The Ancients - Medusa

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

This episode contains references to sexual assault.Medusa stands as one of the most iconic yet misconstrued figures of Greek mythology.Recognised as one of the three Gorgons, she is notoriously portrayed with serpentine hair and petrifying eyes that turn onlookers to stone. Her life is famously ended by Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus. Popular culture often reduces her to a monstrous caricature, even using her name interchangeably for all Gorgons. But how much of this aligns with ancient records, and how much is a Hollywood construct? To unravel this enigma, Tristan welcomes classicist, author, and broadcaster Natalie Haynes. Together, they dissect Medusa's origins, delve into her tragic narrative marked by betrayals from Perseus and Athena, and ponder the implications of her myth in today's context.You can purchase Natalie Haynes's book on Medusa, Stone Blind, here and pre-order her new one Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, here.Senior Producer was Elena GuthrieScript was written by Andrew HulseVoice over was performed by Nichola WoolleyAssistant Producer was Annie ColoeEditor was Aidan LonerganDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. His invocation is not even a whisper. 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 creature's ears are pointed like a bat, just as their teeth are tusks like a boar, 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 Gorgon 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. second thought. But that is why he pauses now. That is why he asks for the Muses' counsel. For the third Gorgon's sister, the one Perseus has 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. Her tresses 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 muses in whispered song and she has been twice punished by the gods. 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, well, 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-favourite 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 Blind. 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 Musa song reaches back through tarnished ages and deep into the endless oceans, to the palace of Phocis and Ceto, gods of the sea. All manner of creatures are born to them beneath the waves. Sea serpents, gorgons, wizened greyeye. But Medusa is unique. She is their only mortal child. Away from the crushing depths of her parents' home, she is raised by her gorgon sisters, Uriale and Sveno. 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 sisters' severity, their extremity, those hallmarks of a deathless outlook,

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 Uriale and Sveno 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 Poseidon's to command. All those born from it are his subjects to do with as he pleases, even these Gorgons who live on the land. Her sisters might disgust 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 a conch to her ear and hears him calling her name, she drops the shell back into the sea. When the waves scrawl 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, immortal 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 as 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 Senno soothe their sleeping sister and rail against the Lord of the Deep, the goddess Athena slips into their cave. You see, 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. loves. When the muses 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's hero? Is he here on a divine quest to slay a monster? Or 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 Hit today. It's a pleasure. Now, Medusa, such a great topic. She's often vilified, but in your most recent book, you paint a very different picture where actually,

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 our 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 100 people to identify a Greek monster, I reckon a bunch of people would do really well with the Sphinx. I think Medusa would win hands down, people always, because she's so recognisable 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's got a snaky tail. That's not in our ancient sources either. Our ancient sources depict her as being winged and having snakes for hair, but not with a big snaky tail. That's a Harryhausen invention, and one that's cast a very long shadow. Lego Medusa has a snaky tail.

She's obviously based on, I think she's based on that one. And, you know, she has this power to turn you to stone. She's armed in the Harryhausen version with a bow and arrows, which is good because Perseus and his two comrades come after her so she's outnumbered but she is 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, apotropaic. So there are Gorgon heads, they're called Gorgonea. The singular is a Gorgoneon

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 sort of protective role as well. The word Medusa in Greek means 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. There are three Gorgons, something else which we lose because monsters live alone. Well, okay, maybe they essentially the mortal Gorgon. There are 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 moves on. And you're like, oh, wait, what? And so she is raped or assaulted by Poseidon in the Temple of Athene. And then she's cursed by the goddess Athene 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 monstered 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, that 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'd written a chapter about her in Pandora's Jar, my nonfiction book on women in Greek myth. And I still felt really kind of angry for her when I finished it. I'm like, she's so badly treated in her myth. And then her myth is really badly treated. And and so generally if you're still cross about something when you've written 9 000 words on it you probably should write another book so that was my feeling that needed to be said because otherwise i think people will just always see her as a monster and that's just you know there's a story about asclepius the god of healing and he's acquiring his healing powers.

Athene 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 Soterian. 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 entirely 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 say we mentioned i think there was monsters but perhaps

we have this idea today that monsters they have to be evil creatures but as you say right here it's much more complicated back in greek mythology there's so many different monsters evil 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 you know they 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, is 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 on earth would be the point in finding out what somebody's going to be dead in five minutes thinks 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 so according to these greco-roman sources

those who talk about the myth of medusa i What is Medusa's origin story? How does she end up in this area of the world with these two Gorgon sisters? Yeah, they move around a bit, the Gorgons, but most frequently it's the coast of Libya, north coast of Libya, where they're centered. So they are, 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, somewhere far away. And so battles that are held with the Amazons, they're mostly traced to sort of the Russian steppe. But the important thing is not from where we are, because where we are, women stay indoors and don't fight on battlefields. 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 Hesiod.

In Pindar, we're told that Medusa is a beautiful young girl. She is Euparu, he says. She's got beautiful cheeks. In Ovid's version, in the Metamorphoses, he tells us that she is Clarissima Forma. She has this very beautiful figure, very beautiful shape, and that suitors flocked across the Greek world to try and marry her. Well, there's somebody else that suitors flock across the Greek world to try and marry her. Well, there's somebody else that suitors flock across the Greek world to try and marry, and it's Helen of Sparta. She'll go on to become Helen of 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 suitors be arriving to try and marry her? And then, you know, when she's cursed, she gets her snaky 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 of 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, would that turn, and so on and so on. 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 pindar and ovid so is it also important to stress i know as we've mentioned in our previous chats together with helen of troy and on pandora that there is not one definitive myth or narrative about medusa or any other there's never an original version of the myth and everyone wants one and I really understand the temptation and I think it kind of takes us 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 you know 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 and 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 Gorgons as far as paintings the sculptures but the earliest

ones of those tend to be Gorgonea just Gorgon heads and you can read in Homer about Agamemnon having a Gorgon head on his shield. You can read in the Odyssey, actually, that when Odysseus goes down to the underworld for the Nicaea, 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 Gorgon's head after him. So presumably, in this version of the story, A, the Gorgon 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 C, it must be lethal because he leaves immediately he thinks of it. That's the clue to him him leaving so we do have a few literary sources but they're quite brief the Ovid version is the longest and it focuses mainly on Perseus but we have many more incredible vase paintings that show Gorgons 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 6th century BCE, I think, Medusa in Corfu, the archaeological museum of Corfu, and 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 Jar, 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 Jar, which I had how big it was and then the first time I saw it after I'd written about it in Pandora's jar which I had to do for photographs because we weren't able to travel for a while I had no idea it was 13 and a half meters it was like a half massive 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 got these huge muscles her arms are pumping like a sprinter and so are her legs cycling huge calf muscles huge thigh muscles

she's got those beautiful cheeks like Pindar said which is just gorgeous she's flanked on either side by a leo panther a sort of mythological beast somewhere between a lion and a panther and they have got beautiful kind of swirly fur it's sandstone or limestone the sculpture it's not a very robust form of stone so 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 it's 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 that Perseus 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 closed 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 suitors flock across Greece to try and marry. And that's hundreds of years before the Ovid version,

which tells us that in a narrative form. So Ovid is using someone else before the version. There we go. Ovid is always using someone else. 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 doing it but there were plays about the Gorgons there was a

play called the Forkiders the the daughters of Forcus who is the sea god who is the father of both the Gorgons and various other monsters Echidna 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 Medusa arrives in that area of the world where the other two Gorgons are I'm guessing it differs from myth to myth. 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 Hesiod writing the theogony the story of the birth of

the gods to say there were three Gorgons two were immortal one was gorgon that sucks for her 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 and rest assured he doesn't so i don't know if we would have found out more in that lost play the lost daughters of forcus but uh we don't have it so i don't know i had to make it up. Do we 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 that, how it's depicted? Yes, one very, very revealing thing, I think, is that Uriali is deemed the noisy Gorgon,

and yet all the Gorgons must be quite noisy noisy because those Gorgonea, those early heads, often have gigantic mouths, really, really wide mouths, like the Joker, you know, 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 tongues lolling. And if your tongue is out, your mouth is open and you can make a noise. And Uri Ali is apparently, according to many translations, she is responsible for making a baleful dirge. That's one of the translations I really liked. The Greek, of course, just says deafening wail. It's like a loud adjective and then a noun meaning a loud 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, 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 say, oh, baleful, it sounds horrible. Why don't 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, the epithet for Diomedes in the Iliad, who's often described as Diomedes of the loud war cry, or Diomedes, master of the war cry. The Greek is Diomedes good at shouting. So do you see what's happened here is that he gets made more heroic

in translation, and Uriah 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 Gorgons 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 you know of course she's a monster she of context again. It's like, well, she's a monster. You know, of course she's a monster. She's on her own. It's like, 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 the ancient Greek poets, to create the reed flute. And then

when she plays it, she doesn't like what she looks like, and so she throws it aside, and then a satyr picks it up, and that's how satyrs always have pipes. 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.

If you're trying to make sense of all the wild things we're living through, my podcast, Dan Snow's History Hit, is here to help. Our expert historians, thinkers and storytellers unravel the history behind the headlines so you can navigate the news with confidence and clarity. Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go into the story itself. How does Medusa go from this beautiful, you know, young lady to becoming the depiction that we so often see of her, you know, down to the present day, perhaps wrongly, but this depiction of her as this snake-haired monster, yes.

Yeah, the snakes are a really interesting part of her story because Gorgons are often, although by no means always shown with snaky hair but usually and as i say the gorgonea these earlier forms if anything have more snakes you know the earlier the image the snakier 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 it's a an intaglio one of those carved stones and she just has gorgeous ringlets and they're sort of tied up and she looks like she's about to go to you know Mr Bingham's ball on a

Friday night and try and reach 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, and lovely. But yeah, the story of Medusa acquiring her snaky hair, assuming that she does, is that she's punished by the goddess Athene, because she's assaulted by the god Poseidon. So she's sexually assaulted, she's raped in the temple of Athene, and then the payback is that she's sexually assaulted, she's raped in the Temple of Athene, and then the payback is that she gets snakes for hair. And that is the transformation that means that this story is included in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the unifying theme is something undergoes a transformation. And that's the bit that Medusa undergoes, is that she gets the snaky hair.

But in theory, you know, the Gorgons tend to always be shown with snaky 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 oh 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 hair 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 once 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 at 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 the transformation of her body she's assaulted twice twice, yeah, by two different gods. Yeah, she's a really unlucky ancient creature. They're always the ones I'm drawn to, to write about, 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 and that 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 um for me they're sort of slightly baffled by us but not in the same league as olympian gods who aren't 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 we're like well it doesn't matter there you go not that i would do that but you see 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 everyone should know I'm 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 Danae. And Danae is a human woman whose extremely paranoid father is so worried that he gets an oracle. He hears 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. 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 impregnator i i have to admit i took a novelist's version of this story and made him sort of reform

into a man shape in order to impregnate her because i simply couldn't cope with the notion of sort of tiny firefly like drops of golden rain randomly inserting themselves into her body. It's like, there are a time and a place for that, and today is neither of those things, and nor will it ever be. So he is technically half-sibling to the goddess Athene, 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 insofar 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 two 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 Perseus is at least for me no exception and he gets help from lots and lots of gods there are in our 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 winged 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 you know 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 cabesis, 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 borrows that from the Hesperides, the nymphs that live in the garden of the Hesperides. The harpe, the curved sword that wraps around Medusa's neck on that hydra 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 Athene, his half-sibling, much as I say, as she would put on the 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 favoured because look at all the gods who are helping him out. But I think an equally valid reading is 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, Heracles, 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, you know, wrangling with a lion or fighting the hydra or something. The art that we see of Perseus decapitating Medusa, it looks incredibly ambivalent.

The hydra in the Metropolitan Museum in New York shows her asleep, him attacking. It looks like exactly what it is. She looks like a mortal woman. She doesn't look like a gorgon except in extraneous details. She for sure doesn't have the snaky 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 cabesis, 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 joie de vivre that you see when Heracles is out on a quest. This is an Nemean lion kind of equivalent, which has been terrorizing a local community, is it? When it's the story of Medusa.

It certainly is not. 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 Ovid ties the Gorgons to Libya. He says the snakes in Libya come from Medusa's drops of blood.

But sometimes they're put in other parts of the world. So the important thing is that it's an other place and everything else is sort of negotiable. I once looked at a map of what Herodotus thought Africa looked like. I was like, oh, OK. I thought I was bad at geography, but no, it turns out 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've just stuck a tail on a donkey. Well, one other thing I'd love to ask, therefore, about all these people that Perseus meets along the way to decapitate Medusa.

I'm going to butcher the name of what they are, but the three figures, the three figures with the one eye. The grey eye. The grey eye, there we go. So who are these figures? They're sort of sea spirits. 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 war loads of evidence literary evidence for those loads of stories that you you know contradict each other but loads that you could choose from or choose from among this one i was like okay there's not very much about the gorgons but i'm sure there must be loads about danite okay so there's not loads about that but any minute now

there's going to be absolutely masses about the grime. Yeah, 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 Hesperides. 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 iron tooth and uh yeah writing that scene it was it's kind of revolting and at the same time i think it probably is one of the funnier scenes in the book i think it's also so interesting we've as we've been talking in this

story if we take a quick tangent is of course we talked about names like he's here and of it 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 Stoneblind, I don't want to give away the ending of it, so I'll be careful. 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, for 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 by just really liking writing about art just really enjoying writing about it okay so art's 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 the head continues to speak, at least in my version, because I thought there are so many Gorgonea. The Gorgonea come first in ancient art. There are Gorgon heads 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 uh 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 pushed to find a culture which has left any kind of material traces of any kind of ritual objects and not find faces or heads you know often sometimes they look like the sun sometimes they look more like a gorgon but essentially you've got the same thing a round face and then this 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 winged at least in aeschylus's Prometheus band, I think the reference there. And then obviously you look around you and there's all these heads. So it's like, well, we need somebody to separate a head from a body. So Perseus comes into the story later. There's certainly not art of him as early as there was art of the Gorgonea. 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 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.

So he's trying to figure out the evolution of the character of Medusa even in the mythology itself. That's extraordinary. You never think of that. Once again, as Holland did at the 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 and you start seeing Perseus appearing on these vase paintings later than we start seeing the sculptures of Gorgonea so it seems pretty if you look at there's a gorgeous Gorgonea in a vase painting in the British Museum and it's lovely lovely big face it could be a theatrical mask which again you know how do you tell the difference as a 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 Gorgonea tend to have beards like a 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 boar element of gorgons or whether they just have beards do they therefore not always have snake hair was that something we always associate but most do not always how interesting i mean well if we go into the legacy a bit more because we don't want to go too much into the story as you've written all about it in your new book. But in regards to the whole legacy of Medusa, and there's so many different depictions of her over the many centuries. Are there any particular depictions that you have a soft spot for that are particular favourites? Yeah, I have a soft spot for loads. Anyone's for a good depiction of a Gorgon.

I can't help myself. But yeah, no, there have been some really incredible ones. My favourite at the moment is probably one that is really really recent and that is luciano garbatti 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 k in a National Trust house. I can never remember which one. I was promised my mum, I'll take her and I haven't because I'm a terrible person. And that is the sort of super neoclassical version of Perseus. It's gleaming white, whiter than me and I'm partly Belgian. And he's naked,

obviously. He's holding the head of Medusa and the statue is called Perseus Triumphant. And Garbati 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 to the statue? It's like the first time I saw it, I was like, how's this happen? And then it was remodeled last year.

They molded a full-size version from Galbati's design and it stood outside a courtroom in Manhattan for a while. And, I mean, there are some extraordinary images. The Caravaggio, obviously, is 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 serene. 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. Yeah, but serene anyway. So, yeah so isn't it yeah with the kind of the maybe not expressionless but yeah yeah but serene anyway so yeah i mean he 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 i've got a little medusa head on that protective gorgonay on i mean it's fascinating like in how many different forms medusa's legacy is today you know both as she's everywhere she's the versace logo she's everywhere 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 desexualizing her which i like a lot because quite often when you get a quite often when you get a monstrous man, he's just monstrous and scary. And 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 femme fatale is 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, in the Percy Jackson films.

I have a huge soft spot for the little Lego version because she's not at all sexy. Damien Hirst styled 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. That was very much in the sexy Medusa area.

And you kind of go, oh, you could give her some more clothes 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 talking to a friend at history hit hq and he mentioned i mentioned to you before we 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 the vicious enemy evil kind of medusa coming through in that depiction 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 stone blind 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 he

can do it by touch there's not really very much difference and yet when we read midas's story again in ovid's metamorphoses we imagine it from the inside we think oh wouldn't it be awful if everything i touch 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 at her from from the outside. I guess with Circe as well, some other kind of figure. She turned me into a pig. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How interesting.

And I guess one other thing that, I mean, I'm a little weird, but I'm weird and proud, is actually one of my favorite and enjoyable memes of all time, was one which just showed the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, which just goes, Medusa won, Jesus Christ now. Oh, nice. Yeah, really nice. There is something really gratifying about imagining

that statues in the ancient world are all Medusa's you know victims or the previous 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 just 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 Medusa in this novel of yours and it just goes to me to say natalie always a pleasure having you on the ancient podcast on history 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 filmed 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 bargain thank you to you all for helping make this episode a reality now last things for 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, well you know what you

can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your 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.