48 Fun Facts About Medusa

Medusa is generally described as a woman with what in place of hair?

Living snakes. Early Greek artists made her uglier still, with boar's tusks, a lolling tongue, wings and sometimes a beard; the beautiful Medusa of later art was a rethink.

Which healer was said to raise the dead with blood drawn from the right side of Medusa's body?

Asclepius. Athena gave him blood from both sides of the body: the left side's killed, the right side's healed, and he revived so many of the dead that Zeus struck him down.

What were the names of Medusa's two immortal sisters?

Stheno and Euryale. Because they could not die, the hero was sent for Medusa's head alone; the two survivors gave chase but never caught him.

Medusa and her sisters were usually said to be daughters of which sea-god and his sister?

Phorcys and Ceto. The same pair were parents of the Graeae, so in the usual telling the grey sisters Perseus forced to help him hunt Medusa were giving up their own sister.

What does the name Medusa literally mean in Ancient Greek?

Guardian. It suits what the Greeks did with her face: they put it on temples, coins and armour as a charm to turn evil away.

Which king of Seriphus sent Perseus to fetch Medusa's head because he wanted to marry the hero's mother?

Polydectes. As Apollodorus tells it, Perseus came home to find his mother hiding at an altar from the king, walked into the palace and turned Polydectes and his gathered friends to stone with the head he had asked for.

Perseus avoided Medusa's gaze by looking at her reflection in what?

A mirrored shield. Ovid's Perseus explains why he needed it: the path to her lair was lined with the stone figures of men and animals that had looked straight at her.

The cap of invisibility that Perseus wore on the quest against Medusa belonged to which god?

Hades. In Apollodorus's telling the cap was only on loan: a band of nymphs kept it along with a pair of winged sandals, and Perseus handed it back once the quest was done.

Which god had made Medusa pregnant by the time Perseus killed her?

Poseidon. Hesiod, the earliest poet to tell it, makes it a love scene: the god he calls the Dark-haired One lay with her 'in a soft meadow amid spring flowers'.

What sprang from Medusa's body when she was beheaded?

Pegasus and Chrysaor. The winged horse flew off to carry thunder and lightning for Zeus, while his brother's name means 'golden sword', after the blade he was born holding.

Medusa was grandmother to which three-headed giant of Greek myth?

Geryon. He kept a herd of cattle on an island at the western edge of the world, and Heracles killed him when he came to drive them off as his tenth labour.

Perseus finally gave the Gorgon's head to Athena, who placed it on what?

Her shield, the aegis. From then on the goddess carried the deadly face into battle herself, and most ancient images of Athena show it at the centre of her armour.

The evil-averting image of Medusa's head used in classical antiquity is called what?

A gorgoneion. Greeks painted it in the bottom of wine cups, so the face stared up as a drinker drained his bowl, and potters fixed it to their kilns to keep the firing safe.

According to Ovid, whom did Perseus turn to stone with the head on his way across north-west Africa?

The Titan Atlas. Warned that a son of Jupiter would one day strip his tree of golden apples, he refused the traveller shelter, and became the mountain range that still carries his name.

In Ovid's telling, seaweed that touched Medusa's severed head hardened into what?

Corals. Ovid says delighted sea nymphs repeated the trick on fresh seaweed and scattered the seeds, his reason why coral is soft under water but turns hard in the air.

Lucan says Medusa's dripping blood bred the amphisbaena, a serpent best known for which odd feature?

A head at each end. Its Greek name means 'going both ways', and Lucan lists it among the serpents that fell on Cato's army as it marched across the Libyan desert.

Which ancient historian located Medusa and her sisters in Libya?

Herodotus. He heard it in Egypt, where the people of Chemmis told him Perseus had stopped off on his way to fetch the head and had ordered them to hold Greek-style games in his honour.

In an ode of 490 BC, which poet already speaks of 'fair-cheeked Medusa'?

Pindar. His ode honours a prize-winning piper, and claims Athena invented pipe music to copy the wailing of Medusa's sisters as they mourned her.

The vase-painter Polygnotus showed Medusa doing what as Perseus beheads her?

Sleeping peacefully. The vase, now in New York, is one of the earliest to show her as a lovely woman, not a monster, and it may be poking fun at a hero who kills a girl in her sleep.

In Ovid's telling, why did Minerva punish the once-beautiful Medusa?

She was violated in her temple. Ovid's Minerva turns her face away in outrage and then punishes the girl, not the god who attacked her.

Perseus forced the Graeae, the Grey Sisters, to help his quest against Medusa by seizing what?

Their single shared eye. Perseus snatched it out of the air as one sister passed it to another, and the blinded sisters had to tell him the way.

Perseus carried Medusa's head home in a kibisis, which was what kind of object?

A knapsack. It kept the dead Gorgon's face safely covered, because her stare still worked: Perseus later pulled the head out to turn a rival for his bride, and the man's followers, to stone.

Perseus killed his own grandfather Acrisius by accident when he did what?

Threw a discus that veered into him. Acrisius had left Argos precisely to dodge an oracle that his grandson would kill him, and Perseus was too ashamed afterwards to take his throne.

Which queen's boast about beauty so angered the sea nymphs that her daughter Andromeda was chained up for a sea monster?

Cassiopeia. Her punishment is still on view: set among the stars on her throne, she wheels round the pole and, as the poet Aratus put it, plunges headfirst like a diver.

Perseus was heir to Argos, but Pausanias says the Greeks credited him with founding which nearby city?

Mycenae. Pausanias ties the name to Perseus twice over: the cap (mykes) of his scabbard fell off there, or a thirsty Perseus pulled up a mushroom (mykes) and water gushed out.

The Medusa pediment of about 580 BC, a landmark of early Greek sculpture, was dug up on which Ionian island?

Corfu. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who kept a holiday palace on the island, joined the dig in 1911 and stayed obsessed with its Gorgon for the rest of his life.

In the Iliad, a Gorgon 'glaring terribly' is set on the shield of which Greek commander?

Agamemnon. Homer never uses the name Medusa: his poems know one nameless Gorgon, flanked on the king's armour by the figures of Terror and Rout.

Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi of which city?

Florence. The casting nearly failed: when the molten bronze began to clot, Cellini, by his own account, had some two hundred of his pewter plates and bowls thrown in to get it flowing.

Caravaggio's two paintings of the screaming Medusa are thought to double as what?

Self-portraits. Caravaggio is said to have given her his own face instead of a model's, which is why his Gorgon has the features of a young man.

Bernini's marble bust of Medusa in Rome breaks with earlier artists by showing her how?

Alive and anguished. Scholars also read the marble as a pun: the woman who petrified everyone who looked at her has herself become a block of stone.

Istanbul's Basilica Cistern, with its two Medusa-head column bases, took its present form under which emperor?

Justinian I. It was later so forgotten that a French scholar hunting for it in the 1500s found locals drawing well water from it unawares, and was rowed among the columns by a man spearing fish.

Which Dan Brown novel reaches its climax in Istanbul's Basilica Cistern, beside an upside-down Medusa head?

Inferno. The villain hides an engineered plague in a slowly dissolving bag under the cistern's water, and Robert Langdon reaches it by following a trail of clues drawn from Dante.

Which Italian fashion house uses Medusa's head as its logo?

Versace. Gianni Versace grew up in Reggio Calabria, in the part of Italy the ancient Greeks settled, and raided its classical art for his label: Medusa for the logo, the Greek key for his borders.

Medusa's head appears at the centre of which Italian island's flag, together with the three-legged trinacria?

Sicily. The three bent legs are said to stand for the island's three capes, and ears of wheat were added as a nod to its days as the granary of Rome.

Whose posthumous 1940 essay 'Medusa's Head' equated decapitation with castration?

Sigmund Freud. In the short note, drafted in 1922 and never published in his lifetime, he traced the horror of her face to a small boy's shock at first seeing a woman unclothed.

Which French feminist's 1975 essay 'The Laugh of the Medusa' declares 'she's beautiful and she's laughing'?

Hélène Cixous. Her manifesto calls on women to write their own stories, and treats the monster as something men invented out of fear of female desire.

Luciano Garbati's sculpture, shown in Manhattan in 2020, flips the Medusa myth by showing what?

Medusa holding Perseus's severed head. Taken up as an emblem of the MeToo movement after a photo of it went viral, the bronze was set up facing the Manhattan court where Harvey Weinstein had been tried.

In the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, Perseus uses Medusa's head to petrify which sea monster?

The Kraken. The film swapped the Greek myth's own sea monster for a beast from Scandinavian sailors' lore, and it was the last feature for the stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen.

Which actress played Medusa in the 2010 film Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief?

Uma Thurman. Her Medusa runs a New Jersey garden centre stocked with her stone victims, and the film ends with Percy's abusive stepfather opening the fridge where her head is kept.

In Spanish and Italian, which sea creature is simply called a 'medusa'?

Jellyfish. The naturalists who named them in the 1700s thought the long trailing tentacles recalled the Gorgon's head, and biologists still call the animal's free-swimming stage a medusa.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, who covers the poet's eyes when the Furies call for Medusa to turn him to stone?

Virgil. He turns Dante round and, not trusting the poet's own hands, claps his over them too, while the Furies shout from the walls of the city of Dis.

A caricature sold on T-shirts and mugs showed Donald Trump as Perseus holding up whose severed Medusa head?

Hillary Clinton. The image pasted the two faces onto Cellini's bronze during the 2016 election, and the classicist Mary Beard cited it to show how deeply the exclusion of women from power is embedded.

Which winking star in the constellation Perseus, known as the Demon Star, marks the head of Medusa?

Algol. About every three days it dims for some ten hours as a fainter companion star passes in front of it, which may be how it earned a name that comes from the Arabic for 'the ghoul'.

In Apollodorus's telling, which god guided Perseus on his quest and gave him an adamantine sickle to behead Medusa?

Hermes. He supplied the blade, but in the same account Athena steadied the stroke, guiding Perseus's hand while he kept his eyes off his target.

Perseus was the son of Zeus and which mortal princess, shut in a bronze chamber by her father?

Danaë. Zeus is said to have reached her as a stream of gold pouring through the roof, and when the baby was found her father set mother and child adrift at sea in a wooden chest.

Caravaggio's Medusa of about 1597, sent as a gift to a Medici grand duke, hangs in which gallery?

The Uffizi. The poet Marino flattered its first owner in verse: any enemy who saw the painted Gorgon would turn to cold stone, though the duke's true Medusa, he added, was his own valour.

Greek legend made Andromeda's first son, left behind with her father, the ancestor of which people?

The Persians. The boy was called Perses, and one Greek tale has King Xerxes cite the kinship, asking Argos, the home city of Perseus, to sit out his invasion as family.

A famous floor mosaic from Pompeii shows which conqueror charging into battle with Medusa's head on his breastplate?

Alexander the Great. He rides bareheaded at King Darius with his lance levelled, the Gorgon glaring from his chest as a charm to unnerve the enemy, in a scene thought to copy a lost Greek painting.