It is Nathaniel Hawthorne who really goes to town. For Edith Hamilton, Medusa and her Gorgon sisters are, it is true, rather less awful-“creatures with great wings and bodies covered in golden scales.” She and her sisters have white tusks “like pigs” according to Roger Lancelyn Green. But what’s certainly true is that she becomes progressively more monstrous in post-classical retellings of her story. “Beautiful cheeked,” is how the poet Pindar describes her in the 5th century. In classical sources, in fact, she’s not always monstrous. Athena then punished her for this violation, by turning her into the monstrous, stony-glanced creature that we know. She was lovely, according to the poem-until she was raped in Athena’s temple by Poseidon. It is in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses that her story is most deeply elaborated. In various versions of her story she has sisters, among whom are the Graiae, a trio of women who share a single eye between them. Medusa’s story comes from very deep in Greek mythography: in the Theogony, by the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, she is described as being the child of Phorcys and Ceto, chthonic sea deities. You’ll know her as the snaky-haired, dreadful-faced monster whose decapitated head the hero Perseus is gripping by the serpentine locks in the great Benvenuto Cellini sculpture as the terrifying creature whose glance turns people to stone. Is it Pandora, the Eve character of Greek myth, who opens her “box” and lets out all the evils of the world? Not even. What female character gets the worst deal in all of Greek mythology? Is it Helen, called a “bitch” in one translation of the Odyssey, who leaves her husband Menelaus for Paris of Troy, her face thus supposedly launching a thousand ships and a 10-year-long, bloody war? "It is hard not to see in Medusa’s snaky, phallic locks an implied claim on male power." Illustration: Kate Hazell
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