Medusa

Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Chutaburg Forest, what secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland, or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe It is silent thought. The cap of Hades, one of Perseus's many gifts from Olympus, may render him as invisible as death itself, but it does not muffle sound. It will not stop the Gorgons from hearing him as he sneaks about their cave. The creatures' ears are pointed like a bat, just as their teeth are tusks like a ball, their toes talons like a bird. Their backs sport great, corvid wings, and their hair is a tangled mop of vipers. Perseus has seen two of the Gorgons sisters already, and they are monstrous. Had they been mortal, he would have taken his sword, its blade curved and keen as a waxing moon, and cut them down without a second thought. But that is why he pauses now. That is why he asks for the Musus Council. For the third Gorgon sister, the one Perseus is found asleep by a fire in the cave's deepest hollow. The one he has been instructed to kill, the one they say has the power to turn anything she sees to stone. She is not like her sisters. She is beautiful. Perseus are the coiling and uncoiling of grass snakes, but they frame a young face. Soft skin, the colour of wet sand. She is winged too, but there is a tenderness in the way they wrap about her, a feathered cloak. This is Medusa, explained the Musus in whispered song, and she has been twice punished by the gods. It's the entrance on History Hit, I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and in today's episode we're talking about one of the most well-known figures from Greek mythology, the story of the Gorgon Medusa. Now, like all of our episodes of our Greek gods and goddesses series, and ones where we focus in on these other figures from mythology that had infamous unfortunate run-ins with certain deities. We're going to kick off this episode with a story, a retelling of one of the myths associated with Medusa. In this case, the one of Medusa and her run-in with the god of the sea, Poseidon. And it is quite a horrific story. Now, following that, we have a fantastic interview with one of our fan-favorite guests on the ancients. None other than the classicist, the broadcaster, the author, the polymath, the fantastic and very funny polymath that is Natalie Haynes. I'm always in awe of Natalie because she does so much, and she knows so much when it comes to Greek mythology, and it was a real pleasure to sit down with her. To talk all things Medusa for a book she has written all about this figure from Greek mythology called Stone Aligned. It's always a pleasure having Natalie on the podcast, and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, continuing our special series on Greek mythology, here's a story of Medusa, and an interview with Natalie. The music song reaches back through tarnished ages and deep into the endless oceans to the palace of focus and keto, gods of the sea. All manner of creatures are born to them beneath the waves. Sea sapents, gorgons, wizard gray eye, but Medusa is unique. She is their only mortal child. Away from the crushing depths of her parents' home, she is raised by her gorgons' sisters, Yuri Arle and Svenho. It is a halcyon youth. The gentleness of her sisters is as boundless as their strength, and Medusa is loved. Her mortality acts like waves to a pebble. It smooths her sister's severity, their extremity, those hallmarks of a deathless outlook. Till they are more like mortals than gods sometimes. Even their days become more human, they farm, they fish, they follow the cycle of the seasons and make offerings at the nearby temples. And for a time, all Olympus watches with fascination. The deathless are obsessed with mortals. They're ant-like comings and goings, they're mayfly lives. After all, what other entertainment is there to fill eternity? But the gods' obsession does not translate into comprehension. They can only understand Yuri Arle and Svenho as playing parts, like actors. And before long, the scene grows tiresome. Their deathless attentions turn to some new mortal drama half the world away. All except for one. As lord of the deep, all the sea is Poseidons to command. All those born from it are his subjects to do with has he pleases. Even these Gorgons who live on the land. Her sisters might have discussed him, but Medusa, she is a woman grown with beauty and divine blood. There are few Poseidon would say, more worthy of his lust. But when Medusa lifts the conch to her ear and hears him calling her name, she drops the shell back into the sea. When the waves scroll her name into the sand, she turns her back on the beach. She does not desire him. She fears him. Poseidon's temper is tempest. How dare one of his subjects, a mortal no less, reject him. So he forces himself upon Medusa. It's as she makes offerings in the temple to Athena, the virgin goddess, and the attack is like a rip current in the shallows. Sudden and unexpected. The temple is supposed to be a sanctuary, but Poseidon pays his little thought to profaning another god's temple as he does a mortal's body. His cares are satisfying lust and inflicting punishment. It is only mortals who must fear blasphemy and sacrilege. Mortals like Medusa. And so begins her second punishment. The night after the attack, as Uriale and Seno soothe their sleeping sister and rail against the Lord of the deep, the goddess Athena slips into their cave. The desecration of her temple is an injury to her pride. It is the only currency in which the deathless deal. So her response must be extreme, punishing, all-encompassing, without mercy even for the victim. Athena pours the blood from her bruised ego into the gorgon till it floods her veins and pools behind her eyes. Forevermore, Medusa's sight will petrify. Whatever she looks upon will turn to stone, even the sister she so loves. When the musers bring their story to a close, no time has passed for Perseus. He still stands over the sleeping gorgon. The hilt of his sword is cool against his palms. It is Zeus's own weapon, a harpy. And for the first time, as he raises the blade, curved and keen as a waxing moon, he wonders why the gods have aided him with so many gifts. Is it because he is Olympus' hero? Is he here on a divine quest to slay a monster? Is it because he is Olympus' tool? Is he here to inflict Medusa's third and final punishment? Natalie, it's great to have you back on history here today. It's pleasure. Now Medusa, such a great topic. She's often vilified, but in your most recent book, you paint a very different picture rather than being this villainous monster. She's a victim. Yeah, it's a really interesting twist, I think, on her. Because she absolutely isn't a villain in ancient sources. She's not even always a monster. And yet she's become the most iconographic monster, I guess. I think if you asked a hundred people to identify a Greek monster, a lot of people would do really well with the sphinx. I think Medusa would win hands down. People always, because she has. She's so recognised, but because of the big snaky hair. And yet, I think a lot of this villainy, if I'm absolutely honest, comes from quite recent history, specifically from the film Clash of the Titans in 1981, as made with stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen, in which she was really scary. Number one, she lives in a cave, who lives in caves, monsters, bond villains. I guess Batman, sort of, but not really, because it's just a basement. And she's got a sneaky tail. That's not in our ancient sources either. Our ancient sources, the picture is being winged and having snakes for her. But not with the big snaky tail. That's a Harryhausen invention. And one that's cast a very long shadow, Lego Medusa has a sneaky tail. She's obviously based on that one. And, you know, she has this power to turn you to stone. She's armed in the Harryhausen version with the bow and arrows, which is good because Perseus and his two comrades come after her, so she's outnumbered. But she's armed. She's a hunter being hunted. And additionally, she has this power, having once injured you, to turn you to stone. But if you look at our ancient sources, Gorgons are a much more binary phenomenon there. They are both sort of monstrous or grotesque and protective, apotropaneic. So there are Gorgon heads, they're called Gorgonere. The singular is a Gorgonere on all over the place in the ancient Greek world. So you see them on doorways, you see them on the walls of temples, you see them as antifixes. So the thing that goes on the end of a pipe. So sure, maybe they're just meant to be scary. But what are you trying to scare with a pipe, pigeons? Nothing. So I think they have this protective role as well. The word Medusa in Greek means guardian, guardian. So there's always been this duality to Medusa in our ancient sources, which just gets lost, I think. And you're right, of course, yeah, she's essentially the mortal Gorgon or three Gorgons, something else which we lose, because monsters live alone. Well, okay, maybe they do, but Gorgons are three. Steno-Uriali and Medusa. And in Hesiod, we're told that Steno and Uriali are immortal, but that Medusa is mortal. And Hesiod just kind of drops this casually in. He says, that's a wretched fate. Oh, thanks Hesiod, and then he's gone, wait, what? And so she is raped or assaulted by Poseidon in the Temple of Athenii. And then she's cursed by the goddess Athenii herself, because the temple has been profaned. She can't take it out on Poseidon, who obviously is the guilty party here, because he is her uncle and extremely powerful. And so she instead takes it out on Medusa. Medusa is quite literally the first monster rape survivor. She is somebody who experiences a sexual assault and is then turned into the villain of the piece or made a monster. So it was always a story that was a lot more nuanced and a lot more painful, actually, in its origins than in its more recent iterations. It's much easier to think someone's a monster, to dehumanize them, rather than to see and acknowledge their pain. But that's why there was a good reason to do a book, I thought, a novel of her. I've written about her in Pandora's Jart, my nonfiction book and women in Greek myth. And I still felt really kind of angry for her when I finished it. She's so badly treated and her myth is really badly treated. And so generally, if you're still cross about something when you've written 9,000 words on it, you probably should write it. So that was my feeling, that needed to be said. Because otherwise, I think people will just always see her as a monster. There's a story about Esquipius, the god of healing, and he's acquiring his healing powers. Athenae gives him two drops of Medusa's blood. One from the left hand side, I think, of her body is lethal, a deadly poison. And the drop from the right hand side of her body is called Sotarian. It's a savior. It's the thing that can revive you. It can bring you back from the dead. So this kind of dual nature of a gorgon is something that can kill you or cure you. We've lost that entiling in our recent iterations. I wanted to bring that back. So a lot mentioned there, but I think, lastly, let's delve into the. Actually, this idea furthermore of the gorgons, as you said, we mentioned the thing that was monsters. But perhaps we have this idea today that monsters, they have to be evil creatures. But as you say, it's much more complicated back in Greek mythology. There's so many different monsters, not evil creatures that dwell all around this ancient Greek world. And they are not just characteristically evil. No, they're not at all really evil. I think creatures is a much better name for gorgons than monsters. Because monsters, as you say, comes with a sort of a baggage which implies negativity, whereas creature is a bit more nuanced. And the interesting thing about gorgons is that they occupy this completely liminal space. So their parents are sea creatures, sea gods, so they live near the ocean. But they have wings, they can fly. So they're obviously also creatures of the air. And yet they live on the ground. So two of them, at least, are immortal. But they don't dwell on Mount Olympus. So they are very earthly gods. It's how I tended to think of them. And when I was writing the scenes with the three gorgons together, I really wanted to kind of bring to the fore that distinction between being an Olympian god who has no real idea how the world works for mortals and no interest in finding out. Because they're going to live forever. What an earth would be the point in finding out what somebody's going to be dead in five minutes. Things about anything. But the gorgons, the two immortal ones, find themselves a gorgon sister. They get a mortal sister. And that means they have to acknowledge change because she's right there changing in front of them. And when I started writing the book, I thought it would be her mortality that was the issue that would be of sort of central to them as a family. But actually, there was a thing that goes with mortality, which is change, that was much more interesting. And it didn't occur to me until I started writing the book that that's something that a sort of immortal creature could never understand any other way. It's only because they come to love someone who is in a constant state of change as all mortal creatures must be, that they start to see the world very differently from other deities. Well, let's delve into that a bit more. According to these Greco-Roman sources, those who talk about the myth of Medusa, what is Medusa's origin story? How does she end up in this air of the world with these two gorgons sisters? Yeah, they move around a bit to the gorgons, but most frequently it's the coast of Libya, north coast of Libya, whether centered. And this often happens with Greek myth, something that's strange and different, definitely lives over there, where we aren't. To give you that sense of distance and otherness straight away, and it's not always negative, sometimes it just is to kind of demarcate this difference. You'll see it again with the Amazons, who are very, very different because they're women, but they're on a battlefield, and they live over there, so we're far away. And so battles that are held with the Amazons, they're mostly traced to sort of the Russian step. But the important thing is not from where we are, because where we are, women stay indoors and don't fight on battlefield. So the Amazons must be somewhere else. And the same a bit happens to the gorgons. So there are three of them, that's in Hisiod. In Pindar, we're told that Medusa is a beautiful young girl. She is Yuparu, he says she's got beautiful cheeks. In Ovid's version, in the Metamorphosis, he tells us that she is Clarissima former. She has this very beautiful figure, very beautiful shape, and that Sutas flocked across the Greek world to try and marry her. Well, there's somebody else that Sutas flock across the Greek world to try and marry, and it's hell enough spatter. Gorgon to become hell enough Troy, the most beautiful woman the world has ever known. So this implies, at the very least, that the young Medusa is someone who is incredibly compelling, because why else would all these Sutas be arriving to try and marry her? And then, you know, when she's cursed, she gets her sneaky hair in Ovid's version. But lots of people think that's when she acquires her ability to turn you to stone. And in fact, that's not mentioned, so maybe Gorgons could always turn you to stone. Maybe all the Gorgons could turn you to stone. And they just choose not to, or it doesn't work on other Gorgons. It never comes up as a question. But this is often the case, things that seem to us really important, just aren't mentioned by ancient sources. And if you're writing a poem rather than a novel, you don't really need to worry about the kind of logistics. So what it is, I obviously had to spend loads of time going, right? So in order to turn something to stone, does she have to make eye contact with it or just look at it? Can she turn it to stone if it doesn't have eyes? If it's a tree, with that turn and so on and so on. But, yeah, Ovid can just move serenely through the whole thing going, it's poetry. What do you want from me? Well, you mentioned names like Hesiod and Pinder and Ovid. So is it also important to stress? I know, as we mentioned in our previous chats together with Helena Troy and Pandora, that there is not one definitive myth or narrative about Medusa or any other of these figures. The original version of the myth and everyone wants one and I really understand the temptation. And I think it kind of takes this, because I think, I think we often first discover Greek myths as children, when it's really important that there's a right version. And when someone reads a book differently, you go, "Don't do it wrong, you're doing it wrong." And it's like, "I get that." And I get that there's a feeling of security in having what feels like the original version of a myth. But there's just, there is not any such thing. You know, these myths are being described and created and recreated across the Greek world over. Well, the Greek speaking world is about two millennia long. The end of it is as far from the beginning of it as we are from Julius Caesar. And it's an enormous space as well. So there isn't, there just isn't an original version. The earliest visual representations, we have loads of visual representations of Gorgans. As far as paintings, the sculptures. But the earliest ones of those tend to be Gorganea, just Gorgan heads. And you can read in Homer about Agamemnon having a Gorgan head on his shield. You can read in the Odyssey, actually, that when Odysseus goes down to the underworld for the Nekwia, the bit where he communes with the dead. He stays down there, chatting to dead people for a bit after he's got the information that he needs. And then he suddenly gets the fear, and the thing that he's afraid of is that Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, will send the Gorgans head after him. Presumably, in this version of the story, A, the Gorgan head lives in Hades. Dwells in Hades is probably a better verb, is dead in Hades. And B, it's mobile and freestanding, and can just sort of hover around and see it must be lethal. Because he leaves immediately, he thinks of it. That's the clue to him leaving. So we do have a few literary sources, but they're quite brief. The offered version is the longest, and it focuses mainly on Perseus. But we have many more incredible vase paintings that show Gorgans in various different states. Firstly, as I say, the earliest versions often just heads, and we see those as antifixes as various other types of sculpture. There's a fantastic sixth century BCE, I think, Medusa in Kofu, the archaeological museum of Kofu. And it's from, it's the pediment from the Temple of Artemis. I think it's 13.4 metres across. And I know that, because I wrote about it in Pandora's Jazz, so I totally knew how big it was. And then the first time I saw it, after I'd written about it in Pandora's Jazz, which I had to do from photographs, because we weren't able to travel for a while. I had no idea it was 13.5 metres, it was like a half, a half! I came around the corner, and my jaw literally dropped, I just stood there. Oh, yeah, she's huge. And this version of her is just, it's so wonderful. She's so strong, she's huge muscles, her arms are pumping like a sprinter. And so her legs cycling, huge calf muscles, huge thigh muscles. She's got those beautiful cheeks, like Pindar said, which is just gorgeous. She's blanked on either side by a Leo Palfyr, a sort of mythological beast somewhere between a lion and a Palfyr. And they have got beautiful, kind of, swirly fur. It's a sandstone, a limestone, the sculpture. It's not a very robust form of stones, it hasn't all survived beautifully. But she has these two big cats on either side of her. And she has this incredible belt made of twisting snakes. It's absolutely glorious. And you can tell that it's an early one because the more monstrous or grotesque or extreme, she looks generally at 6th century or very early 5th century. By the time you get to later in the 5th century, she gets beautified. Like everybody else in Greek art, the beautification project takes over. And so there's a hydria, a big water jug, about half a meter tall in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. That shows her at the moment the person is about to kill her. And she's just a beautiful young girl. She's got beautiful black ringlets. No snakes, very unusually, at the point where she's killed, just normal hair, that beautiful hair. And she has these incredible beautiful eyelids, just clothes like this, just two little semi-circles. And so in that version, she's very obviously meant to be the sort of beautiful young woman who suit us flock across Greece to try and marry. And that's hundreds of years before the offered version, which tells us that in a narrative form. So there is, so Ovid is using someone else before the version. There we go. Never, ever, ever, ever underestimate the number of times Ovid is referencing something we almost certainly don't know what it is because it doesn't exist anymore, but he's doing it. But there were plays about the Gorgons. There was a play called The Forkides. The Daughters of Forkis, who is the Seagot, who is the father of both the Gorgons. And various other monsters, a kidner, and plenty more where that came from. So yes, but we only have, I think, maybe one fragment from that play. It's so interesting with this myth, because rather than me just asking questions, saying then what happened next and then what happened next. For instance, with how Mijusa arrives in the air of the world where the other two Gorgons are, I'm guessing it differs from myth to myth to myth. It's never, it's never referenced. I had to make it up in my book. Because this is exactly the kind of information you don't need when you're writing a poem. All you need to do is he's here, writing the Theogony, the story of the birth of the gods, to say there were three Gorgons. Two were immortal, one was Gorgon, and that sucks for her to move on. That's all you need to say. You don't need to say, "Oh, and they already existed when she existed." You just don't need to bother and rest assured he doesn't. So I don't know if we would have found out more in that lost play. We lost daughters of Forkis further. We don't have it. I don't know, I had to make it up. I don't have any information, therefore, from our surviving sources, from the literature mythology, but I guess also in art as well, about the relationship between Medusa and the other two Gorgons. Do we know anything about how it's depicted? One very, very revealing thing, I think, is that Yuri Ali is deemed the noisy Gorgon. Yet all the Gorgons must be quite noisy because those Gorgon air, those early heads, often have gigantic mouths, really, really wide mouths, like the Joker, properly too wide for a normal face. And routinely they're shown with tusks pointing up, and sometimes also pointing down, and with their tongues out. So tongue's lollying. And if your tongue is out, your mouth is open and you can make a noise. And Yuri Ali is apparently, according to many translations, she is responsible for making a baleful dirge, as one of the translations I really liked. The Greek, of course, just says "definning whale". It's like a loud adjective, and then a noun meaning "allowed noise". So she makes a loud noise, and the reason that she makes a loud noise is because her sister has just been killed. So if not then, then when is it okay to make a loud noise, but somehow there's something quite critical when you sell baleful, that sounds horrible. What do you say, grief-filled? But this word that simply means loud, deafening, in Greek, gets translated in a negative way. I would suggest, as a contrast, that epithet for Diomedis in the Iliad, who's often described as Diomedis of the loud war cry, or Diomedis master of the war cry, the Greek is Diomedis good at shouting. So do you see what's happened here, is that he gets made more heroic in translation, and Yuri Ali gets made more monstrous, or more unacceptable, because she's a female character making a loud noise. Well, yeah, I think that tells you a lot about how she feels about her sister, but because we've largely split the gorgans up and made Medusa a sort of solo monster, even though she's part of a trio in ancient sources, we rob her of context. Again, it's like, well, she's a monster. Of course, she's a monster, she's on her own. Well, she's a sister. And when she dies, one of her sisters sets off this enormous desperate cry, which is so piercing that it inspires Athene, according to one of her ancient Greek poets, to create the reed flute. And then when she plays it, she doesn't like what she looks like, so she throws it aside, and then a satire picks it up, and that's how satire is always her poet. There you go. You're welcome. Hi, it's Dan Snow here from Dan Snow's History Hit podcast. So we've got a massive conventional war on the European mainland, and there are ever more signs of climate breakdown. 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She leads her own army, everyone goes gargant for Eleanor and trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History Hit. Let's go into the story itself. How does Medusa go from this beautiful young lady to becoming the depiction that we so often see of her down to the present day, perhaps wrongly, but this depiction of her as this snake-haired monster? Yeah, the snakes are a really interesting part of her story, because Gorgons are often, although by no means always, shown with snakey hair, but usually. And as I say, the Gorgon air, these earlier forms, if anything, have more snakes, you know, the earlier the image, the snakeier it tends to be. And then, as we see the image created later, by the time you get to Hellenistic sources, I shared one the other week, and she could be like Jane Austen's Medusa. She's got these beautiful ringlets as an entalia, one of those carved stones. And she just has Gorgon's ringlets, and they're sort of tied up, and she looks like she's about to go to Mr Bingham's ball on a Friday night and try and meet her perfect statue. I'm not sure, it's really lovely. She's got little wings in her hair, which I think are intended to convey that she's a winged creature. Because obviously, if you only show the head, you have to kind of allude to the other bits of the body, but just an extraordinary way to depict her. Lovely. But, yeah, the story of Medusa acquiring her snakey hair, assuming that she does, is that she's punished by the goddess Athenae, because she's assaulted by the god Poseidon. So, she's sexually assaulted, she's raped in the temper of Athenae, and then the payback is that she gets snakes for her. And that is the transformation that means that this story is included in Ovid's Metamorphosis, where the unifying theme is something undergoes a transformation. And that's the bit that Medusa undergoes is that she gets the snakey hair. But in theory, you know, the Gorgon's tend to always be showing me the snakey hair. So, it actually makes her, at least in my version, it makes her look more like her sisters. So, in the act of being turned into a monster, what it means is that, in fact, she looks more like the two creatures that have loved her most in her whole life. So, to her, there's nothing monstrous about Gorgons, and the issues with the snakes are to do with physical pain, rather than to do with a sense of, you know, looking in a mirror and thinking, "I can't go out, I look terrible." For me, the thing that is very painful for Medusa is her eyes, that although there's no ancient source that says she becomes able to turn you to stone at the time that she gets cursed or gets the snakes for her, that's the way I chose to tell it, because I think that's the version of the story most people probably believe. But we tend to see, we have always tended to see Medusa from the outside, I think. We tend to see her as a monster that we have to work out how we would escape. How do I stop her turning me to stone? We think to ourselves, "I'd need to use something reflective, I'd need to use a shield, a mirror." You know, everybody's got their plans for how they would cope with her. It's like, "Well, I'm not sure you really need to. My version doesn't want to kill you." Because as far as I know, there isn't an ancient source where she kills anyone, while she's alive, while she has agency, she's used to kill what she's dead, lots and lots of people. That's not the same thing at all. No, and how she goes into that state from what you're saying there, you know, as we've highlighted right to the start, she's a victim. She is the object of this divine attention, this infamous divine attention, first from Poseidon being raped in this temple, and then by Athena with a transformation of her body. She's assaulted twice, yeah, by two different gods. Yeah, she's a really unlucky ancient creature. They're always the ones I'm drawn to. I'm afraid. But yeah, it's a double assault, and I was thinking about that the whole time I was writing. Because I was thinking of all those times when you get people talking about their experience of trying to get any kind of legal process underway for sexual assault. The over and over again, the phrase which came up was it was like being attacked a second time, either by the police or being cross-examined in court, or one of those sorts of things. And this sense where these not only but often women had been physically assaulted and then sort of emotionally and psychologically assaulted later. It's like, well, I know a story about that. Hang on, I'll just write it and you can see. Now I also noticed in your book how, when talking about the Gorgons, how humans feared Gorgons or how they're depicted in the mythology. But Gorgons, do we know what they thought almost of humans? We don't, I'm afraid. For me, they're sort of slightly baffled by us, but not in the same league as Olympian gods who don't care about us. So trying to get an Olympian god to understand what we're like is like trying to get us to understand what an ant is like. Well, it doesn't matter. There you go, not what I would do that much, but you've seen my point. But yeah, no, I don't think anyone's given much thought to how the Gorgons felt, really, until I decided it was really important to know. I was sure somebody's written it before me. I'm not claiming originality here, but yeah, I don't think our ancient sources were particularly concerned in the way that the Gorgons viewed the world. Okay, so let's move on to our other key protagonist in this story, Perseus. Natalie, take it away. Who was Perseus? Perseus is the son of Zeus and also of Danai. And Danai is a human woman whose extremely paranoid father is so worried that he gets an oracle. Here's an oracle that her son will kill him. So he locks her up in a cell so she can't ever meet anyone or in any way become pregnant. It's a little failing to account for the fact that Zeus will turn himself into golden rain and rain his way through the tiny gaps in the roof and then in pregnant. I have to admit, I took a novelist's version of this story and made him sort of reform into a man's shape in order to in pregnant because I simply couldn't cope with the notion of a tiny firefly like drops of golden rain, randomly inserting themselves into a body. There are a time and a place for that and then today is night of those things and nor will it ever be. So he is technically half sibling to the goddess Athenii with whom he appears in this book, although she for certain wouldn't acknowledge it. They're very, very different in almost every regard, although not in a crucial one. And he's a young hero in so far as in its kind of literary critical sense rather than in its modern sense. So he's not particularly heroic. He's simply at the centre of a narrative in which he has to go on a quest and bring back the head of a Gorgon. And the version of the story that we all tend to know is he has to go and get the head of a Gorgon so he can kill a sea monster so he can rescue Andromeda. But in fact that's a side quest as the gamers would say. On his way home he has to go and get the head of a Gorgon because a petulant king asks him to and he agrees. And so he goes to get the head of a Gorgon and of the three Gorgons too can't be killed so it's going to have to be Medusa. It really is that simple. That's why her fate according to Hesiod in being mortal is wretched. It's because she's going to be the one who gets killed. So he is at least in my version he's pretty young a teenager sort of 16 when he goes on this quest because I think often these heroes have to have been pretty young. Otherwise they would already have reached adulthood and these kind of quests wouldn't be appropriate for them. They'd already have been either banished or become king. So it has to be a sort of coming of age ritual for them and persists is at least for me no exception and he gets help from lots and lots of gods. There are in a literary and even more in our artistic sources objects that he's given by multiple deities. So he's shown in multiple vase paintings he's described in a couple of sources wearing the sandals of Hermes, the wing sandals that means that you can fly or travel incredible distances very quickly. He has a hat which may look a bit like the hat of Hermes on some of our vase paintings but it's described in our literary sources as the hat of Hades. It's a cap of darkness and that means he's invisible when he wears it. He has a kibisus, sometimes a sort of backpack that you can put an extremely dangerous and heavy object like the head of a gorgon that can turn things to stone into. He bars that from the disparities, the nymphs that live in the garden of the disparities, the harpe, the curd sword that wraps around Medusa's neck on that hydro in the Metropolitan Museum in New York belongs to Zeus. Standing behind him, offering him advice as he goes to kill Medusa is the goddess Athenii, his half sibling much as I say as she would probably definition. And so there are kind of two ways of looking at these vase paintings where you see all these different gods influences on this one young character. One is to say he's obviously extremely favored because look at all the gods who are helping him out but I think an equally valid reading is. Land of Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisonous cup in Renaissance florets. Each week on Echoes of History we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Look how helpless he is because he needs all these gods to help him out. If you look at vase paintings of other heroes going on quests and doing things like Hercules Hercules is by far the most popular character from Greek myth to appear on ancient Greek vases. And it always looks like he's having a whale of a time wrangling with a lion or biting the hydra or something. The art that we see of Percy is decapitating Medusa. It looks incredibly ambivalent. The hydra in the Metropolitan Museum in New York shows her asleep in attacking. It looks like exactly what it is. She looks like a mortal woman. She doesn't look like a gorgon except in extraneous detail. She for sure doesn't have the snake hair. And she's asleep. It looks like a man beheading a sleeping woman. It looks terrifying. There's a vase in the British Museum which shows the immediate aftermath, sort of one second, two seconds after that scene. Where her body is still, she's kind of collapsed on the ground, her hands are supporting her weight. Her head is gone. There's blood streaming from her neck. He stuffed her head into the cabeces, the backpack. And it looks really horrible. It looks really violent. It looks like this young man has done something just terrible. And there's none of the Jvodaviev that you see when Hercules is out on a quest. This is an enemy in lion kind of equivalent which has been terrorizing a local community, is it, when it's the story of Medusa. This is someone who, you know, bad fate has befallen them and therefore they're now in this form. Somewhere, as we also mentioned, other, somewhere far away from where humans were. Yeah, probably Libya, but, you know, that's partly because of it ties the gorgons to Libya. He says the snakes in Libya come from Medusa's drops of blood, but sometimes they put another parts of the world. So the important thing is that it's an other place and everything else is sort of negotiated. But I once looked at a map of what Herod's just thought Africa looked like. I thought I was bad at geography, but no, it turns out. So maps weren't a big thing for them. So, you know, somebody's drawn this map in the modern world working on what he describes it as looking. Honestly, I sort of have just stuck a tail on a donkey. Well, one other thing I'd love to ask, therefore, about all these people that Persia's meets along the way to capitalise Medusa, I'm going to butcher the name of what they are, but there's three figures, the three figures with the one eye. The grey eye, the grey eye, there we go. So who are these figures, the grey eye? That's sort of these birds. At every stage in this book, I kept thinking, in a minute, I'm going to find the big literary source that I will be able to pilfer and pass off as my own, which, frankly, was an absolute breeze to do with stories like The Children of Jocasta, because it focuses on the Theban Saga and a thousand ships, because that's all the Trojan waters. Loads of evidence, literary evidence for those loads of stories that you contradict each other, but loads that you could choose from, or choose from a man. That's what I was like, okay, there's not very much about the Gorgans, but I'm sure there must be loads about Dunite. Okay, so there's not loads of that eye. But in any minute now, there's going to be absolutely masses about the Gorgans. In one version of their story, they share a single eye and a single tooth. And that was so clearly the most disgusting version that I'm afraid it was irresistible to me. And so Perseus needs their help to direct him to the disparities. And so he has to go and find these old women who are immortal, but obviously damaged in this particular way, and so far as they have a communal eye and tooth. And writing that thing, it was kind of revolting, and at the same time, I think it probably is one of the funny machines in the book. I think it's also so interesting, as we've been talking in this story, if we take a quick tangent, is of course we talked about names like Hissiard and Ovid and so on and so forth. But the importance to try and learn more about this mythology to piecing it together is art, is ancient art, whether it's Greek, whether it's Roman, or even down, I guess, into more recent times. How important a source that is for telling the story of this myth of Medusa. Yeah, it's a real treat, because running through stone blind, I don't want to give away the ending of it, so I'll be careful. But running through it is this recurring theme of statues, and things being made of stone. Four obvious reasons. And there are two statues in the book, which are very much based on real statues. And so ancient art, although there are no pictures in this book, it's absolutely full of those images, because those are the sources that I was using. So this is the first time really I felt conscious that I'm taking art from one medium, a visual medium, and trying to incorporate it into a different medium, a literary one. You know, I would have told you 20 years ago I could never write about art, and I don't know what's happened to me, I've betrayed young, unable to draw me. I still can't draw. I just really like writing about art, just really enjoying writing about it. Okay, so I was incredibly important with the story of Medusa, and I guess also if we keep going with Perseus and so on, so he's cut off the head of Medusa. But the story of Medusa, it continues from there in the fact that the head has continued significance. Yeah, the head continues to speak, at least in my version, because I thought there are so many Gorgonere. The Gorgonere come first in ancient art. There are Gorgonheads everywhere, and then a little bit later you start getting full bodied Gorgons. And the Greeks are such inveterate storytellers. It's probably the case that the, I mean, the heads can have come from anywhere and everywhere. Our earlier sources, earlier places that have just disembodied heads, Humbaba in Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian myth, is a head, but obviously male, not female, so a little bit different from the Gorgons. But I think you'd be hard push to find a culture which has left any kind of material traces of any kind of ritual objects, and not find faces or heads. Often sometimes they look like the sun, sometimes they look more like a Gorgon, but essentially you've got the same thing around face, and then there's radial hair. And in the case of Gorgons, it's snakes, but it perhaps also makes us think of a lion's mane, the tusks, obviously. So the Greeks seem to see these strange heads, and then make strange bodies, winged bodies. They're wings, at least, in East Galicia's Prometheus band, I think they reference there. And then obviously you look around you and there's all these heads. It's like, well, we need somebody to separate a head from a body. So Perseus comes into the story later that suddenly not art of him as early as the result of the Gorgon era. So I think it's reasonable to suggest that rather than there being a hero who we have to go and find a monster for, so he can be heroic and kill it, I think it's the other way around. These heads exist, and then the bodies exist, and then Perseus comes along to explain the separation. It's trying to figure out the evolution of the character of Medusa, even in mythology itself. That's extraordinary. You never think of that. Once again, as long as you start, when you're very young you see a book of myths, and you think that's a definitive one narrative version of it, but there's always an evolution of these stories. There is always going to be an evolution, and partly, I mean, with Gorgons it's really interesting because we can see it. You know, this isn't in our literary sources anywhere near as much as it's in our visual sources, and you can see the heads change, you can see the heads become less monstrous and become more feminine, and then prettier as the decades roll past. It is an extraordinary process to watch. You start seeing Perseus appearing on these vows paintings later, and we start seeing the sculptures of Gorgonais, so it seems pretty. If you look at this, I mean Gorgonais is Gorgonais on a vows painting in the British Museum, and it's a lovely, lovely big face. It could be a theatrical mask, which again, you know, how do you tell the difference as an art historian between a mask and a Gorgon, and it's not always possible. There are always going to be overlaps between faces that look masculine and feminine, where Gorgons are concerned, because the early Gorgonais tend to have beards, like a like bearded creature, yeah, as well as their tusks. So bearded pigs are a thing, so I wonder if it's a little nod to the ball element of Gorgons, or whether they just have beards. Do they therefore not always have snake hair? Is that something we always associate, but most do. Not always. Interesting. I mean, well, if we go into the legacy a bit more, because we don't want to go too much into the stories, you've written all about it in your new book. But in regards to the whole legacy of Medusa, there's so many different depictions of over the many centuries. Are there any particular depictions that you have a soft spot for that particular favour? Yeah, I have a soft spot for loads. I'm anyone's for a good depiction of a Gorgon. I can't help myself. But yeah, I know there have been some really incredible ones. My favourite at the moment is probably one that is really, really recent. And that is Luciano Gabbatti, who is an Italian, Argentinian sculptor, created a sort of gender switched version of a statue by Antonio Canova. And the Canova is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. There's a version in the Vatican. There's a version somewhere in Kent in a National Trust House. I can never remember which one I was promised my mum I'll take them, because I'm a terrible person. And that is a sort of super neoclassical version of Perseus. It's gleaming white, white are the me, and I'm partly Belgian. And he's naked, obviously. He's holding the head of Medusa, and the statue is called Perseus Travert. And Gorgatti looked at this statue and imagined it the other way around, and made it Medusa, beautiful, naked, holding up the head of Perseus. And it's like, what happens when you do that? It's not the first time I saw it. It's like, how has this happened? And then it was remodeled last year. They moulded a full-size version from Gabbatti's design, and it stood outside the courtroom in Manhattan for a while. And I mean, there are some extraordinary images, the Caravaggio, obviously it's the one that everyone knows, which I hate, because it looks really, she looks so angry and upset. I just, I don't like it. I like them much more. This one's lovely, it's super serene, and she's really calm. Isn't it, yeah, with the kind of the, maybe not expressionless, but, yeah, it's so beautiful. Yeah, but serene, anything. So, yeah, I mean, who designs my books, I have nothing to do with the design of them, so I feel completely fine, boasting about it, because it wasn't me, but that's a nice one. And I'm wearing one now, which was made for me by a really brilliant jeweler in America, and so, yeah, got a little Medusa head on there. A little protective Gorgonayon. I mean, it's fascinating, like, in how many different forms Medusa's legacy is today, you know, both as. She's ever, she's the Versace Logan. She's just super rare. Exactly, and I say in so many different forms, as this villainous creature, but also, you know, as this victim, this other narrative of her is starting to come to the fore as well, which is great to see. It really is. And also, we're de-sexualising her, which I like a lot, because quite often when you get a sort of, when you get a monstrous man, he's just monstrous, and scary. And, you know, sometimes we're also meant to fancy him. It's not never happened, but it's not sort of automatic. Whereas, monstrous women, dangerous women are often, it's like that fan-for-tall. It's a sort of irresistible combination. So, it's not an accident that Medusa has been played by, for example, Uma Thurman, one of the world's most beautiful women, who have the Percy Jackson films. I have a huge soft spot for the little Lego version, because she's not at all sexy. Damien Hurst starred Rihanna. Do you remember this on the cover of GQ Magazine, and gave her not just snakes for hair, but these incredible snake-eye contact lenses? I'm not cool enough for that. There was very much in the sexy Medusa area, and you could give her some more clothes. I'm sorry, I'm old enough to be your mother, etc. But anyway, yeah, so I quite like it when she gets stripped of the sexy Monster Lady vibe. Well, I think it's funny, actually, just before coming here for the interview today, I was going to a friend at History Hit HQ. And he mentioned, I mentioned to you before he started shooting this, how apparently in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, one of the most difficult bosses to fight is Medusa. So, once again, that's kind of the vicious enemy evil kind of Medusa coming through in that depiction. I mean, it's really easy to turn her into that, because, hey, she can turn you to stone. And the example I always give when I'm doing the live tour for StoneBlind is to ask why we're afraid of her, because she can turn you into an animal object, and we're not afraid of Midas. Who can turn you into an animal object. She can do it by sight, and you can do it by touch. There's not really very much difference. And yet, when we remind us the story, again, in all of its most morphoses, we imagine it from the inside, we think, "Oh, wouldn't it be awful if everything I touched turned to gold?" When we read about Medusa, we go, "Wouldn't it be awful if she tried to turn me to stone?" We look out from the outside. I guess just Cersei as well, some other kind of figure. She turned me into a pig. Exactly. Yeah, how interesting. And I guess one other thing now, I mean, I'm a little weird, but I'm weird and proud, is actually one of my favourite and enjoyable memes of all time. This one, we just showed the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, which just goes, "Midusa won, Jesus Christ me off." Oh, no, really, no. There is something really gratifying about imagining that statues in the ancient world, or Medusa's, you know, victims, or the previous, you know, failing to get past that boss level fight. But as I say, there's no sources for her going around killing people, so, yeah, we've made her a monster. We've made her a monster, and you address that in your book, and it's so nice to kind of see this new angle depiction of Midusa, setting this level of yours. And it just goes to me saying, Natalie, always a pleasure having you on the ancient's focus on this tree here. So thank you. Well, there you go. There was the one and only Natalie Haynes talking you through all things Medusa. Natalie's book on Medusa is out now, and stay tuned, because in time, there will be a film with version of this podcast going up on the History Hit YouTube channel, along with a special Medusa documentary that Natalie is filming with History Hit out on location in Greece. Stay tuned. That's going to be big. It's going to be epic, and that's coming to History Hit TV in the near future. So watch out for that. The script writer for the story in this episode was Andrew Hoss. The narrator was Nicola Willie. The assistant producer was Annie Colo. The senior producer was Elena Guthrie. And the episode was edited by Agent Algum. Thank you to you all for helping make this episode a reality. Now, last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have enjoyed the episode today, and you want to help us out as we continue our mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you, we know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get to podcasts from, it really helps us as we continue to grow the ancients and to reach as large an audience as possible. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode. you