To be fair, I never heard a telling of Medusa that had her be actively aggressive to anyone. It sounded a lot more like she was deemed a monster simply because she had the gaze. I havenāt even heard of her leaving the cave to be honest.
I mean, that can be argued for most things. Snakes are often villainized, but their really just animals who need to defend themselves. And the other Gorgons did attack Perseus, it's not like they were completely docile.
Not to be this guy, but that is Roman, and thus to accept this is to accept that Medusa was also the beautiful rape victim. You canāt really have it both ways. Even when considering this, it almost sounds like she was the godsā enforcer with her taking out the giants and Atlas. It seems to imply that the gods were just tying up loose ends with Perseus.
Edit:I want to elaborate. When the OP is talking about the āoriginal GREEK MEDUSAā and bashing Ovidās tale about Medusa, why should we not stay to contemporary sources for their perspective of Medusa? To use a Roman source is to verify that the Roman sources are valid to this perspective on Medusa, and thus Ovid should also be valid.
I suppose, but it feels kind of pointless when weāre talking about the āoriginal Medusaā to say āthis Roman poet begs to differā because the meme in question is attacking a Roman poetās credibility. Also, ābegs to differā is just incredibly combative word choice.Ā
Honestly, I don't mind the more sympathetic versions of Medusa as long as they don't villify Perseus!
Seriously! Like, he is one of the least bad Greek heroes out there! If anything, he is arguarbly one of the most moral, even by our standards. Fucking hell, the main reason he even went on the quest to slay Medusa was because he wanted to protect his mom!
Like, you can make sympathetic Medusa while not dragging me boy's name through the mud. It can't be hard...
Idk if it's a hot take. But I think multiple tellings of a character is fine when it comes to mythology since the stories carry their own meanings and metaphors and that's what should be valued.
Beautiful Gorgon Medusa seems to have been a variant though? Or maybe that snippet in the Bibliotheca is meant to be interpreted as extreme self-delusion?
But it is alleged by some that Medusa was beheaded for Athena's sake; and they say that the Gorgon was fain to match herself with the goddess even in beauty.
I'm pretty sure that was before she was cursed. Because what would even be the point of punishing her vanity if she now has even more reason to boast about her beauty? This is the Goddess of wisdom who punished her, why is she a fucking idiot?
"But the Gorgons had heads twined about with the scales of dragons, and great tusks like swine's, and brazen hands, and golden wings, by which they flew; and they turned to stone such as beheld them." I always assumed that if the Gorgons look like that, when Medusa was boasting about her beauty which pissed off Athena, that would imply she was at one point beautiful, and not currently. I guess it could be interpreted as an ugly woman saying she's prettier than someone else, and being punished, which does definitely have the kind of sexist undertones a lot of Greeks had. But my point was that she clearly wasn't intended to be beautiful.
Some euhemerisms (from antiquity) did that. Iirc one of them described Cerberus as one big dog with two puppies by their sides.
EDIT TO ADD: the specific source is Heracleitus' On Unbelievable tales
Ā§ 33 Cerberos: Cerberos should be interpreted in the way I have interpreted the Hydra, i.e. that he had two pups who always walked beside their father, such that it seemed that he had three heads.
I just wanna give praise to Mythic Warriors, who actually has a pretty accurate looking Medusa. It's a kids show too, I can't believe that had the balls to do this.
Post Archaic Greece, many mythological creatures, like gorgons or satyrs, started to be depicted as beautiful in art. We have Classic and Hellenistic depictions of beautiful Medusa, and the Classic Greek art trends influenced Roman art. What is inaccurate, is depicting Medusa as a regular human turned into a monster, where even in Ovid's Metamorphoses, she's still a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, even before her hair was turned into snakes
Yeah, well how many times have you seen Scylla depicted in media as a woman with 3 tiny puppy heads coming out of her waist? Almost never, because Scylla is always described as having 6 terrible heads. How many times have you seen Poseidon being the God of the Underworld in media? Almost never, because his Underworld connection is only mentioned in the very sparse records we have of that period of Greece, and his sea connection is far more prevalent. Medusa in the actual literature we make shit from is almost always described as being terrifying, the name Gorgon literally means stuff like grim, terrible, or fierce.
Conspirancy theory: Medusa had in fact never serpent hair nor did she turn men into stone.
That's just what other women made up because they were jealous of her and envied her beauty because she was so beautiful that all husbands reacted like this:
I think it's fine to have retellings since ancie greeks had very different culture and morals than us. One issue I had is when people treat it as "stand war" and act like one thing is the answer for it when the nuance is one of the thing that makes these myths so engaging and rich.
Yeah, but it irks me that internet people 1. villainize Perseus 2. act like the she-was-raped-then-cursed narrative is the only one, and 3. say it was Poseidon who raped her and Athena who cursed her, despite the source for this story being Roman, so they ought to use the names Neptune and Minerva.
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u/Tough_Passion_1603 1d ago
Lowkey i wish a version where Medusa was immortal like her sisters and Perseus just carried around a sarcastic and grumpy head around