Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(28)

Both these vase paintings show a deeply ambivalent response to the beheading of Medusa. It is a necessary part of Perseus’ heroic narrative, and he is an indisputable hero, a son of Zeus no less. His heroic status is not being questioned: both vases show him wearing divine possessions or gifts, and with Athene assisting him. But the winged shoes, cap and special knapsack seem to reveal a second level of ambivalence: Perseus is a hero favoured by the gods, but he is also an insufficient hero, one who needs copious divine assistance to complete his quest He is not being presented as a giant-slayer, a monster-killer. The ingenuity we might see in an image of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops or the strength of Heracles killing the Hydra is missing.

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Our best-known version of Medusa and Perseus – despite the hard work of museum curators around the world – is probably in Clash of the Titans (made in 1981 and shown by law every Bank Holiday Monday since). Harry Hamlin’s Perseus uses his shield as a protective mirror when he takes on a fully conscious Medusa who could petrify him at any moment: her reflection doesn’t have the same fatal power as her undiluted gaze. This creates a dramatic tension in the movie which is undeniably absent from the Pseudo-Apollodorus story, and from the pots which show the Gorgon asleep or already beheaded. Perseus is hunting a monster which is hunting him right back. He is armed with a sword, she with a lethal stare.

He also has a more heroic reason to get Medusa’s head in the first place. For our ancient sources, Perseus was simply doing the bidding of Polydectes (who wanted Perseus out of the way so he could more easily seduce Danae, Perseus’ mother). But our modern taste for hero narratives requires something a bit juicier than this. So the Perseus of Clash of the Titans needs to acquire the head of a Gorgon to save the life of the beautiful Andromeda, who has been tied to a rock and menaced by a kraken (an especially frightening sea-monster, not least because it has swum a long way south – and back in time a couple of millennia – from thirteenth-century Norse myth. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Clash of the Titans kraken is so named purely for the delight of audiences in hearing Laurence Olivier – who plays Zeus – say, ‘Release the kraken’. For the record, I consider this a perfectly legitimate reason to ignore any amount of mythological chronology and geography). The sea-monster in the Medusa story is mentioned in our Greek sources, though, even if it’s not a kraken. And even if turning the monster to stone with Medusa’s head is an afterthought once Perseus has acquired it, rather than his reason for beheading her in the first place.

In his description of this scene, Pseudo-Apollodorus rather pleasingly refers to Andromeda as boran thalassiō kētei24 – ‘food for a sea-monster’. The word kētos (meaning ‘sea-monster’) is particularly resonant in this story, because ancient Greek sea-monsters share this name with Cēto (in Greek, she is spelled Kēto), the mother of the Gorgons, and indeed also the Graiai. As, in fact, do modern-day whales and dolphins, whose infraorder is Cetacea, from the same root.

We’re accustomed to reading Greek myths to examine the fractured relationships between parents and children, but we often overlook this one, and the way a daughter is used to kill a representation or even manifestation of her mother. Perhaps the monster element is what puts us off. Yet surely the way Medusa is weaponized post-mortem against (at the very least) an echo of her mother – a sea-monster in her mother’s image and sharing her name – has its parallels with Oedipus killing his father, Laius. Oedipus is alive while Medusa is dead, but both are the unwitting assassins of their parents. If killing a man seems somehow less forgivable than killing a sea-monster, we might do well to remember one story about Laius (for example, in Euripides’ lost play Chrysippos)25 that tells of him kidnapping a young man and raping him. Ashamed at what has been done to him, the young man, Chrysippos, kills himself with a sword. There is more than one kind of monster.

Clash of the Titans also shifts the chronology of one of this story’s other mythic creatures: Pegasus. In the film, Pegasus is presented as a magical horse belonging to Zeus and loaned to Perseus to assist him in his quest, along with Bubo, an enchanting clockwork owl. For the Greeks, this might have been a perplexing development, because Pegasus is born (fully formed, alongside his brother Chrysaor, a giant) from Medusa’s severed neck. Both flying horse and giant are the offspring of Poseidon and Medusa, according to Pseudo-Apollodorus.26 Medusa’s spilled blood is also fecund: Ovid tells us that, as Perseus carries her head away over Libya, her blood drips onto the desert sands.27 These drops of blood turn into various snakes, in what we might describe as a rare act of herpetohaematogenesis: the creation of snakes from blood. Libya, Ovid drily explains, is infested with snakes.

It scarcely needs saying that by separating Medusa from her family – her Gorgon sisters, her sea-monster parents, her equine and gigantic sons – we make her seem more disposable. A family of monsters may not seem like much of a family (although these things are all relative, I suppose, if you’ll forgive the pun), but they are part of who she is. Modern versions of the Medusa story have tended to focus on Perseus; she is a relatively minor monster in Rick Riordan’s bestselling novel Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, for example, although at least she was played by Uma Thurman in the 2010 film adaptation. Because of this shift in focus, we have lost sight of who Medusa is and what she means to those closest to her.

She is not a monster to her sisters. Pseudo-Apollodorus tells us that Sthenno and Euryale chase Perseus after he decapitates Medusa. He only escapes them because he is wearing the helmet of Hades, which makes him invisible. But it is important for us to note – given the solitary, hermit-like creature that tends to be portrayed in modern interpretations of her – that Medusa does not go unmissed or un-lamented.