Andromeda

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Andromeda is a figure of Greek myth: a princess offered to a sea-monster as the price of her mother’s pride, rescued at the last moment by the hero Perseus, and afterward set among the stars as the constellation that still bears her name. In the oldest tellings she is the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, rulers of a kingdom the sources place in the east or in Aethiopia — a vague, half-legendary elsewhere rather than a fixed map point.

The story turns on a boast. Cassiopeia claimed that she, or her daughter, was more beautiful than the Nereids, the sea-nymphs; the sea-god Poseidon answered the insult by sending a flood and a monster, Cetus, to ravage the coast. An oracle told Cepheus that the land would be spared only if Andromeda were given to the beast. She was chained naked to a rock at the shore and left for it. Perseus, returning through the air with the severed head of Medusa, saw her, struck a bargain with her parents for her hand, and killed the monster — by the sword in some versions, by the petrifying gaze of the Gorgon’s head in others. The wedding that followed was interrupted by a rival suitor, and the quarrel ended when Perseus turned the wedding hall to stone.

The episode is told across the whole span of classical literature, gathered into its familiar shape by later mythographers and given its best-known narration in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It became a favored subject for ancient wall-painting and, much later, for European art, where the chained woman and the descending hero offered painters a charged scene they returned to for centuries.

In the sky, Andromeda is one of the constellations catalogued by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, set near her mythic kin — Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and the sea-monster Cetus — so that the family is grouped together overhead. The constellation is the namesake of the Andromeda Galaxy, the great spiral nearest the Milky Way, whose faint smudge lies within its bounds; the galaxy’s name is thus an inheritance from the myth by way of the star-figure, not from any ancient claim about it.

What the figure carried, for those who told and retold the story, is harder to fix than the plot. Greek myth is reticent about its own meanings, and Andromeda was read in many ways across the centuries — as a tale of fate and rescue, as a moralized warning against a mother’s vanity, as an image later allegorists bent toward the soul awaiting deliverance. Those readings belong to their readers more than to the early sources, which simply tell what happened and leave the rest to the listener.

→ Related: Orion · Hydra · Cassandra