Perseus and Medusa

One look straight into the eyes of this enemy, and a person would turn to stone on the spot. Defeating such an enemy seemed impossible.

Yet this was a real problem, one that a young man named Perseus once had to solve if he wanted to come home alive. The ancient Greeks said his story took place long ago, and that it belonged to a small island in the blue sea called Seriphos.

The mother of Perseus was named Danae. His mother's father, a cruel king, heard a prophecy that this grandson would one day bring him great misfortune. Without pity, the king set mother and child adrift on the sea in a wooden chest, to go wherever the wind and waves might carry them. The chest drifted for many days until it washed ashore on Seriphos. There a kind fisherman named Dictys found them and saved them both. Dictys raised Perseus as his own son. He taught the boy to row a boat, to throw a spear, and to live an honest life.

But Dictys had a brother, King Polydectes, who ruled the island. He was greedy and scheming. He set his eyes on Danae and wanted to force her to marry him. Danae refused him firmly, for all her love belonged to her only son. When sweet words could not win her, Polydectes made Danae a servant. Day after day she carried water and ground grain, while Perseus was still far away on trading ships.

Then one day, Polydectes held a great feast and ordered every guest to bring a gift for the king. Perseus was only a poor sailor with nothing to bring, and he stood outside the door in shame. The guests pointed and laughed, and called him a nameless child who had drifted in from the sea. Stung in his pride, Perseus blurted out a challenge. He would bring back a gift more precious than anything they had. It would be the head of the Gorgon Medusa, a monster who turned anyone who looked into her eyes to stone in an instant.

Polydectes laughed loudly and seized on that promise at once. From now on, he declared, Perseus could not set foot on the island again unless he brought back the head of Medusa. The moment Perseus finished speaking, he regretted it. But words once spoken are like an arrow that has left the bow, and they cannot be taken back.

That very night, as Perseus sat alone on the shore, a goddess appeared before him. It was Athena, with deep gray eyes and a bronze shield hanging from her shoulder, polished as bright as a mirror. Athena said that if Perseus truly wished to face Medusa, she would help him. But he must remember one thing, only one. Never look straight into the eyes of Medusa. Look only at her reflection in this shield. With that, Athena handed him the mirror-bright shield and told him to guard it well throughout the journey.

Right after that, the god Hermes appeared too. He gave Perseus a pair of winged sandals to fly like a bird, and a curved sword, clear as a gemstone and so sharp that a single stroke would be enough. Athena warned him that the journey would last as long as seven years. There would be no turning back and no changing his mind halfway. Perseus nodded. He strapped the sandals onto his feet, slung the shield over his shoulder, and set out.

The first stage of the road brought Perseus to the home of the three Gray Sisters. They were strange old women, ancient beyond counting, who shared just one eye among them, passing it from hand to hand so each could see. The three refused to show him the way. They held tight to the secret of where the nymphs who could help him lived. Perseus stood still and watched. He waited for the exact moment when the eye passed from one sister's hand to the next. Then, quick as lightning, he reached out and caught it first. The old women panicked and could only beg. In the end, they had to tell him the true way in exchange for their eye.

That was how Perseus found his way to the garden of the nymphs. Fragrant flowers bloomed all along the paths, and the babbling of a stream mingled with their clear laughter. The nymphs welcomed him kindly. They placed in his hands a precious cap of invisibility, which hid whoever wore it from every eye. Then they showed him the long road to the island where the three Gorgon sisters lived.

Perseus put on the cap, slung the shield over his shoulder, and flew on and on toward that lonely island. As soon as he arrived, he remembered Athena's warning. He raised the mirror-bright shield before his face and looked only through it to search the island. In the reflection, he saw the three Gorgon sisters fast asleep. The two elder sisters were covered in iron scales, ugly and coarse. Medusa alone was different. Her hair was a mass of snakes that stirred faintly in her sleep, yet her face held a strange sorrow. She tossed and turned restlessly, as if trapped in a long nightmare.

He flew higher, keeping the shield before his eyes, never once glancing at Medusa directly. In the mirror he could clearly see the monster stirring. He could even see the shadow of his own hand slowly drawing the curved sword from its sheath. Through that whole battle, Perseus never looked straight at her once. It all took place in the small mirror in his hand. One stroke of the sword swept through the reflection, and then everything suddenly went still. He did not need a second stroke.

Without once turning to look, Perseus reached out and quickly wrapped what had fallen in a soft goatskin, then tied it tight. All the while, his eyes stayed turned in another direction. The two other Gorgon sisters woke with a start and found that their sister was gone. They shrieked and chased him across the whole sky. But the winged sandals of Perseus flew faster than the wind. They carried him farther and farther away, until the shrieking was only a tiny echo behind him, and then it faded completely.

Across many seas, Perseus returned to the island of Seriphos. First he found his mother, Danae, and his foster father, Dictys, and held them close after so many years apart. He went straight to the great hall. There Polydectes was holding a lavish feast with his courtiers, laughing as he recalled the young man's old promise as if it were a joke.

Perseus stepped forward and said calmly that he had kept his promise. Then he opened the goatskin and turned it toward the crowd, while he himself turned away, never looking at what he held up. In a single moment, the arrogant laughter in the hall died away. No one moved anymore. The whole room sank into a strange, heavy silence. Soon nothing could be heard but the wind slipping through the window frame. Polydectes and his courtiers had become a ring of silent gray stone statues.

From that day on, Danae no longer had to live in fear of Polydectes. Perseus handed the throne of Seriphos to his kind foster father, Dictys, the man who deserved it more than anyone. Then he led his mother down to a boat, and they sailed far from the island where she had suffered so much.

The ancient Greeks still tell how that young man defeated the most fearsome thing in the world without ever looking straight at it. He won not with his own eyes, but with a mirror-bright shield, and with friends who appeared just when he needed them most. The boat carrying Perseus and Danae left the shore. Behind them, the island of Seriphos grew smaller and smaller in the blue sea, where the water still sparkled like that shield of long ago.