PERSEUS AND MEDUSA ON ATTIC - Metropolitan Museum of Art

PERSEUS AND MEDUSA ON
AN ATTIC VASE
BY MARJORIE J. MILNE
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Greek and Roman Art
The Attic red-figured vase illustrated opposite
and on pages 128 and 129 was acquired by the
Museum last year. It is an outstanding example
of the style of Polygnotos, one of the most important
of the vase painters active in Athens
about 450-430 B.C., who had been hitherto represented
in our collection by only a minor work.
One side is decorated with a conventional
scene, a king, whom the inscription calls Polypeithes,
standing between two women. The
other, or principal, side has a picture of Perseus
and the Gorgon Medusa. Medusa lies relaxed
in sleep on a rocky hillside sparsely grown with
small flowering plants. Her wings rise half
opened behind her. She wears a short dress (for
Gorgons, when awake, were active creatures
and had no use for the floor-length robes of
Greek women) made of heavy wool, woven in
handsome geometric patterns. Perseus (somewhat
unnecessarily identified by the inscription
Ieppeu[c]), with his head turned away, seizes
her by the hair and puts the cutting edge of his
harpe, or sickle, to her neck. The artist has absent-mindedly
made the wings of his cap point
in the wrong direction. Athena watches the
scene. Her aegis is still bare of the Gorgon's
head, which she will receive from Perseus after
he has completed his mission.
This scene is interesting for two particularities.
It is one of the earliest illustrations of the
story to show the Gorgon not as a hideous monster
but as a beautiful woman. Art in this respect
lagged behind poetry; in an ode written in
490 B.C. Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked
Medusa." Much more remarkable is the second
particularity, the presence of rays around Perseus'
head. They do not show in the photograph,
for the paint with which they were
drawn has flaked off, but the dull lines that it
has left on the glaze are plainly visible on the
vase itself (see the drawing on p. 130).
At least one other representation of Perseus,
a drawing on a white-ground toilet box in the
Louvre, shows him with rays around his head.
The style of this work would date it a few years
earlier than our new vase, but the attitude of its
Perseus is very similar. His head is turned back,
his knees aYe bent in a running position, and
one arm (instead of both) is stretched out in
front of him. It looks as if Polygnotos and the
artist of the Louvre vase had been inspired by
the same work. What this work was we may perhaps
discover after we have considered the
meaning of the rays. Since the discussion of the
rays involves details of the story of Perseus and
Medusa, we shall begin by briefly recalling the
story.
When Akrisios, king of Argos, asked Apollo's
oracle at Delphi whether he would have a son,
he was told that he would not, but that his
daughter Danae would bear a son, at whose
hands he would meet his death. So he imprisoned
Danae in an underground chamber, in
order that no man might approach her. But
Zeus, who had fallen in love with her, transformed
himself into a shower of gold raining
through the roof of her prison. To Zeus she
bore a son, Perseus. When Akrisios discovered
this, he shut Danae and Perseus in a chest and
cast them into the sea. The chest floated to the
island of Seriphos, where Danae and Perseus
were rescued and cared for by a fisherman,
Diktys. After Perseus grew up, Diktys's brother,
King Polydektes, fell in love with Danae, and
to get rid of Perseus sent him after the Gorgon's
head. With the help of Hermes and
Athena, Perseus succeeded in obtaining the cap
of Hades, which made him invisible, the
winged shoes, which helped him to fly, and the
kibisis, a bag for carrying the head. He found
the three Gorgons asleep and, looking the
other way (for the Gorgon's head would turn
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Perseus cutting off Medusa's head as she sleeps. Detail of an Attic red-figured vase by Polygnotos.
A bout 450-440 B.C.
Rogers Fund

Attic red-figured vase of which a detail is shown
on the preceding page
the beholder to stone), cut off the head of Medusa,
the mortal one. Her two sisters pursued
him but could not catch him, for the cap of
Hades made him invisible. He returned to
Seriphos and displayed the head to Polydektes
and his people, who were immediately turned
to stone. He then set out with the friendliest
intentions to see his grandfather, Akrisios,
whose fears he finally succeeded in allaying.
But the oracle was fulfilled nonetheless, for
one day when he was engaged in a discusthrowing
contest, his discus by mischance struck
Akrisios, who died of the wound.
Albert Dumont, who published the Louvre
vase, explained the rays around Perseus' head
as an attempt to show pictorially the magical
properties of the cap of Hades. Perseus, however,
had been a familiar figure in art and
legend from the seventh century B.c. on. It
would hardly seem likely that an artist of the
mid-fifth century should suddenly find it neces-
sary to draw attention to the well-known power
of the cap of Hades. Moreover the cap is de-
scribed in the "Shield of Herakles," a sixthcentury
poem falsely attributed to Hesiod, as
"having the dread darkness of night." It would
be strange, as Professor A. D. Nock has pointed
out to me, to find darkness expressed by rays,
for rays are the means used by Greek art to
depict light. The sun, for example, is often
represented as a man with rays around his
head, and sometimes other phenomena of light,
such as the dawn and the morning star, appear
as human figures surrounded by rays.
Now a number of modern scholars have
thought that Perseus was originally not a hero
but a sun god. His journey in the chest and his
landing on Seriphos have been interpreted as
a mythical description of night followed by
sunrise, and the Gorgon is sometimes explained
as the moon. Our new vase might seem at first
sight to confirm such theories.
The study of folklore, however, has shown
that the story of Perseus, like some other stories
that in the nineteenth century were interpreted
as solar myths, has nothing to do with the sun
or other natural phenomena. It is made up for
the most part of episodes found in many parts
of the world and belonging not to nature myths
but to stories told purely for pleasure. Such
stories have made us familiar from childhood
with the king who desires offspring and is
warned of consequences which he vainly strives
to avoid, with imprisoned princesses, persons
put in chests and flung into the sea, dangerous
missions accomplished with the advice of supernatural
helpers, caps of darkness, shoes of
swiftness, and the rest of it. No exact parallel
for Medusa, it is true, has ever been found. But
recently a plausible explanation of her has
been advanced by W. R. Halliday. The story,
he suggests, was inspired by the Gorgon's head,
which occurs in both literature and art in contexts
from which Perseus is absent. For ex-
ample, Odysseus in the eleventh book of the
Odyssey, line 633 ff., explains why, on his descent
to Hades, he did not stay longer, "Pale
fear seized me that noble Persephone would
send the head of the Gorgon, the dread monster,
from Hades." In art the head was very common
as a decoration on shields, buildings, citadel
walls, vases, and other objects. It was in fact one
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of the most frequently used charms against the
evil eye. People began to wonder where the
head had come from and how the "Gorgon"
had been deprived of it. The story of Perseus
and Medusa was an attempt to answer these
questions.
The myth, then, cannot be used to prove
that Perseus was a sun god. Nor is there any
trace of an identification of him with the sun
in genuine popular belief. Philosophical speculation
is another matter. In Byzantine commentaries
on Hesiod we find Perseus explained as
the sun and Medusa as the moisture that the
sun evaporates. This probably goes back to an
ancient source, but it is only one of several
ancient explanations. Another, for example,
made the three Gorgons three kinds of Fear
vanquished by Courage (Perseus) and Wisdom
(Athena).
Just when the solar explanation of Perseus
was first hazarded we do not know; it may be
as old as our vase. The interpretation of the
Homeric gods as allegories of natural phenomena
is said to have been begun by Theagenes
of Rhegium in the twenties of the sixth century
B.C. In the second half of the fifth century we
find Metrodoros of Lampsakos applying this
method even to heroes. Agammemnon, he said,
was the ether, Achilles the sun, Helen the
earth, Paris the air, and Hektor the moon. But
such theories would hardly have been reflected
in vase paintings. It is the popular forms of
myths that appear on vases, not the abstruse
notions of philosophers.
If our new vase and the Louvre toilet box
had been painted at a later period and in South
Italy, we might cite as a parallel the great halo
of rays around the hero Bellerophon on a
South Italian vase of the Hellenistic age. Pre-
cisely why these rays were given to Bellerophon
we do not know. Perhaps they refer to something
uncanny in him. For we find them (or
sometimes a mere halo) on South Italian vases
around such figures as Lyssa, the personification
of madness, a sphinx, a sea demon, and
the sea nymph Thetis, who had the power of
transforming herself into other shapes. It may
be, on the other hand, that the custom of giving
rays to representations of the sun, dawn,
King Polypeithes and two women, the other
side of the vase shown on the opposite page
and the morning star, who (except for the Sun)
were among the less important figures in Greek
mythology, gave rise, among artists of Italy, to
a tendency toward bestowing rays on various
minor mythological figures. This latter habit,
however, whatever its explanation, is not Attic
and so cannot be used to interpret our new vase.
The following tentative explanation of the
rays at least does not contradict what we know
of Attic art and of the way in which Athenian
vase painters worked. One of the constellations
is named Perseus, and since it is described by
the astronomer Eudoxos, who lived in the first
half of the fourth century B.C., it was probably
recognized before his time. Various other considerations
have led scholars to conjecture that
its recognition goes back to the sixth century
B.C. The attitude of the figure in the stars is
not unlike that of the Perseus on our vase and
on the toilet box in the Louvre. The knees are
bent in a running position and the right arm is
raised. Now Sirius, the dog star, is represented
in art, for example on coins of Keos, an island
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major art. The great mural painter Polygnotos,
for example, represented Phaidra as a girl in a
swing, a covert allusion to her suicide by hanging,
and a number of similar instances occurred
in his work.
Head of Perseus. Detail of the vase shown on
page 128. Drawn by Lindsley F. Hall
off the coast of Attica, as a dog with rays
around his head. I therefore suggest that Polygnotos
and the artist of the Paris vase had seen
a picture of the constellations among which
Perseus figured as a running youth with rays
around his head. Euripides in the Ion, 1146 ff.,
describes a tapestry representing the heavens
with the sun, moon, stars, night, dawn, and a
number of constellations which is used to roof
a banqueting tent. Perhaps some such tapestry
was the source of the Perseus on our new vase.
There is, however, an alternative possibility
which has been suggested to me by Professor
Nock and which seems to me attractive. Homer
describes a supernatural light around the heads
of fighting heroes (Iliad v. 4 ff. and xvIII. 203
ff.) and in the Birds of Aristophanes (1709 ff.)
Peithetairos, the founder of the city Cloud-
Cuckoo-Town, is said to surpass the brilliance
of stars and sun. The rays, then, may be a form
of glorification of Perseus as hero. They were
perhaps suggested to the artist of the original
painting by the story of Danae and the golden
rain. Double meanings of this kind are not
characteristic of vase paintings but occur in
The accession number of our new vase is
45.11.1. Its height is i8-13/16 inches (47.8 cm.).
It has been put together from fragments, with
a few missing pieces restored in plaster. It was
first published by G. Libertini in "Grandiosa
pelike col mito di Perseo," Bollettino d'arte,
vol. xxvII (1933), pp. 554 f., and has been referred
to in several articles since. It was attributed
to Polygnotos by J. D. Beazley, Attic
Red-figure Vase-Painters, p. 680, no. 49. The
ancient literary and archaeological sources of
the story of Perseus are enumerated and some
modern theories are discussed or advocated by
E. Kuhnert in Roscher, Ausfiihrliches Lexikon
der griechischen und romischen Mythologie,
vol. III, cols. 1986 ff.; C. Robert in Die griechische
Heldensage, vol. I, pp. 222 ff.; and J. L.
Catterall in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie
der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. xix,
cols. 978 f. For folklore in the story of Perseus
see E. S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus,
A. H. Krappe, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen,
vol. xxxiv (1933), pp. 225 if., and W. R. Halliday,
Indo-European Folk-Tales and Greek Legend,
pp. 113 ff. For rays around figures on
South Italian vases see L. Stephani, Nimbus
und Strahlenkranz in den Werken der alten
Kunst (reprinted from Memoires de l'Academie
des sciences de St.-Petersbourg, Series vI,
Sciences politiques, histoire, philologie, vol. ix),
passim, and K. Keyssner in Pauly-Wissowa, op.
cit., vol. xvii, cols. 6o0 if. The constellation is
discussed by Windisch, De Perseo eiusque
familia inter astra collocatis; Boll and Gundel
in Roscher, op. cit., vol. vi, cols. 908 ff.; and
W. Rathmann in Pauly-Wissowa, op. cit., vol.
xix, cols. 992 f. For the Louvre vase see A. Dumont,
Monuments grecs publies par l'Association
pour l'encouragement des etudes grecques
en France, vol. I, no. 7, 1878, pp. 15 ff., pl. 2.
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