Medusa’s Family File: Sisters, Sons and a Grinning Face

On the island of Corfu, early in the sixth century BCE, the builders of a temple to Artemis set a Gorgon at the centre of its west pediment, taller than any visitor who looked up at her. She is caught mid-stride in the archaic running pose, one knee almost touching the ground, snakes knotted at her waist like a belt, tongue pushed out between bared teeth. On either side, much smaller, are a winged horse and a young man: her sons, Pegasus and Chrysaor. Great cats crouch beyond them. It is not a picture of a crime. It is a family portrait, and the family is the subject of this file. The stone figures can still be seen in the island’s archaeological museum.

The household of Phorcys and Ceto

Hesiod’s Theogony files Medusa under a strange household. Her parents are Phorcys and Ceto, sea powers born of Pontus and Earth. Their first children are the Graiai, “grey from birth”, whom Hesiod names Pemphredo and Enyo; later writers add Deino to make three, and give the sisters a single eye and a single tooth to share. Next come the Gorgons, who live beyond the stream of Ocean at the edge of night, near the clear-voiced Hesperides: Stheno, Euryale and Medusa. Hesiod pauses on a detail that shapes everything after it. The two elder sisters are deathless and ageless. Medusa alone is mortal.

The rest of the household fits the same pattern. Hesiod’s youngest child of Phorcys and Ceto is a fearsome snake that guards the golden apples in the hidden places of the dark earth; later writers call him Ladon. Between them sits Echidna, half nymph and half serpent, though Hesiod’s grammar leaves her mother unclear, and Apollodorus gives her other parents altogether. The family, in short, patrols the edges of the world. Even the names suit the work: Stheno suggests strength, Euryale breadth, and Medusa comes from a verb meaning to guard or to rule.

A meadow, a blade, two sons

Hesiod’s account of Medusa’s lover is brief and calm. The dark-haired god, Poseidon, lay with her in a soft meadow among spring flowers. There is no temple, no outraged Athena, no curse. Then Perseus arrives, and the children are born not from a womb but from the wound.

When Perseus cut her head from her neck, out leapt great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus, named for the springs of Ocean where he was born; the other came holding a golden blade in his hands.

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

Pegasus leaves the earth at once, flies to the immortals and lives in the house of Zeus, carrying his thunder and lightning. He comes back to the ground in the story of Bellerophon. In Pindar’s Olympian 13, the Corinthian hero struggles to catch him at the spring of Peirene until Athena gives him a golden bridle in a dream; mounted, he kills the Chimera, a creature that ancient genealogists placed in Echidna’s brood, so a relative of sorts. Pindar’s Isthmian 7 recalls how Pegasus later threw Bellerophon when he tried to ride up to the homes of the gods. Corinth stamped the winged horse on its silver coins for centuries.

Chrysaor, the brother with the golden sword, is almost never shown alone. Hesiod gives him one task: with the Oceanid Callirhoe he fathers Geryon, the three-headed herdsman whom Heracles kills on the island of Erytheia beyond Ocean. Medusa’s grandson, in other words, is one of the Labours. A metope from Temple C at Selinous in Sicily, carved in the sixth century BCE and now in Palermo, compresses the whole sequence into one panel: Perseus beheads Medusa while Athena stands by, and Medusa clutches the tiny Pegasus against her side. Her death and her son’s birth happen in the same frame.

The grinning face

For archaic artists, the face was the point. In a tradition that drew almost everyone in profile, the gorgoneion, the Gorgon’s head on its own, stares straight out: broad and round, eyes wide, mouth stretched in a grin over tusks, tongue lolling, sometimes bearded, with snakes curling at the temples. It went on shields, roof tiles, pediments, coins and the insides of drinking cups, where the drinker found her looking up as the wine drained away. Its job was to turn harm back on itself: a frightening face set up to frighten off whatever threatened the house, the city or the man behind the shield.

Homer knows the face but tells no story about it. In Iliad 11 Agamemnon’s shield bears the grim-eyed Gorgon, glaring terribly, with Terror and Rout around her; in Iliad 5 the Gorgon’s head sits on Athena’s aegis. The Shield of Heracles, a poem transmitted under Hesiod’s name, puts the whole chase on a shield: Perseus in flight, and the Gorgon sisters after him with snakes coiled at their belts, flicking their tongues and gnashing their teeth. A large Proto-Attic amphora from Eleusis, painted in the middle of the seventh century BCE, shows the same pursuit: the sisters run with heads like bronze cauldrons sprouting snakes, while Medusa’s headless body sprawls behind them.

Pindar adds sound to the picture. In Pythian 12, written for a champion piper from Akragas, he says that Athena invented the music of the aulos to imitate the shrill lament that came from Euryale’s jaws as she mourned her sister. The Greek pipe, on this account, began as the sound of a family’s grief. Pindar also calls Medusa fair-cheeked, an early sign of a change that was coming.

From grin to beauty

Over the fifth century BCE the face softened. Painters and sculptors began to give Medusa calm, even lovely features, sometimes with only a pair of small wings or a knot of snakes to identify her; the marble known as the Medusa Rondanini, a Roman work in Munich usually traced to a Classical Greek model, is the most famous example. Literature eventually supplied a story to explain the change. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, makes her a celebrated beauty whose hair was her finest feature, violated by Neptune in Minerva’s temple; the goddess punished her by turning the hair to snakes. Apollodorus preserves another version in which Medusa was killed because she had claimed to rival Athena’s beauty.

Hesiod’s version contains none of this: no guilt, no punishment, no crime in a temple. The beautiful victim is a later layer laid over an older figure, a mortal daughter of the sea who belonged to a family of guardians. Both layers matter, but they should not be confused.

Medusa’s story does not end with Perseus. Her head is imagined in the keeping of the powers below in Odyssey 11, where Odysseus fears the queen of the dead will send it up to him; that is filed in the Persephone entry. A monster from a different household, the Minotaur, turns up in the Daedalus file, and every member of the household of Phorcys has a numbered row in the Catalogue.