Medusa

From Hesiod to Ovid: how her story changed

The version most people know now is the Roman poet Ovid’s, in the Metamorphoses. In it Medusa was a mortal beauty with many suitors, and her hair was her finest feature. The sea god “is said to have deflowered her in the Temple of Minerva”, as Henry Riley’s 1851 translation puts it; the goddess turned away and hid her eyes behind her shield, and so that the deed would not go unpunished she changed the Gorgon’s hair into snakes. Translators and readers do not agree on what to call what Poseidon did. The Met’s essay says Medusa was “seduced by Poseidon”. The classicist Valeria Spacciante, writing in Public Books in 2023, retells it as rape followed by punishment: Medusa is “raped by the sea god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena” and then punished by Athena for impure acts in her temple.

Ovid was not the first to make her beautiful. Pindar’s twelfth Pythian ode of 490 BC already speaks of “the horrible snakey hair of the maidens” and of “beautiful Medusa”, and tells how Athena invented the music of the flute to imitate the dirge the other Gorgons wailed for her. Apollodorus records another reason for her death: “it is alleged by some that Medusa was beheaded for Athena’s sake”, because she claimed to rival the goddess in beauty. The Met’s essay dates the spread of the snake-haired Medusa to the first century BC, with Ovid.

A face to frighten off harm

The gorgoneion was everywhere in the Archaic period, from about 700 to 480 BC. The Met’s essay describes Temple C at Selinunte in Sicily, built about 540 BC, with a huge Gorgon’s face in each pediment, and the terracotta roof-tile ends, or antefixes, of temples across Sicily, southern Italy and mainland Greece; the centre of the pediment of the Temple of Artemis on Corfu has Medusa herself, with Pegasus and Chrysaor. Painted in the bottom of a cup, the face surprised the drinker as he finished his wine. It was worked on the handles of bronze vessels and on earrings, pendants and rings, and soldiers wore it on helmets, shields and greaves, which the Met takes as a sign that it was thought to protect the wearer. A silver tetradrachm of Athens dated 523 BC, in the American Numismatic Society’s collection, has a gorgoneion on the front and a panther’s head on the back.

Pausanias saw it in public places. A gilded head of Medusa framed by an aegis was set up on the south wall of the Acropolis, facing the theatre; the Spartans hung a golden shield with Medusa in relief on the temple of Zeus at Olympia after their victory at Tanagra; and at Tegea people said Athena had given Cepheus, son of Aleus, a lock of Medusa’s hair “as a guard to the city”. The gold-and-ivory Athena in the Parthenon wore the head of Medusa in ivory on her breast.

From monster to beauty

The archaic Gorgon has a round face, wide eyes, a beard and a gaping mouth with its tongue out between sharp teeth. From the fifth century BC she became more human and more female, losing the teeth and beard but keeping her wild hair and her stare, the Met’s essay says. A pelike by Polygnotos of 450 to 440 BC, showing Perseus creeping up on her as she sleeps, is among the earliest images of her as an innocent young woman, Allison Meier wrote in Hyperallergic in 2018, reviewing the Met’s exhibition Dangerous Beauty. Its curator, Kiki Karoglou, called Medusa “the archetypal femme fatale”. The exhibition included Versace fashions of the 1990s carrying her head as a luxury logo, and Meier quotes the classicist Mary Beard on the way the image of Medusa is still used in attacks on women politicians.

What does a Medusa tattoo mean?

For many of the people who wear it today, a Medusa tattoo says that they survived sexual violence. Dictionary.com, in a December 2023 entry, records that some people get the tattoo “to indicate that they are a survivor of sexual violence and to symbolize their own empowerment”, and that the reading seems to have been common on TikTok as early as 2021. Spacciante describes a Medusa tattoo trend that “went viral on TikTok” in 2021, in which thousands of survivors showed their tattoos. The reading rests on Ovid’s version, in which Medusa is punished for what was done to her. It is a modern meaning, and Dictionary.com notes that not everyone with a Medusa tattoo is a survivor; Medusa was a popular tattoo, read as strength, long before. Public art took up the same reading in 2020, when Luciano Garbati’s seven-foot bronze of Medusa holding the head of Perseus, a reversal of Cellini’s Perseus in Florence, was installed facing the criminal court in Manhattan where Harvey Weinstein was tried. ARTnews reported both the welcome and the criticism, including the activist Wagatwe Wanjuki’s objection that a European figure sculpted by a man had become the commentary on a movement a Black woman began.