Perseus

← Encyclopedia

A child is shut in a wooden chest with his mother and pushed out onto the sea. The chest washes up on the small Cycladic island of Seriphos, a fisherman draws it from the water, and inside is a woman and a boy who will grow into the slayer of the Gorgon Medusa. That is where the story of Perseus most often begins — not with a birth but with a survival, a mother and son afloat in a box because a prophecy said the boy would one day kill his own grandfather. Perseus is a hero of Greek myth, in the oldest tellings a son of Zeus by the mortal Danaë, and his tale is among the most widely attested in Greek literature: told in fragments by the earliest poets and at length by the later mythographers, gathered finally into the shape every retelling now assumes.

The story and its sources

The plot is layered out of strata that do not all agree. Acrisius, king of Argos, is told by an oracle that his daughter Danaë will bear a son who will be his death, and so he locks her in a bronze underground chamber; Zeus reaches her as a shower of gold, and Perseus is conceived. Grandfather and mother and child are set adrift; they come ashore on Seriphos, where the island’s king, Polydectes, wants Danaë and finds the grown son in his way. He extracts a reckless promise at a banquet and sends Perseus off for the impossible gift: the head of Medusa, one of three Gorgon sisters, a monster whose gaze turns the living to stone.

What follows is a quest assembled from helpers and instruments. Perseus finds the Graeae, the gray sisters who share a single eye and one tooth between them, and takes the eye to compel them to point the way. He gathers from a band of nymphs the winged sandals, a cap that confers invisibility, and a leather wallet — the kibisis — to carry the head once it is cut; Hermes lends the curved sword, the harpe; Athena lends the polished shield. Approaching Medusa as she sleeps, he beheads her without meeting her eyes, and from the severed neck spring the winged horse Pegasus and the warrior Chrysaor, the children she carried by the sea-god. The two surviving sisters give chase; he escapes invisible into the air. Returning, he rescues Andromeda from a sea-creature sent to ravage her father’s coast, takes her to wife, turns the rival suitor Phineus and the treacherous Polydectes to stone with the trophy, and at last, competing in funeral games, kills with a stray discus an old man in the crowd who proves to be Acrisius — the oracle keeping itself. The severed head, lethal even in death, passes to Athena, who fixes it to her shield.

The earliest witnesses give only pieces of this. In Hesiod’s Theogony, around 700 BCE, Medusa is the one mortal among three Gorgon sisters who live beyond the stream of Ocean toward Night, and when Perseus strikes off her head, Pegasus and Chrysaor leap from her. That is nearly all the poem grants her. The motif that defines the killing for every later reader — that Perseus does not look at Medusa directly but watches her reflection in a bronze shield — belongs already to the archaic material: it surfaces in the Shield of Heracles, a poem of the first half of the sixth century BCE composed by a poet working in the Hesiodic tradition, where the Gorgons pursue the fleeing hero across the imagined surface of the shield. The mirror, in other words, is not a late refinement of the tale; it is nearly as old as the tale itself. Pindar carries the figure into lyric. In Pythian 10, written for a victor in 498 BCE and the oldest of his odes to survive whole, the son of Danaë feasts among the Hyperboreans at the world’s edge, led there by Athena, while Apollo delights in their unending festival. In Pythian 12, composed in 490 BCE for the flute-player Midas of Acragas, Pindar makes the beheading the origin of music itself: Athena weaves the dirge of the surviving Gorgons for their slain sister into the many-headed melody of the reed-pipe, so that the instrument is born out of grief and triumph at once.

The connected narrative — the whole chain from oracle to discus — is the work of the later compilers. The Bibliotheca attributed to Apollodorus, a handbook probably of the first or second century CE, sets the episodes in order and supplies the catalog of instruments; Ovid, in the fourth and fifth books of the Metamorphoses, gives the Andromeda rescue, the petrifaction of the Titan Atlas into the mountain range that bears his name, and the slaughter at the wedding feast their best-known and most quoted form. The plain shape of the story, and the strangeness of its central act — a killing performed by refusing to look — were old enough to invite reading beneath the surface from early on.

The mirror, and the reading of it

The detail of the averted gaze became a standing image. A thing that kills by being seen must be approached obliquely; Perseus strikes by watching the reflection rather than the face, and that maneuver — knowledge of what cannot be confronted head-on, mastery by indirection — drew commentators across a thousand years. The allegorizing began in late antiquity. Fulgentius, writing his Mythologiae around the turn of the sixth century, read the three Gorgons as three grades of terror, and Perseus, aided by Minerva, as courage joined to wisdom putting fear to death. The Christian mythographers who inherited him pushed the figure further. In the fourteenth century Boccaccio, in the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, set out the fourfold reading the schools had by then formalized: the killing of the Gorgon could be taken historically as a remembered deed, morally as the wise man’s conquest of vice, allegorically as the soul spurning the world to rise toward the celestial, and anagogically as Christ overcoming the princes of the world and ascending to the Father. One fable, four ascending senses — the same exegetical ladder built for scripture, laid against a pagan tale.

The reading reached its most worldly statement in Francis Bacon. In De Sapientia Veterum of 1609, Englished a decade later as The Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon made the seventh of his thirty-one fables “Perseus, or War,” and read the whole quest as a manual of prudent warfare. The gifts each carry a meaning — the winged sandals as dispatch, the wallet as supply, the cap as concealment — and the mirror is the crux. Bacon writes that Pallas gave Perseus, along with her shield, a looking-glass; finding Medusa asleep, the hero dared not look at her directly but beheld her in the glass, and so, with his aim corrected, struck off the head. The lesson Bacon draws is that no war should be entered into upon the sight of its first occasion, but only after the cause has been studied at a remove, in the reflecting glass of counsel. The petrifying head set afterward upon the shield keeps, in his telling, its power to turn the beholder to stone — terror itself made into a defense. Here the myth has become wholly a vehicle: the story is the husk, the policy the kernel, and the mirror the figure for seeing a deadly thing safely by not facing it.

These readings are interpretation laid over a story rather than meanings the early sources declare. Greek myth is reticent about its own significance, and the mirror-as-method, like the moralized hero, belongs to its readers more than to its first tellers. The figure proved durable precisely because the image is exact: some things can be acted upon only when they are not looked at directly, and the hero who learned this became the standing emblem for the lesson.

The Gorgoneion, the face that guards

The severed head had a life of its own, and it outran the hero who took it. The Gorgoneion — the frontal face of the Gorgon, eyes wide, tongue thrust out, tusks bared — is among the oldest and most insistent images in Greek art, and for much of its history it traveled without any narrative attached. The Greeks classed it as apotropaic, a thing that turns evil away, and they set it where harm might enter: on Athena’s aegis and, in Homer, on the shield of Zeus; on the great running Gorgon that fills the west pediment of the temple of Artemis at Corfu around 580 BCE; on the terracotta antefixes that capped temple roofs across Sicily, southern Italy, and Etruria; on coins, on the round bosses of shields, on armor and door-fittings, on cups and lamps, and on small worn amulets and engraved gems carried against misfortune. The logic is the logic of the myth turned to use. A face whose look paralyzed the living could, as an image, freeze hostile force in place — the talismanic idea that a power captured in a figure might be aimed outward. The Gorgoneion meets the evil eye with a stronger eye and outstares it; it answers a hostile gaze with a more terrible one. Many who fixed the guarding face above a doorway knew it without the hero attached — the emblem had become a thing in itself.

The face also changed over time. The archaic Gorgon is a grimace, deliberately hideous, all teeth and protruding tongue and fixed stare. From the fifth century the image softens; the monster acquires beauty, and by the Hellenistic period the severed head can be rendered as a sleeping or sorrowing woman, terrible and lovely at once. The shift is not merely a matter of taste. As the scholarship on the red-figure vases argues, the beautiful Medusa is shaped by what the scene is made to say — the killing came to be drawn as a kind of perverse abduction, the Gorgon given the affinities of the seized maiden — so that horror and pathos are held in the same face. The frontal stare remains the constant: where almost all Greek figures are shown in profile, the Gorgon looks straight out at the viewer, breaking the plane, meeting the eye it is meant to repel. That confrontation — the face that looks back — is the heart of what the emblem does.

Among the stars

Perseus also rose into the sky. The constellation that bears his name is one of the forty-eight cataloged by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, and it lies among the figures of the same saga: Andromeda beside him, Cassiopeia and Cepheus her parents nearby, the sea-monster Cetus below, so that the whole story is laid out overhead as a cluster of stars. In his hand the older charts place the head of Medusa, and the star that marks it is Algol — Beta Persei, the second-brightest in the figure — whose name descends from the Arabic raʾs al-ghūl, the head of the demon or ghoul; in the Hebrew tradition it carried a parallel name, Satan’s head. The naming preserved the trophy in the heavens: the lethal face fixed, like everything else in the cluster, among the stars.

Algol turned out to keep a secret the myth could not have known. The star is not steady. Roughly every two and seven-eighths days it dims sharply for some hours and then recovers — the demon, in the old poetic gloss, winking. The variation was first reported by Geminiano Montanari in 1667 and explained a century later by John Goodricke, who in 1782 and 1783 timed the cycle and proposed, correctly, that a dimmer companion periodically eclipses the bright star; the insight earned him the Copley Medal and gave its name to a whole class of eclipsing variables. There is no evidence that any ancient observer noticed the dimming, and so the matching of a demon’s name to a star that visibly fails is, as the record stands, a coincidence — the name older than the discovery it seems to anticipate. The placement made the hero part of the inherited celestial furniture that astrology and astronomy drew on together long before the two were distinguished. In the technical Greek tradition the constellations were the fixed frame against which the wandering bodies were read — the planets named for their gods, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, moving through a sky furnished with these older figures. In the allegorizing handbooks of the later mythographers the constellation and the moralized hero tend to merge, the star-Perseus and the conquering-mind Perseus folding into one image.

A long afterlife

How much of all this counts as esoteric and how much as ordinary literary inheritance is not a line the material itself draws sharply. The myth is not a doctrine and was the property of no school; what later writers built on it — the mirror as a figure for indirect knowing, the warding face, the hero set among the stars — is interpretation laid over a story, and reads best when kept distinct from the story’s plain shape. The story kept generating images regardless. The Renaissance, reading the ancient fables for hidden philosophy in the same years that Bacon was moralizing them and that Neoplatonist readers were tracing the soul’s ascent through pagan tale, also gave the hero his most famous modern body: Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and unveiled in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence in 1554, the hero standing over the slain Gorgon with the severed head held high — itself a political emblem, the Medici over the fallen Republic, the apotropaic head turned once more into a warning. The story that began in ancient Greece as a boy adrift in a box on the sea had become, by then, a figure good for almost anything: a lesson in war, a ladder for the soul, a guard above a door, a pattern in the night sky.

Texts and study

The literary and artistic evidence for Perseus is gathered, source by source, in Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), the standard modern compendium for the archaic and classical strata, and treated narratively in Karl Kerényi’s The Heroes of the Greeks (Thames & Hudson, 1959). The frontal Gorgon face and the meaning of its gaze are the subject of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s essay Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other, collected in Mortals and Immortals (Princeton University Press, 1991), which reads the Gorgoneion as the face of radical otherness that the living cannot meet and survive. The shift from the monstrous to the beautiful Medusa, and its entanglement with the imagery of abduction, is argued in Kathryn Topper’s Perseus, the Maiden Medusa, and the Imagery of Abduction, Hesperia 76.1 (2007): 73–105. The allegorical tradition runs through Fulgentius’s Mythologiae, Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, and Francis Bacon’s The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609; English 1619), whose “Perseus, or War” is the sharpest single statement of the fable read as policy. The constellation and its demon-star descend from Ptolemy’s Almagest through the Arabic star-lists that gave Algol its name.

The head, in the end, came to rest on a goddess’s shield: a weapon turned into a guard.

→ Related: Atlas · Mercury · Mars · Saturn · Zeus · Andromeda · Cassiopeia · Danae · Apollo · Ancient Greece · Astrology · Amulet · Talisman · Renaissance Hermetism · Neoplatonism · Ptolemy