with wings in her hair and snakes knotted under her chin, as in the Roman marble known as the Medusa Rondanini in Munich. Ovid’s version and the sculptors’ version meet halfway: the monster has become someone you could pity.

Which face is the real one?

None of the three cancels the others. Hesiod’s Medusa marks the edge of the world and the cost of being mortal. Ovid’s speaks, sometimes too directly for comfort, to modern arguments about violence and blame. The gorgoneion reminds us that for most Greeks Medusa was less a story than a working object, a face on a shield or under a roof. Modern writers have taken up all three, from psychoanalysts reading her as terror itself to Hélène Cixous, whose 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” recast her as a figure of women’s speech.

The protective face also has a long folk afterlife. Greek households went on turning harm away with objects at the threshold and the hearth, as you can see in our room on how villages kept out the kallikantzaroi. The queen whom Odysseus feared might send that head up from below has her own room: Persephone. And the goddess who wears the Gorgon on her breast stands in our Pantheon, under Athena. Lift the lamp once more before you leave. The face on the Corfu pediment is still grinning, and after some twenty-six centuries it is still staring straight at whoever walks in.