Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter II: Heroes & Their Quests
Perseus and Medusa: The Hero's Myth, Sources and Legacy
Perseus and Medusa explained: Danaë and the golden shower, the quest for the Gorgon's head, Andromeda, the founding of Mycenae and the myth's sources.
Perseus was the Greek hero who cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turned onlookers to stone. Son of Zeus and the Argive princess Danaë, he was cast into the sea as a baby, grew up on the island of Seriphos, won the Gorgon's head with the help of Athena and Hermes, rescued Andromeda from a sea monster and finally, as an oracle had foretold, killed his grandfather by accident. He was remembered as the founder of Mycenae and the ancestor of Heracles.
Danaë, Acrisius and the Birth of Perseus§
The story begins at Argos. King Acrisius, who had no son, asked an oracle about heirs and was told that his daughter Danaë would bear a son who would kill him. He shut her in a bronze chamber, underground in some versions. Zeus reached her as a shower of gold that fell through the roof, and she bore a son, Perseus. Refusing to believe a god was the father, Acrisius locked mother and child in a wooden chest and cast it into the sea.
The chest drifted to Seriphos, one of the Cyclades, where it was drawn ashore by Dictys, a fisherman in some tellings and brother of the island's king Polydectes in others. A celebrated lyric fragment of Simonides (late sixth to early fifth century BCE) imagines Danaë in the dark chest, speaking to her sleeping baby while the waves beat around them. Perseus grew to manhood in Dictys' house. The motif of the endangered child set adrift and later returning to fulfil a prophecy is widespread in myth, and the folklorist E. Sidney Hartland made Perseus the centre of a large comparative study of such tales in the 1890s.
The Quest for the Head of Medusa§
Polydectes desired Danaë, and the grown Perseus stood in his way. According to Apollodorus, the king gathered his friends and asked each for a gift of horses, pretending he wished to woo another woman. Perseus, who had nothing, rashly said he would bring the head of the Gorgon if asked, and Polydectes held him to it.
Athena and Hermes guided him. First he went to the Graeae, the grey-haired sisters of the Gorgons, who shared a single eye and a single tooth between them. He seized the eye as they passed it from hand to hand and gave it back only when they showed him the way to certain nymphs. From the nymphs he received winged sandals, the kibisis (a pouch to carry the head) and the cap of Hades, which made its wearer invisible; Hermes gave him a curved adamantine sickle, the harpē. Flying to the edge of the world beside the stream of Ocean, he found the three Gorgons asleep. Of the three only Medusa was mortal, as Hesiod's Theogony already says. Perseus approached her looking not at her face but at its reflection in a polished bronze shield, while Athena guided his hand, and he cut off her head. From her neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and the warrior Chrysaor, her children by Poseidon. Medusa's immortal sisters woke and pursued him, but wearing the cap he escaped unseen.
Who the Gorgons were, and how later poets such as Ovid recast Medusa as a beautiful woman punished by Athena, belongs to the history of the creatures themselves; this article follows the hero. Pindar's twelfth Pythian Ode (490 BCE) adds a striking detail: Athena, hearing the wailing of the Gorgons, invented a melody for the pipes to imitate it.
Andromeda and the Sea Monster§
Flying home, Perseus passed over Ethiopia, which Greek myth placed vaguely at the southern or eastern edge of the world, and in some later accounts near Joppa on the Levantine coast. Queen Cassiopeia had boasted that she was more beautiful than the Nereids, the sea nymphs, and Poseidon sent a flood and a sea monster (kētos). An oracle declared that the land would be freed only if the king's daughter Andromeda was given to the beast. King Cepheus had her chained to a rock by the shore. Perseus saw her, agreed with her parents that he would marry her if he saved her, and killed the monster.
Her uncle Phineus, to whom she had been promised, then attacked with his followers, and Perseus turned them to stone with the Gorgon's head. Sophocles and Euripides both wrote tragedies called Andromeda, now lost except for fragments; Euripides' play (412 BCE) was famous enough to be parodied by Aristophanes. Ovid's Metamorphoses (books 4 and 5) gives the most vivid surviving version and adds touches of his own, among them the Titan Atlas turned into a mountain when he refused Perseus hospitality and the origin of coral from seaweed hardened by the head. The Greek astronomical tradition set the whole family in the sky as the constellations Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus and Cetus, the sea monster.
The Return to Seriphos, Argos and Mycenae§
Back on Seriphos, Perseus found that Danaë and Dictys had taken refuge at an altar from the violence of Polydectes. He entered the king's hall, where Polydectes sat feasting with his friends, and showed them the head; they were turned to stone where they sat. He made Dictys king of the island, returned the sandals, pouch and cap to Hermes for the nymphs, and gave the head to Athena, who set it on her aegis or shield.
The prophecy was still to be fulfilled. Acrisius, hearing of his grandson's return, fled to Larissa in Thessaly. Perseus went there to compete in funeral games, and a discus he threw struck Acrisius and killed him. Ashamed to inherit the kingdom of the man he had killed, Perseus exchanged Argos for Tiryns with his cousin Megapenthes. He was credited with fortifying Midea and with founding Mycenae, whose name Pausanias connects either with the cap (mykēs) of his scabbard falling there or with a mushroom from which he drank water. His children by Andromeda included Electryon, grandfather of Heracles, and Perses, whom Herodotus names as the ancestor of the Persian kings.
The Sources, Art and Variants of the Perseus Myth§
Perseus enters literature early. Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) mentions the beheading of Medusa, and the Shield of Heracles attributed to him describes Perseus in flight on the hero's shield, the Gorgons in pursuit. The fifth-century mythographer Pherecydes of Athens told the full story, and his account, preserved in later scholia, lies behind much of Apollodorus' Library. Art is even older: the Gorgon with Pegasus and Chrysaor fills the west pediment of the temple of Artemis on Corfu (c. 580 BCE), and a metope from Temple C at Selinus in Sicily shows Perseus, watched by Athena, beheading a kneeling Medusa while looking away.
Variants abound. Some writers have Perseus see Medusa directly while wearing the cap, others make the mirror central; Ovid lets him use the head again and again. Ancient rationalists such as Palaephatus explained the Gorgon as a foreign queen or a hoard of gold. Modern interpreters have read the myth as an initiation story, a sun myth (in the nineteenth century) and, in Sigmund Freud's short essay "Medusa's Head" (written 1922), as a story about fear. The comparative study of these readings is surveyed in Daniel Ogden's Perseus (2008).
Perseus and the Gorgon's Head in Later Culture§
Medusa's head outlived the hero's story as the gorgoneion, a frontal face with staring eyes and protruding tongue painted on shields, carved on temple roofs and worn in jewellery to turn harm aside, a practice related to the protective charms described in The Evil Eye: History and Protective Charms. Renaissance and later artists returned repeatedly to Perseus: Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–1554) stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Titian painted Perseus and Andromeda for Philip II of Spain, and Edward Burne-Jones designed a Perseus cycle in the 1870s and 1880s. Like the Argonaut Jason and Athens' Theseus, Perseus became a model of the quest hero who leaves home, gains supernatural help and returns transformed.
Frequently asked questions§
How did Perseus kill Medusa without being turned to stone?§
In the usual version he looked only at her reflection in a polished bronze shield while Athena guided his hand, and he struck while the Gorgons slept. The cap of Hades then made him invisible so that her sisters could not catch him.
Who were Perseus' parents?§
His mother was Danaë, daughter of King Acrisius of Argos, and his father was Zeus, who came to her as a shower of gold while she was imprisoned in a bronze chamber.
Did Perseus marry Andromeda?§
Yes. After killing the sea monster sent against her people, he married Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and she bore him several children, among them Electryon and Perses.
What did Perseus do with Medusa's head?§
He used it to turn his enemies, including Phineus and Polydectes, to stone, then gave it to Athena, who placed it on her aegis or shield. Its image, the gorgoneion, became a common protective emblem in Greek art.
Sources and further reading§
- The Library — Apollodorus, 1st–2nd century CE
- Metamorphoses — Ovid, c. 8 CE
- Theogony — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
- The Odes of Pindar — Pindar, 5th century BCE
- Description of Greece — Pausanias, 2nd century CE
- Perseus — Daniel Ogden, 2008
- The Legend of Perseus — Edwin Sidney Hartland, 1894
- Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources — Timothy Gantz, 1993
- The Heroes of the Greeks — Karl Kerényi, 1959