GORGON, GORGONS, a figure or figures in Greek myth ology. Homer speaks of only one Gorgon, whose head is repre sented in the Iliad (v. 741) as fixed in the centre of the aegis of Zeus. In the Odyssey (xi. 633) she is a monster of the under world. Hesiod increases the number of Gorgons to three Stheno (the mighty), Euryale (the far-springer) and Medusa (the queen), and makes them the daughters of the sea-god Phor cys and of Keto. Their home is on the extreme west ; according to later authorities, in Libya (Hesiod, Theog. 274; Herodotus II. 91; Pausanias II. 21). The Attic tradition, reproduced in Euripides (Ion, 1002), regarded the Gorgon as a monster, pro duced by Ge to aid her sons the giants against the gods and slain by Athena.
The Gorgons are represented as winged female creatures; their hair consists of snakes; they are round faced, flat nosed, with tongues lolling out and with large projecting teeth. Medusa was the only one of the three who was mortal ; hence Perseus was able to kill her by cutting off her head. From the blood that spurted from her neck sprang Chrysaor and Pegasus, her two sons by Poseidon. The head, which had the power of turning all who looked upon it into stone, was given to Athena, or buried in the market-place of Argos. The hideously grotesque original type of the Gorgoneion, as the Gorgon's head was called, was used generally as an amulet, a protection against the evil eye. Heracles is said to have obtained a lock of Medusa's hair from Athena and given it to Sterope, the daughter of Cepheus, as a protection for the town of Tegea against attack (Apollodorus II. 144). Later classical art showed Medusa as coldly beautiful; the realists of Hellenistic times gave her face an agonized ex pression. Various silly rationalistic accounts are given by late authors. More reasonable is the explanation of anthropologists that Medusa, whose virtue is really in her head, was originally a ritual mask. It also seems possible that the staring or pursuing faces, not uncommon in nightmares, have a good deal to do with her.