Medusa Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
48 free Medusa trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Medusa is the Gorgon with living snakes for hair whose gaze turned anyone who met it to stone, and the only one of the three sisters who could be killed. This quiz starts with the myth as most people know it (her sisters and parents, the mirrored shield, the winged horse that leapt from her neck, the head that ended up on a goddess's shield) and then digs into the details the sources actually give: who sent Perseus, which gods equipped him, the three old women with one eye between them, and what her spilled blood is said to have created in the Red Sea and the Sahara. From there it follows Medusa through art and culture: the beautiful sleeping Medusa of Polygnotus, Ovid's story of the punished maiden, Cellini's bronze in Florence and Caravaggio's self-portrait on a shield, the upside-down heads under Istanbul, the Sicilian flag, Freud's essay, feminist reclaimings, Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion Gorgon, Uma Thurman's garden centre, and the reason jellyfish are called medusae. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Medusa, the Gorgons, Perseus and the works that depict her, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Greek mythology, Zeus and mythical creatures quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Medusa is generally described as a woman with what in place of hair?
Living snakes
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.
Q 02Which healer was said to raise the dead with blood drawn from the right side of Medusa's body?
Asclepius
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.
Q 03What were the names of Medusa's two immortal sisters?
Stheno and Euryale
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.
Q 04Medusa and her sisters were usually said to be daughters of which sea-god and his sister?
Phorcys and Ceto
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.
Q 05What does the name Medusa literally mean in Ancient Greek?
Guardian
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.
Q 06Which king of Seriphus sent Perseus to fetch Medusa's head because he wanted to marry the hero's mother?
Polydectes
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.
Q 07Perseus avoided Medusa's gaze by looking at her reflection in what?
A mirrored shield
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.
Q 08The cap of invisibility that Perseus wore on the quest against Medusa belonged to which god?
Hades
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.
Q 09Which god had made Medusa pregnant by the time Perseus killed her?
Poseidon
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'.
Q 10What sprang from Medusa's body when she was beheaded?
Pegasus and Chrysaor
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.
Q 11Medusa was grandmother to which three-headed giant of Greek myth?
Geryon
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.
Q 12Perseus finally gave the Gorgon's head to Athena, who placed it on what?
Her shield, the aegis
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.
Q 13The evil-averting image of Medusa's head used in classical antiquity is called what?
A gorgoneion
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.
Q 21Perseus forced the Graeae, the Grey Sisters, to help his quest against Medusa by seizing what?
Their single shared eye
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.
Q 22Perseus carried Medusa's head home in a kibisis, which was what kind of object?
A knapsack
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.
Q 23Perseus killed his own grandfather Acrisius by accident when he did what?
Threw a discus that veered into him
Q 14According to Ovid, whom did Perseus turn to stone with the head on his way across north-west Africa?
The Titan Atlas
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.
Q 15In Ovid's telling, seaweed that touched Medusa's severed head hardened into what?
Corals
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.
Q 16Lucan says Medusa's dripping blood bred the amphisbaena, a serpent best known for which odd feature?
A head at each end
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.
Q 17Which ancient historian located Medusa and her sisters in Libya?
Herodotus
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.
Q 18In an ode of 490 BC, which poet already speaks of 'fair-cheeked Medusa'?
Pindar
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.
Q 19The vase-painter Polygnotus showed Medusa doing what as Perseus beheads her?
Sleeping peacefully
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.
Q 20In Ovid's telling, why did Minerva punish the once-beautiful Medusa?
She was violated in her temple
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.
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.
Q 24Which queen's boast about beauty so angered the sea nymphs that her daughter Andromeda was chained up for a sea monster?
Cassiopeia
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.
Q 25Perseus was heir to Argos, but Pausanias says the Greeks credited him with founding which nearby city?
Mycenae
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.
Q 26The Medusa pediment of about 580 BC, a landmark of early Greek sculpture, was dug up on which Ionian island?
Corfu
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.
Q 27In the Iliad, a Gorgon 'glaring terribly' is set on the shield of which Greek commander?
Agamemnon
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.
Q 28Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi of which city?
Florence
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.
Q 29Caravaggio's two paintings of the screaming Medusa are thought to double as what?
Self-portraits
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.
Q 30Bernini's marble bust of Medusa in Rome breaks with earlier artists by showing her how?
Alive and anguished
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.