Medusa The Real History | Greek Mythology

2,600 years ago, this place, a temple of Artemis on Corfu, had a connection with a myth that has endured ever since. Medusa. You've heard of her snaky hair and stony gaze, and you may think you know her story. A young hero sent on a quest to behead the terrifying, sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful, Gorgon. But do you really know the complexity and the tragedy of her tale? Come with me to meet the real Medusa. Let's start at the very beginning. The first literary account we know of Medusa is thanks to the poet Hesiod. The Gorgons dwell beyond glorious ocean, in the frontier land towards night. They are the immortal Stheno and Uriali who grow not old, and their mortal sister Medusa, who suffered a woeful fate. On the beautiful island of Corfu, it's a story literally written in stone. Just over a century ago, farmers were digging here, next to the convent of Ios Theodoros, and then they found some stone figures. The farmers didn't know what they had unearthed in this quiet corner of Corfu, but the Greek Archaeological Society began to excavate. Little by little, they revealed the remains of an ancient temple to Artemis, built 2,600 years ago. The scale was enormous. As the team continued digging through the spring of 1911, they discovered a huge sculpted pediment. Staying nearby was the German Kaiser. He came to have a look, and arrived to see a face emerge from the ground. The face of a Gorgon. I've come to meet her now, in Corfu's marvellous Museum of Archaeology. So this is the Temple of Artemis pediment, which was found by those farmers just across the island in Corfu. And this is Medusa. Not just a Gorgon, but THE Gorgon, the most famous of the three sisters. The pediment of the Temple of Artemis. And you can see Medusa exactly as she's been described to us in our literary sources. You can see that she has snakes in her hair. Not snakes instead of hair, that's a later innovation, but you can see she's got snakes coming out around her ringlets, and she's also got snakes right up along her hairline, just little tiny chic ones. Obviously she also has this incredible belt made of double snakes, which makes her look super powerful. The other thing about Gorgons that people often don't know, is that they have wings, so she can fly. And you can see that because you can just see a few of the feathers behind her left arm. And while we're up there, would you just look at the incredible bicep that she has. This is a strong Gorgon. This is not a sort of little girly one. She is tough, right? And you can see how strong she is, because you can see the muscle definition across her. So she's got those very, very strong biceps. She's got really strong buttocks. And you can see how incredibly muscled her legs are, because she's running, or more probably, she's flying. This is how this pinwheeling leg movement that makes her look to us like a runner, when matched with wings in ancient art, probably means that she's flying. So she's moving at speed. Before Hesiod composed the story of Medusa in the 7th century BCE, Gorgonea, or Gorgon heads, had already appeared in the Odyssey and the Iliad as a phantom in Hades, and as a terrifying head on the shield of the Greek warrior Agamemnon. But Corfu's Medusa, carved 2,600 years ago, gives us the full whole body package. So Gorgons have a wide mouth and a protruding tongue. And again, this is something that we see in almost all Gorgonea, Gorgon heads. And then in Gorgons later on, there's the possibility of noise. There are lots of different attempts to derive the word Gorgo, Gorgon in English, and none of them is completely spot on probably. But one of the more plausible arguments is that it comes from the noise of thunder. So perhaps she can make this very loud noise. Gorgons are often associated with a cacophonous noise, which is why I think often ancient male authors are a bit unnerved by them. Women making a loud noise is always alarming. Medusa is one of three sisters. They are the daughters of the primordial sea god, Phocis, and his wife, Kato, who produce a tremendous array of sea monster offspring. The Gorgons, Steno and Uriale, are immortal. Strangely, the third sister, Medusa, is not. So the reason that we know that this is Medusa, rather than one of her Gorgon sisters, is her offspring. It's one of the things that we often forget in the modern world is that she has two children. It's a very unusual sculpture because generally in our ancient myths, they are born from her severed head at the point of her death. But on this occasion, as you can see, she's still bodily intact. So this is quite a rare example. Here are her offspring. You can see the back legs and the tail and the wing of Pegasus, the winged horse who is born from Medusa's neck. And on the other side, this is Chrysaor. He's a golden giant. So you can see that he is big, not least because if we go in really close, you can perhaps just see his foot has survived. This sculpture is made of quite a soft stone, so it hasn't survived perhaps as sturdily as we might have hoped. You can see that his foot is toe to toe with Medusa's gigantic foot. So even though he's a giant, he's not as big as her. As well as telling the story of Medusa's offspring, this sculpture captures every detail of the mortal Gorgon herself. Here you can see in close up some of the beautiful design on the edge of her skirt. You can see her lovely ornate sandals, which have got these gorgeous plant motifs. And you can also see, if we go in really close, you can see the scales on the snakes that make up her belt. The Medusa of Corfu is not there to terrify the worshippers at the Temple of Artemis. Her job is to protect the temple. There is always this duality to Medusa in the Greek sources. She scares or she protects, depending on who you are. To help her achieve this, she has some fantastical wild beasts. Look at her guardians, these leopanthas. A leopantha is a mythological creature, a cross between a lion and a panther. She's got a lovely leonine face and a mane, as you can see, which in its own way, by the way, just reminds us of Medusa's ringlets over there. And then a gorgeous tail hooking up over the back collars. And the fur must be dappled or spotted. It has these beautiful little swirls on it to convey that it's not a completely even surface, but has got lovely little spots. So a leopantha. The scale, detail and beauty of Corfu's Medusa pediment takes my breath away. She dates from 580 BCE, from Greece's so-called Archaic Period. I'm coming back to the site of the Temple of Artemis, where it was discovered. You do have to use your imagination to picture the scene in the 6th century BCE. Luckily, help is at hand in the shape of local archaeologist Eleni Jagoudi. So how big was this temple originally? I know it's not very grand now, but it's an incredibly important site and that pediment was extraordinary. Unfortunately, you don't have the opportunity to understand a lot of what it must have been during the Archaic Period. When it was discovered, it was a very, very big temple, the Temple of Artemis. Just have in mind that the measurements are almost 48 meters to 22 and a half meters, 14 meters in height. It was completely made of stone, apart from the roof, so it was huge. It was a very big building and one of the earliest examples of archaic architecture. The whole of the sanctuary is not preserved in good state and this is because during the 5th century after Christ, three nave basilica was built here using stones from the temple. Right here in Corfu, 2,600 years ago, people built this Temple of Artemis, the oldest Greek stone temple we know of. So what was Corfu like when this temple was built? I shouldn't say Corfu, should I? I should say Corcyra because it was a Corinthian colony from the 8th century BC. Yes, and they became very, very prosperous through trade. They managed to have colonies in what is today the coastal area of northwestern Greece and also Albania. We know that they are very wealthy because they are building this temple. A very early example of the Doric order and a temple that is the first known example in ancient Greek architecture that was built using stone almost in its entirety. Wow, so this was a huge display of wealth and power, which is why it overlooks the port. Certainly, and having in mind that the Gorgon pediment is the western pediment and anyone who would enter this port would be instantly informed of the wealth and the power of the city. The Gorgon looked down on new arrivals in Corfu, both protecting and impressing above the entrance to the Temple of Artemis. And at the heart of that temple was this most enormous altar. I feel like this is quite a stupid question, but I'm going to go for it anyway. Is this the actual altar of Artemis? It is certainly the altar and you have to have in mind that this is part of that because the continuation to the south is actually underneath the monastery. Oh wow, so it would have gone right through where that wall now is. So it was massive. It was a very large altar, and of course you have to have in mind that the temple was the place where the goddess was residing, but every form of cult was taking place around the altar. Yes, so you needed a really big altar for Artemis because, and this pains me as a vegetarian to say it, you're going to sacrifice lots of animals to Artemis. She received bloody sacrifices. She did. Artemis is a strange, wild goddess. She's part of the natural landscape. Not agriculture, that's Demeter's province, but the trackless places where the wild things are. Woods, forests, the lands of animals untamed by humans. She is the Potneatheron, the queen of wild creatures, so it's no surprise that Medusa and her wild beasts appeared above the entrance to her temple here. They are perfect partners. This is her main attribute that in such a good way we can see it in the gorgon pediment here in Corfu because as a gorgon she is surrounded by the leopanthers and in this way she is protecting the animals and protecting the whole community of livings, people, young life also. As well as the Medusa-protected temple of Artemis, Corfu had several other shrines dedicated to the goddess and her wild ways. Worshippers have left us a scattering of figurines dedicated to her. This Artemis you can see right at the front is looking after, I'm pretty sure it's a deer. She's usually shown with deer and it's got lovely deer legs and it's sort of nuzzling up to her hand. So these votive figures would be made as offerings to the goddess but they also are of the goddess. This is quite a respectable looking Artemis by the standards of ancient depictions and this one has got her bow as you can see in her hand so she is going to go hunting. Artemis is a virginal goddess, one of three virginal goddesses in the big hitters of Mount Olympus along with Athene and Hestia. She's the sister to Apollo, she is the daughter of Zeus. So Artemis is the goddess who looks after girls in their childhood. She's also, and you can never feel on too secure ground with Artemis, she is also the goddess who will suddenly take the life which is what we're told happens in a Fidgeneyron owlis for example, the Euripides play although, spoiler alert, she's swapped for a deer at the end, it's all okay. But she's not averse therefore to human sacrifice so she protects girls but she might also suddenly strike them down with her arrows. Artemis is the goddess of land which is wild and pathless so if you're going for a walk in the woods it's Artemis who's your goddess of choice and that's why she's armed with a bow and arrow, she's ready to get hunting. And it's Medusa who is the protective partner of Artemis on Corfu. Part of the idea that gorgons and their heads full of snakes and even tusks are a reminder of the protection we need from the wild world beyond. The gorgon sisters occupy a liminal space. Their parents are sea creatures, they have wings but they dwell on land. And the poet Hesiod gives us an idea of where we can find them. Beyond the Hesperides, the daughters of the evening, on the edge of the known world. So Hesiod tells us that the gorgons live, well, far away essentially, further than the Hesperides even and trying to find a real location for that is a bit of a challenge. People have generally assumed that he means somewhere like Libya but maybe he means much further west. Our idea of what even Libya is is different from Hesiod's. He hadn't been there, his audience hadn't been there and I mean the gorgons might have been there but Hesiod doesn't know that. So this is a fantastical imagining of perhaps the coast of North Africa as considered by a Greek who probably hasn't left the place where he started out. So we can kind of guess where the gorgons might have gone. I like to think of them as being round about where the sun tends to set. The archaic period when Hesiod first wrote Medusa's story ran from 800 to 480 BCE. It was a time of immense change. City-states such as Athens, Corinth and Corsaira competed for power and increasing trade led to colonisation and a new age of intellectual exchange. Greek colonies stretched across Europe from what is now Spain to Russia, Egypt and Libya expanding Greek culture, trade networks and influence throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. And it's when the first of what we'd recognise as Greek stone temples with columns were built. Temples like Corfu's temple of Artemis and this little late archaic gem at Kardaki. So this is a Doric temple, it's from around 500 BCE. You can tell that the columns are Doric because they grow straight out of the ground like tree trunks, nothing fancy or decorative going on there and then it broadens into an unadorned capital. So it doesn't have scrolls like an Ionian column would, doesn't have acanthus leaves, extra frills like a Corinthian column. The most famous temple in the world I suppose is probably the Parthenon and that too has Doric columns but generally I feel like Doric temples are a little bit bigger than this. Some of this was lost in a landslide but even so it only took me a few seconds to walk from side to side and it would take me a bit longer to go from side to side. One of the temples in Paestum for example. So yeah this is a sort of lovely lost, quiet, hidden, tiny temple. It was built in an extraordinary era of intellectual upheaval including architecture, literature and language with the first recognisable Greek alphabet as used by Hesiod for Medusa's story to help me explore this unique moment. I'm meeting Tim Whitmarsh, Regis Professor of Greek at Cambridge University. Thank you for joining me amid the cicadas in Kardaki. Seems like the right place for it doesn't it? Yeah it's such a beautiful spot. Tell me about our earliest literary source for Medusa, it's Hesiod right? It is Hesiod yes and calling it literary of course begs the question of what literature actually is. We have to think ourselves back to a time on the cusp between an earlier period when there was just a tangle of oral stories and a later period when these texts were actually written down and Hesiod sits right on that cusp. Right so what we call Greek myth have bubbled up across the Greek world over hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of years possibly. If you include the period after Hesiod of course when they're continuing to evolve in all sorts of other different directions. Right so when's Hesiod? Hesiod is at the 8th century BC, we can't be more precise than that, we don't really know what kind of individual he was. I mean he tells us that he was a shepherd, that's right, from Boeotia. Whether we believe that or not seems plausible. And so Hesiod writes the Theogony because he wants to tell the story of how the gods come into being but he goes a bit beyond just the gods right? I mean he specifically goes to the trouble of telling us that Medusa's not immortal so she isn't a god. So why does he include them just because they're monstrous and strange? But Hesiod's Theogony is an absolutely extraordinary poem which tries to tell you the history of everything if you like. It goes back to the origins of time itself with chaos and the formation of the universe through the generations of gods to the current Olympian order but it also gives us to the new gods, the ones that overthrow the previous generation of the Titans and establish what is hoped to be a permanent order of divinity. Right, so why then does he feel the need to include for example Gorgons? He could just tell stories about, you know, there are quite a lot of myths that are fairly local to Boeotia. He could just do those, he could just do nice wood nymphs, he could do, he tells about the muses who live in Mount Helicon, that's really nearby, that's where they meet him and fill him with inspiration. But he chooses to tell us about amongst other things the Gorgons who live incredibly far west. Hesiod's not travelled to these kinds of places. Nowhere to voyage with the imagination, isn't it? It's an extraordinary expression of expansion if you like at a time when Greeks are beginning to send out these colonial expeditions to found new cities across the Mediterranean world and of course Hesiod there in the centre is telling us that he has never really himself left the Greek mainland except for a small trip across the strait. So he is really just a receptacle for all these stories that are coming back from the wider Mediterranean world. So what we've got with the Theogony is not just a history of time but also an account of space in all its vastness in terms of the mapping out of the ancient Mediterranean. Okay, so the Theogony is really a way in which Hesiod allows himself and his fellow Greeks to know where they came from and where they are. Exactly, yeah. And Gorgons are part of that? The Gorgons are part of that because they're set in the far west, near what we call the Straits of Gibraltar. So they're a way of plotting coordinates on the map of the Mediterranean world. Okay, so we live here a long way away from, for example, those Gorgons all the way over that. Yes. Right, okay. The Gorgons live just beyond the western edge of Greek geography. I've already looked at one version of Medusa but she's not the only version on Corfu. Like Greek culture, she metamorphosed and adapted over time. In Corfu's archaeological museum, as well as the giant Gorgon pediment, there are some smaller versions of Gorgon heads that show how her image changed over the centuries. So these are Gorgonea, Gorgon heads, the singular Gorgoneon, and these are antifixes. So this is a decoration that you would put on the end of a pipe, on a roof or something like that. And so what's really interesting about them in such close proximity is you can see just how much the image shifts over quite a short space of time. So this is archaic, this is the second half of the 6th century BCE, and you can tell because she looks more monstrous or maybe grotesque or extreme. You can see she's got the bulging eyes, she's got her tongue sticking out a wide mouth. Again, you can tell that this creature is capable of making a loud noise and she probably is making the loud noise because her tongue is out. You can see that she's got ringlets. This one doesn't seem to have snakes, but the crucial thing about her is the wide mouth and the protruding tongue. Shift to the one from the 4th century and you can see that the teeth are much less visible. In fact, as far as I can see, she doesn't have teeth at all. This one has got proper jaws, you know, she's verging on tusks, but this one has a much more sedate looking mouth. She has, however, got some snake action coming in again just behind the ears. So her hair is still hair, it's not all snakes, but she does have a couple of snakes just slithering out. But you can see that the shift in the 5th century is to make monsters, especially female monsters, more beautiful. And it happens with sirens, it happens with gorgons, and this is a perfect illustration of it. So we have a sort of scarier, monstrous version shading into a sort of beautiful woman with a slight snake accoutrement type look. Those snakes in the hair and animalistic connections are never far away in Medusa's story, capturing the fear and power of the unknown, the alluring danger of the wild. Gorgon heads, in a way, they seem to tap into lots of different fears of the outside world, of the natural world. So they have often snakes for hair, while snakes might not be dangerous in the UK, they can be dangerous in Greek myth. Ask Eurydice, you can't, she died of being bitten by a snake. Ask Philoctetes, also unfortunate foot incident. They have tusks, like wild boar. Again, not scary to me, I grew up in a city, I think a boar is just the same as a pig. It's not. Ask Adonis, the lover of Venus slash Aphrodite, you can't, he died from being gored by a wild boar. The wide, wide mouth, perhaps thunderstorms, they don't seem as scary again to us because we've got double glazing, but I promise you, incredibly frightening in Greece. So probably these heads, these faces, which we find in all kinds of places, they seem to be both protective, people wear them on shields, the design on a shield, and perhaps also designed to ward things off. They are apotropaic, they're protective. So these are talismans to keep us safe. But let's move Medusa's story forward, heading towards her woeful fate, as Hesiod puts it. Now, two of the best known Olympian gods enter the story. Poseidon, the god of the sea, earthquakes and horses, and Athene, the goddess of wisdom and warfare. It takes me to the tall olive trees of Corfu. You're probably wondering why I've brought you here to this olive grove, and the reason is that you can't talk about Athene without talking about olives. This is how she wins the city of Athens. Two gods vie to be the tutelary deity, the protective god for Athens, and they are Athene and Poseidon. Poseidon offers the Athenians a sea, Athene offers them the olive tree. Athens, of course, picks the olive tree and Athene becomes their devoted protector. But it's not the only fight that Poseidon and Athene have. They also have a fight about Medusa, and the reason that they fight over Medusa is because Poseidon, like a lot of male Greek gods, decides that he should be able to have sex with anyone he chooses, and he chooses Medusa. He rapes her in the temple of Athene. According to most of our sources in Pindar, they have a consensual encounter in a damp meadow, which, yes, is a euphemism in Greek as well as in English, but in our other sources it's a non-consensual encounter. He rapes Medusa in Athene's temple. Athene doesn't punish Poseidon, she punishes Medusa. Medusa is literally the first monstered rape survivor, and she punishes her by turning her beautiful hair, her most gorgeous feature, according to Ovid in his Metamorphosis, into snakes. Medusa's story was always more nuanced and more painful in its origins than in its more recent tellings. Perhaps it is easier to dehumanise Medusa and to see her as a monster than to acknowledge her pain. There's no evidence in the ancient sources that Medusa kills anyone while she's alive, while she has agency, but we've been encouraged to see her from the outside. How would we survive against her lithifying gaze? Our perspective changes depending on who is telling Medusa's story. What if we were the one sent to kill her? Perseus enters the story. This young man is the son of Danae and Zeus, mortal woman, king of the gods. The only problem is that Danae's father, Acrisius, has heard an oracle that this baby will one day destroy him. He's so paranoid that he has Danae and baby Perseus locked up in a chest and cast out to sea. The gods intervene, of course, and Danae and Perseus wash up on the island of Seraphos. Danae and Perseus are taken to a king named Polydectes. Polydectes, immediately obsessed with Danae and anxious to pursue her without her son around, sends Perseus off on a seemingly hopeless quest for the head of Medusa. Perseus has the gods on his side. As a son of Zeus, he receives divine help on his mission. Let's follow his route out to Medusa's cave. Athene and Hermes accompany him and find the nymphs who loan him winged sandals so he can travel at the speed of thought, and a kebesis, a special rucksack designed to carry a powerfully destructive item such as the severed head of a gorgon with a stony gaze. Perseus also borrows the cap of Hades, which holds the grim darkness of night, making the wearer invisible. The young man receives so much divine assistance in his quest to reach Medusa, an inadequate hero who needs all the help he can get. And now we come to the saddest part of the story, where Perseus meets Medusa. A young hero sent on a quest by a petulant king to bring back the head of a gorgon. A young gorgon asleep in her cave with her sisters. It was always going to be her. She's the only mortal one, the only one Perseus could kill. In the next episode, I follow Medusa's story to its horrifying conclusion and explore the way she's been portrayed beyond the Greeks, from ancient Rome to the Renaissance and the 21st century. Medusa has never left us. We left Medusa sleeping in the cave she shared with her sisters, while a young man arrived with murderous intent. Perseus therefore, with Athene guiding his hand, kept his eyes on the reflection in a bronze shield as he stood over the sleeping gorgons. And when he saw the image of Medusa, he sliced the gorgon's teeming throat and stained his sickle red. He cut off the head and bathed, bloodstained, in the viperish dew. This might just seem like hero slaying monster, but to at least some ancient Greeks, it seemed like the tragedy it seems to me. And the tragic story of Medusa doesn't end there. In this episode, I'm staying on Corfu to explore what happened next in the shifting Greek versions of the story and how Medusa has been shaped and reshaped through the Renaissance and into the 21st century. Let's take a long hard look at Medusa. After she is killed, Medusa does not go unmissed. Her sisters, Stheno and Uriale, give chase. Tumbling along behind Perseus, unapproachable, indescribable, straining to catch and grab him. With sharp high noise, the teeth for their rage were made jagged, their stares fierce, and over their dreaded heads was great shivering panic. So when Perseus decapitates Medusa, something remarkable happens. The first is that she gives birth through her neck to two children sired by Poseidon. That's Pegasus, the flying horse, and Chrysaor, the golden giant. That's not all that happens though. The drops of blood that drip from her neck onto the sands of Libya, we're told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, produce all the snakes there are in Libya. The third thing to note is that her blood has remarkable properties in every sphere of life. Athene takes two drops of blood from Medusa, one from the left hand side of her body and one from the right. She gives them to the god of healing, Asclepius. The drop of blood from the left hand side of Medusa's body is lethal, a deadly poison. The drop of blood from the right hand side of her body, the Greek word is Soterion, saviour, it can revive you from the dead. Medusa has always been the monster who could save us. Medusa's blood has extraordinary powers, but there's another part of her body that is even more potent. And what happens to Medusa's severed head? Well, Perseus uses it as a weapon of mass destruction. First he kills Catos, the sea monster, he turns Atlas into the Atlas Mountains, he petrifies a whole island full of people who've annoyed him, and he turns everyone at his wedding to stone, having killed no one while she was alive. Medusa is used to kill hundreds of people after her death. Medusa is so objectified that her head becomes nothing more than a destructive tool for Perseus. The myth of Medusa first emerged in a period of great evolution in Greek storytelling, the Archaic Era, around 700 BCE, when Hesiod composed our first known account of the myth. But what about the writers who followed him? To explore how Medusa's story developed, I'm meeting Professor Tim Whitmarsh. So Tim, what happens to the story of Medusa after the Archaic Period? By the time we hit what we call the Classical Period, the 5th century, is the retooling of the past. People begin to reimagine the store of stories that they had from the past and turn them into new shapes and new forms. So the myths never stop changing, that during the Archaic Period they're bubbling up across the Greek world, being composed, and then eventually written down, and then that doesn't stop in the Classical Era because the world is still changing. Yes, that's right. It's a common fallacy that there is a single core version of the myth which is then toyed with later. Of course, myth doesn't work like that. In the world of mythology itself, the myth is always changing, it's always metamorphosing, it's always taking on new shapes to reflect the needs of the society that produces it. So who's up after Hesiod in terms of the next source that we have? Is it Pindar? Pindar is the next fully surviving source that we have, who is writing a poem for a winner of the flute competition at Leeds. Yes! Come on, winning flute! Now, Pindar's version is extraordinarily experimental because not only does Pindar like taking myths apart and putting them together in different orders, but he also, in this particular version of it, he uses the story of the decapitation of Medusa and focuses on the lament of the sisters for the death of Medusa. Part of the story we lose when we make her a monster who lives alone in a cave, right? She's one of three sisters, of course they lament. Yes, of course, yes. And in this particular version of it, it's the lamentation of the sisters that is picked up by Athena, the goddess Athena, and she uses this as inspiration for the creation of the flute itself. But it also, it puts the accent on the suffering of the Gorgon sisters as well, which is perhaps an incidental thing for Pindar's aim, but for the history of the development of the story, it becomes really important because this leavers open a much more sympathetic possible reading of the Gorgon myth. And then what happens to Medusa? What happens to the Gorgons after that? Well, one of my favourite strands in the tradition, if you like, is the so-called rationalist tradition where later Greeks, beginning in the 4th century BC, tried to work out versions of the story that don't have the supernatural elements in. They tried to explain away all of the features that involve gods or paranormal phenomena generally. Right, stripping away the monster. Snakey hair and all that sort of thing, yes. Oh, you're telling me she doesn't just lie down near some snakes. No wonder people mistook her for having snakes for hair. She just likes to lie among snakes. Well, that's very much in the spirit, but no, I don't think we do have that way in particular. But what we do get is an interesting flip in the story whereby Perseus becomes the real baddie in this version of the story. Perseus becomes a pirate who's marauding along the coast of North Africa, whereas Medusa is a very stately queen who is then subject to the depredations of the pirate Perseus, who comes along and immorally steals from the land. And doesn't just steal, he kills her. He kills her. And I haven't misremembered this, have I? This is in Pausanias. He's so struck by her beauty he then decapitates her so he can take the head to show people how pretty she was. Absolutely, yes. And that plays again on this duality that we always have with the Medusa myth, whether she is horrendously ugly or absolutely sensationally beautiful. So the Medusa myth evolves through later Greek and Latin writers until we get to a version that's more familiar today. Perhaps her most, if you like, canonical version of the story comes in a handbook of Greek mythology written by somebody who we call Pseudo-Apollodorus. Of course, he didn't. We don't all call him Pseudo-Apollodorus. No, no, I'm sure he didn't call himself that. Quite a lot of people don't mention him at all. Yeah, come on. But he is a product of a period of Greek culture where they're really trying to make sense of their prior heritage. Another of these periods, I suppose, where they're trying to make sense of the prior heritage, but turn it into, they're trying to unpick all of the chronology of the story and stick it all together in a sequence to make it into a single continuous story. So Pseudo-Apollodorus' library of mythology is the version for the canonical version that we actually know. So it becomes the source for things like Clash of the Titans, the Ray Harryhausen movie. More on the stop motion movie magic later, but for now, it's no surprise that the script of Clash of the Titans chooses to put Perseus firmly in the heroic driving seat, avoiding the ancient nuances. Well, I think this is one of the features of the Medusa myth that in a sense, it is multifaceted. It has all these different ways into it. But one of them is certainly, and it's picked up there in the ancient sources as well, is the idea that Perseus is no hero. One of our very latest sources for the Perseus myth is a poet called Nonnus who sets Dionysus, who is the hero of his epic, against Perseus and misses no opportunity to say Perseus is a mean-spirited, pathetic, vindictive, misogynist thug. In familiar post-classical accounts, Medusa is separated from her family, from her Gorgon sisters, her sea monster parents, and her children. This solitary life makes her seem all the more disposable. No one will miss her. Beyond literature, Medusa has always been an incredibly tempting and saleable image. Come to a souvenir shop in Corfu and you'll see that Medusa is everywhere. In fact, all the gods from this story are pretty well everywhere. Have a look over here. So here's a Gorgoneon, and you can see she's got the snakes for hair, she's got the wide mouth that's open, she doesn't have the big teeth, but she's unmistakable because look at the snakes twirling through her hair. And if you look along here, just a few of the gods that contributed to this story too. So here's Poseidon, whose rape of Medusa is what provokes Athene to render her hair into snakes in Ovid's version of the story in the Metamorphoses. Here's Athene, who obviously wears Medusa's head as part of her breastplate, part of her aegis. And here's Artemis, on whose temple the pediment, the Gorgon pediment, can be found. And you can see the replica just up there. Getting into the souvenir buying mood, I've picked up a replica that mixes Medusa's from different eras. So I found this vase that has a couple of different images of Medusa on, which illustrate the different versions of her that we've seen so far, and the way she changes through time. It's quite an interesting piece. This side is based on an archaic image. So the vase painting that this is initially copied from is a black figure vase painting, the red figure comes later, generally. This is close to the image by the Amasis painter that's held by the British Museum. She has the more extreme, the more animalistic features. So she has the wider mouth, the noisy mouth, she's got tusks, she's got the strong muscled arms, strong muscled legs, she's got the snakes for a belt. And so this version is very definitely giving us the image that is strange, perhaps monstrous, perhaps meant to be scary. Turn to the other side, and we see a rather more tragic image of Medusa. So this is based on Tarpoli Painter, and it's held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And it shows Perseus handing over the decapitated head of Medusa to Athene. What's interesting about this image is that you can see that this Medusa is much more human, she's got a much smaller mouth, she's got much less protuberant eyes, a narrower nose, so she looks a lot more like a fourth century image of Medusa. So the extremes rendered more manageable, more human. As Greek art evolved, Medusa became less obviously scary, and more clearly wronged. Take a look at this image, one of my favourites. This is one of the most beautiful and sympathetic depictions of Medusa in any art form. It comes from the mid-fifth century BCE, it was made in Attica, so central Greece where Athens is. And shows Perseus in the act of decapitating Medusa. He's looking behind him at another god, this is Athene, offering him advice. But look at Medusa, she's in a posture of defensive sleep, the way children sleep, like this. So you can really see this fifth century beautification project in action here, the more monstrous face that we saw in those archaic images, the tusks, the beard, the snakey hair, that's all gone. They will often see versions of Medusa with one or more of these characteristics later on, particularly the snakes. But this version of her looks incredibly human. This image, painted two and a half thousand years ago, is perhaps Medusa at her least monstrous, her most innocent. Jump forward nearly two millennia, and she's reverted to terror. The Renaissance, the great revival of interest in classical art and culture, brought with it new attempts to portray and understand the mystery of Medusa's story. So here are some of the most celebrated images of Medusa to come to us from Renaissance art and later. The first is, oh it's really horrible, the Rubens one, partly because it's quite gory, the snakes are everywhere, they're sort of writhing amid her hair rather than replacing it. The whole thing makes you feel a kind of visceral disgust, which I'm sure is the intention. The earliest version of Medusa that we have here is the Cellini, which is from the 1550s, and it's probably my least favourite image of Perseus and Medusa in any artistic medium, not because it's not an extraordinary piece of sculpture, it is, you can see everything. So this is Perseus as a naked young man, he's got a beautifully muscled body and he holds Medusa's head aloft, he's obviously afraid of her. The Canova is one of the more famous versions and he's holding Medusa's head at arm's length, but he's not afraid of it, he's just looking at it, that there's a sort of joke in there. As he looks at it, he of course himself has turned to stone, because we're looking at the statue of him. So these versions of Perseus, he looks athletic, he looks young, Medusa is just a decapitated head, there's no sense of her as a person, as a character, as someone who has two sisters, as someone who'll be missed so deeply by them that they will lament for her in a way which makes someone else create a musical instrument to replicate the sound. And I always think you have to contrast them with Artemisia Gentileschi's painting of Judith beheading Holofernes, so a rare gender-switched version of a beheading myth in which Judith decapitates the general who's been holding her town under siege. She goes to his camp, she's allowed in by the guards because she's beautiful, and she and her maid decapitate him. There's nothing triumphant about it at all. It looks like a terrible ordeal that they're having to undergo, his eyes are facing away so there's still no eye contact, there's blood everywhere. And when you compare that with the image of Perseus, you know, he looks pleased with himself, there's almost a slight smile playing on his lips. There's no sense of that with Judith, she looks like she's desperate for the moment to be over. There's nothing sexualized about it, no one is naked, it just looks brutal and necessary. Medusa is a myth that isn't stuck in the past. She's one of the most iconic monsters in modern culture, still being prodded, poked and adapted to reflect the contemporary world. We just won't leave her alone. She's instantly recognisable. No small thanks for this goes to Hollywood directors. Let's take a look. So I've talked you through the ancient Greek source version, and indeed ancient Roman version, of the story of Medusa. This is from 1981, a time almost as distant as ancient Greece. I am of course talking about Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, featuring Harry Hamlin as Perseus. In this version, Medusa is really monstrous. She's depicted, I think for the first time, with a full snake body and armed with a bow and arrows, and she's alone in her lair, no sign of her Gorgon sisters. This is a much more cinematic version. This Perseus isn't going on a quest to find the head of a Gorgon because a petulant king has asked him to. He's going on a heroic quest. He's going to get a Gorgon head to kill a sea monster and save Andromeda. The story of Andromeda is in the ancient sources, but it's a sort of incidental side quest. He saves Andromeda from Katos, the Greek sea monster. Harry Hamlin is saving her from the Kraken, which is an extra scary sea monster because it's swum all the way down from Norse mythology to get to this film. The Kraken is this quite formidable, gigantic monster with what looks like forearms. In Ray Harryhausen's version, Perseus arrives on Pegasus, who's been gifted to him by the gods, rather than born from Medusa's bloodied neck. Oh no, the Kraken has swiped Pegasus and they've both dived into the ocean. I'm delighted that the myth of Medusa endures in any form, really. I always think it's interesting. What I like about this version is that unlike a lot of late 20th, early 21st century versions, she's not sexy Medusa. The sort of sexy monster lady thing is really common. Unsexy Medusa, which is the version we see in Cash of the Titans, where she has a snaky tail, she has snakes for hair, she's just generally scary. She's picked up by Lego. Lego Medusa has got a snaky tail and snaky hair. I sort of like the defiantly unsexy versions. I think it's a more wholesome monster in some ways. So yeah, I secretly love it. I came to Corfu because it has one of the oldest representations of Medusa that we know. This fabulous pediment from the archaic temple of Artemis. Unlike the big budget movie adaptations which take us on Perseus's journey, this Medusa dominates her own story. Mother of Pegasus and Chrysaor. Friend to wild beasts. To find out more about what Medusa means to Corfu, ancient and modern, I'm meeting up again with local archaeologist Eleni Jagoudi. Do you think it's fair to say that Medusa is slightly eclipsed? The goddess Artemis, whose temple she decorates. Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't? Look at the size of her. Who wouldn't? The gorgon is the main part of the pediment here in Corfu. We name the temple and the pediment the gorgon pediment, so certainly she is the one that is the most important. You know, I think of gorgons and certainly in ancient societies it seems reasonably clear that gorgons have this dual nature. They can be scary but they're also protective or apotropaic. Do you think of yours as being a scary or a protective one? Why not being both? This is presented here as a monster but at the same time she is protecting her whole community. Right, and so do you think that Medusa is important to the people of Corfu? Of course she is popular with the locals and of course with children. You have to have in mind that in Greece children are being introduced to history starting with mythology at around the age of eight. So of course the teachers are bringing the children here to discuss about the museum in general and ancient Corfu. But of course the main thing is always the gorgon. Beyond the island of Corfu, Medusa is a globally recognisable symbol in popular culture. We can see her everywhere. She is beautiful and hideous, desirable and dangerous, and still so malleable in hands of others. Time for a night time journey into Corfu town. A chance to reflect on where Medusa stands right now. If you're wondering where Medusa has gone in recent years, the answer is she is everywhere. Here she is ten years ago on the 25th anniversary issue of GQ magazine. This is Rihanna, of course, as styled by Damien Hirst. He's using so much Medusa art imagery here. The hair completely replaced by snakes, so really channeling the Caravaggio image that we looked at. She's wearing the snake that's wrapping around her neck, which reminds me at least of the pediment Medusa here with the snakes wrapped around her waist. She's got snake contact lenses in if you look closely, and of course she's not wearing a top because you know Damien Hirst always really worries that Rihanna will get too hot. And the image hasn't gone anywhere over the last few years. In 2016, we saw a lot of images which showed the eventual president of the United States as Perseus and Hillary Clinton as Medusa. People were glad, I'm afraid, to see her decapitated. My favorite modern image of Medusa is this one. It was by a sculptor named Luciano Gobatti. He's an Italian-Argentine sculptor. He created a statue which gender-reversed the Canova that you can see in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So this is a naked, beautiful, young Medusa and she's holding the decapitated head of Perseus. Some versions of the image were just this white statue on black background, some had text. Next to Medusa's head at the top of the screen, it reads, Be thankful we only want equality. Next to Perseus' decapitated head, it read, and not payback. Medusa is always with us. She is always the beautiful and the terrified. We've gazed closely into Medusa's eyes and we found a far more complicated story than the usual retelling of the myth, the modern tropes. A mortal Gorgon, an extraordinary woman with a terrible fate. The image of Medusa is one of the most iconic and enduring in Greek myth. People ask you to name a monster, she's often top of the list with her snaky hair and her stony gaze. But in all of this iconography, we have forgotten something which is integral to her nature. The word Medusa in Greek means guardian. She wants to protect us. Thanks for watching this video on the History Hit YouTube channel. You can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out. Or if you are a true history fan, check out our special dedicated history channel, historyhit.tv. You're going to love it.