Clash of the Gods (2009) s01e05 Episode Script
Medusa
If looks could kill you would be dead.
Turned to stone with just one glance.
This is the myth of Medusa.
A monstrous female feared by all men.
On the battlefield and beyond.
But she will be challenged by a surprising enemy.
Behind the story lurks a stunning reality.
Is Greece's most famous monster inspired by a human corpse? And is her story based on actual science as seen on our night sky? Discover the hidden meaning behind one of the greatest stories ever told.
The hunt for the head of Medusa.
This was once a garden, now it is a graveyard littered with dead bodies.
Each face frozen in a moment of terror.
The fatal moment when it gazed upon Medusa.
Her gaze penetrates right into your inner being and petrifies you from the inside out.
The myth of Medusa has captivated us for almost 3,000 years.
Today her image still commands instant recognition around the world.
The Medusa that we often see depicted on vases features a woman with boar's tusks, snakes curling around her head instead of hair, sometimes she is bearded, very often she's grimacing, facing us directly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, her eyes staring straight at you.
In ancient Greece, myths made sense of a confusing world.
Their stories recorded history, explained nature, and dictated how people should live.
The Medusa myth was no exception.
They teach lessons to the society and help them organise things.
And I think the Medusa story gives us a window into certain kinds of values in ancient Greek society.
It surely gives a sense of a rich portrait of men's experience insofar as they may well have felt, at some point in their lives, completely under the spell of some bewitching type of woman.
Medusa can crush a man with a single, penetrating look.
It is a power that makes her nearly invincible.
The Medusa myth awakens a number of fears in people, especially men.
This image of the all-powerful woman whose gaze can't be averted, whose gaze can see right through you, to expose everything inside of you, that can freeze you in your tracks, and somehow devour you and consume you, I think men in particular are very afraid of this sort of strong woman.
To the ancient Greeks, Medusa's deadly image was one of the most terrifying in all of mythology.
But she was not always a monster.
According to the myth, Medusa was once a ravishing woman.
Every man in Greece wanted to possess her.
She's described as a beautiful woman with long flowing locks of hair, every suitor wants to marry her, she causes envy among everyone.
But Medusa can't get married.
She is a priestess of Athena, the goddess of war, and bound by an eternal vow of chastity.
Athena is the patron goddess of the great city of ancient Athens.
She's also a virgin goddess, sex is not a part of her world, she's actually beyond the reach of any male desire.
Servants in her temple would have been expected to be virginal so they could devote their energies not to domestic issues and child rearing but to the goddess' service.
Medusa, the hideous image of evil starts out as a symbol of purity.
This is the story, but could it be based on reality? Athena's temple is no myth.
It still stands today high atop the Acropolis in Athens.
The Parthenon.
In Greek it means "place of the virgin".
When it was completed in 430 BC it towered over the city of Athens.
Any Greek city should have a great temple.
It would be like any city in America having some kind of great sports stadium.
So Athens being the most prominent city in ancient Greece, wanted to have also a temple that befitted its magnificence, and so they created the Parthenon.
At the centre of the temple stood a colossal statue of Athena.
Nearly 40 feet high, carved out of ivory and gold.
It was one of the most impressive sights in the ancient world.
In the myth, this is where Medusa's tragic fate unfolds.
Medusa's beauty is off-limits, locked away in the service to Athena.
But one suitor will not let her vow of chastity stand in his way - Poseidon, god of the sea.
Poseidon is this sort of very prominent, masculine power.
He is the god of the sea and the god of storms and the god of earthquakes.
Earthquakes don't creep up on you, they hit you very hard.
If he was angered, even just a little bit, he could explode violently and really do harm to you.
In a fit of raw lust Poseidon makes his move.
And ravages the virgin priestess.
He raped her inside of Athena's Temple, a sacrilegious act.
He stole from her her virginity.
Certainly this would be a crime in any time of the world.
Medusa is devastated.
Her innocence has been stolen.
Her life changed forever.
She was a rape victim and so she was no longer eligible for ordinary marriage according to the mores of Greek times.
And she's no longer a virgin either so she wasn't able to be devoted to service to a goddess.
For certain religious rites you had to purify yourself from intercourse so actually having intercourse in the Temple is desecrating that space.
Hence Athena's anger.
Athena is furious.
But not with Poseidon.
As a powerful male god, this is expected of him.
In the eyes of Athena, it is Medusa who deserves to be punished.
The victim is about to become the accused.
Athena's one of the guys.
She has this role that places her in the kind of male camp.
She's going to side with the men.
In a way, it reflects a society where they considered women more as property value.
They recognised at some point that rape is necessarily harmful to the woman, but it doesn't seem in most of these myths that there's any sympathy at all.
And frequently, the female figure who is raped is the one who's punished.
Athena will impose a devastating sentence on her shattered priestess.
She will transform Medusa from a beauty into a beast.
Her new look will bear a terrifying resemblance to a frequent and real sight in ancient Greece.
Human corpses.
Medusa, mythology's heinous snake-haired beast can turn her enemies to stone with a single glance.
Once, she was Greece's greatest beauty.
Desired by both men and gods.
But after Poseidon raped her Medusa's world changed forever.
The Medusa story is a tragedy because she wasn't even the perpetrator of the deed, it was Poseidon who raped her in Athena's Temple, but she's then turned into a hideous monster.
In the myth, the goddess Athena curses Medusa without warning.
She begins an agonizing transformation.
Clawing desperately at her face.
Her skin cracks and withers.
And her long, silken hair becomes a writhing mass of poisonous snakes.
Medusa's horrific transformation is almost complete.
But there's one more twist.
She's now gonna have to undergo the most powerful and gut-wrenching of all the aspects of her curse.
She'll have to be now a person whose very sight turns the looker into stone.
It's now gonna isolate her from all of human society.
Medusa is now no longer have any interactions with anyone else.
So what Athena has effectively done is consign this poor girl to a kind of solitary confinement for the rest of her life.
For the tragic crime of being raped, Medusa has lost her status, her beauty and her ability to look at anyone without killing them.
Now, the final blow, she is banished to a remote and desolate island for life.
Medusa is now gonna live out this curse for eternity.
And for all eternity, things don't really change.
All that matters is that stone garden grows by one every time someone tries to come close to her.
In the myth, Medusa has become a type of monster called a Gorgon.
A name that comes from the ancient Greek word for terrible.
The gorgon is this horrible monster.
It's got scaly skin, huge staring eyes that can turn you to stone by looking at you.
The earliest traditions that we have of gorgons mention Medusa.
Medusa becomes first a human being who's then transformed into one of these nasty beasts.
In Greek myth, gorgons represent the physical embodiment of death.
In fact, death is what inspired them.
The broad, wide-open eyes, the marks on the face, the bloated face itself, the pulled-back skin showing the teeth and the tongue protruding was inspired by the sight of a dead body.
In the days after dying, the skin of a human corpse begins to shrink around the various parts of the body.
The face becomes grotesquely bloated.
The eyes expand out of their sockets.
And the tongue swells pushing itself out of the mouth.
Gradually, the corpse morphs from man to monster.
On photographs of dead bodies, you can see all these changes that are characteristic of the gorgon taking place.
This is one of the things that people today aren't so familiar with, we get separated from death very early.
We have specialists to take care of dead bodies.
But the truth is that in ancient times you wouldn't be insulated from this.
People would see this sort of thing.
Death was everywhere in the ancient world.
In fact, many other historical monsters are modelled on corpses.
In the middle of the Aztec calendar you find exactly the same features, you've got exactly the same oversized eyes, you've got the broad nose, you've got the rictus grin, you've got the protruding tongue.
You find it in Bes, in Egypt.
In India, you find many of the same features on Rahu, the demon responsible for the eclipse.
In southeast Asia, Rangda, the demon that kidnaps children also has huge pop-eyes and a very, very long tongue scrolling out of her mouth.
The prominence of this gorgon symbol in many different spots in the ancient world gives us a real sense of just how widespread these myths were.
In the story, Medusa is now a gorgon, the mythical face of death.
But her physical transformation is only the beginning of her punishment.
Her hideous looks will make her an outcast.
But her petrifying power will make her a target.
Because the warrior who beheads Medusa will possess the ultimate battlefield advantage.
Her severed head will still turn men to stone.
Men from all over the Mediterranean set out to slay Medusa and claim that power for themselves.
One of them has more than glory at stake.
His name is Perseus.
And his hunt for Medusa's head is one of mythology's greatest adventures.
The story of Perseus begins in Argos, a real region of southern Greece.
In antiquity a lot of myths were situated in specific locations.
Now, this was important for the people who lived in those places.
They could actually claim connection to one of these divine heroes.
In the myth, Argos is ruled by a tyrant named Acrisius.
The king has a problem.
He has no male heir.
The Greek world tried to retain property in families.
And the way you retain it families is you leave it to the first born son or the eldest male heir.
Acrisius' only child is a daughter, Danaë.
She has no children of her own.
So the King consults a prophetess to ask if she will ever bear him a grandson.
Acrisius is told in prophecy that if his daughter ever had a child, that child would rise up and kill him.
He finds out that the son of his daughter is in fact going to kill him, and he sort of freaks out and decides that he needs to prevent her from ever having a child to begin with.
This fear of generational shift, this fear of losing your power to the next generation, was real.
If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some point you needed to keep an eye on the kid.
Overcome by terror, the King hatches a plan to save his own skin.
Acrisius had his daughter Danaë walled up inside of a tower where no on could see her.
It was a pretty miserable existence.
Danaë is trapped with no fresh air and barely any food.
It is the King's way of killing her without getting blood on his hands.
The King kept waiting for news that his daughter had died, and was very surprised that he never received news that she had died of starvation or thirst.
After a while, they begin to see lights on and hear noise and sound coming from the tower.
So Acrisius went to see what his daughter was up to.
The King enters his daughter's chamber and discovers to his horror that Danaë is not only still alive, she's a mother to a son, Perseus.
Acrisius is stunned that someone accessed the secure tower and impregnated his daughter.
But the baby's father isn't a mortal man.
He is king of the Greek gods.
Mythology's most prolific womaniser.
Zeus.
Zeus, who seduced so many women in so many myths, sees Danaë through the grating and falls in love with her.
He comes down to her in about the only shape that could come through the bars, which is a shower of gold.
He took the form of a cascade of gold and poured himself into the room and then was able to make love to her that way.
Zeus' shower of gold may have been inspired by a real natural phenomenon, one named after Perseus.
Probably the most impressive and visible meteorite shower in the sky is the Persean meteorite shower.
Certainly, it looks like a shower of gold coming down if you've ever stopped and watched it in August.
You can see the individual streaks with the yellowish colour to them.
In mythologies around the world women can be impregnated by various natural forces.
It's not just the shower of gold that we have in the legend of Perseus, we have women and animals sometimes being impregnated by the wind.
Or in various mythologies women become pregnant by the sun.
Perseus is born both divine and mortal.
A type of hero known as a demi-god.
So this demi-god idea means that this person has some features that are very godly, some divine powers, but at the same time he is mortal, he can die.
I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea of the demi-gods because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible.
To create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods.
To fulfil his destiny as a demi-god Perseus must first survive his grandfather's wrath.
King Acrisius fears the boy will fulfil the prophecy he dreads and grow up to kill him.
His first impulse is to murder both mother and child.
But he fears Zeus' revenge.
So he devises a plan to let nature do the killing for him.
Acrisius decided to put both the mother and the child into a boat-like construction and throw them into the sea.
Danaë and Perseus have been left for dead with no food, no direction and no protection from the dangers of the sea.
Meanwhile, on a dismal island beyond the waves, Medusa is adding statues to her garden of death.
Warriors turned to stone trying to capture her head.
She possesses a power every conqueror desires.
Even real conquerors like Alexander the Great.
Medusa's power to turn men to stone may have spawned the famous phrase "looks that kill".
But the ancient Greeks believed her power could be used for good as well as evil.
In their language, the name "medusa" actually had a positive connotation, it meant "guardian".
Her image was often used to ward off danger.
She even appeared on the armour of some of the world's most feared warriors.
Evidence of this can be found in one of the time capsules of the ancient world, Pompei.
When they were excavating the city in the 1830s, archaeologists found a very large mosaic which depicts a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian King Darius.
And on Alexander's breast plate is an image of Medusa.
The battlefield wasn't the only place where Medusa's powers were sought.
She was also used to scare children.
The idea was that you would put the symbol on the outside of your stove and this would prevent children from opening up the oven door.
Now, the Medusa was something that Greek parents used to use in order to scare the kids in order to eat their food.
"Eat your food or I'll ask the Medusa to get you.
" So it was something very horrendous, very horrible, mesmerizing, frightening.
In the myth, Medusa has a price on her head.
Warriors from across the Greek world travel to her remote island seeking to steal it and use its petrifying power as a weapon against their enemies.
So far, all who have tried made the same fatal mistake.
They looked at her, first.
The ancient sources are relatively silent on what Medusa must have thought and she is just sitting there living out her life amid a huge panoply of stone corpses.
You can imagine that it would have been a very strange situation.
You've got little stalagmites of people all over the place, and there she is, all alone.
But never had the satisfaction of actually being engaged with anybody.
So you can imagine Medusa living out her life, kind of waiting for the next person to waft into her purview and get turned into stone.
But one hero is determined to break her spell.
As Medusa languishes among her statues Perseus is coming of age across the sea.
When he was a baby, he and his mother Danaë were cast out to sea by his grandfather, King Acrisius.
Mother and son were expected to die.
But Perseus' divine father, Zeus, protected them.
They washed up on an island called Serifos and settled there.
He grows up into a nice and strapping young lad, as it were, very strong, and also very strong-willed and very protective of his mother.
Perseus has a very good reason to feel protective.
The ruler of Serifos has plans for his mother.
The king of Serifos was not enthusiastic about having Perseus around, partly because he had his eye on Danaë who was still a young woman and beautiful and he wanted to marry her.
The king hatches a plan to take Perseus out of the picture.
He demands an expensive gift from all of his subjects and vows to banish any who don't comply.
He knows that Perseus is poor and won't be able to deliver.
Perseus, being a young man without a father and without a family, if you didn't have a father in ancient Greece, it meant that you were very much a kind of social outcast, didn't have any gifts to bring to the king.
Perseus is cornered.
If he is exiled, his mother will be forced into an unwanted marriage and be separated from him forever.
He makes an impulsive decision with deadly ramifications.
Perseus says, well, I may not be able to buy a great gift because I am poor, but I'm gonna do something that no one else has been able to do, I will bring you the head of Medusa.
It's a suicide mission.
No one has ever returned from Medusa's island alive.
But for Perseus there is no turning back.
It's a matter of honour.
He can't get out of it.
He has to bring the head of the Gorgon.
If Perseus succeeds, he will return home a hero with the stature to challenge the King and protect his mother.
But if he fails, he'll be turned to stone.
In Greek mythology, the names Perseus and Medusa are forever linked.
The consummate hero and the ultimate monster.
It is a story that began here, among these ruins.
This is ancient Mycenae.
According to legend, this once great civilisation was founded by Perseus himself.
Mycenae was the greatest of the ancient city-states back in the Bronze Age.
And it ruled sway over a large swath of ancient Greece.
For millennia, it was thought that Mycenae, just like Perseus and Medusa, was a myth.
The only surviving reference to it was in Homer's epic story, The Illiad.
But in the late 19th century, a lost civilisation was rediscovered.
Using Homer's epic poems as a guide, archaeologists in the 19th century were able to locate these great ancient citadels.
And what an amazing adventure it must have been to find out that not only was Homer talking about something that existed but now they themselves were in contact with it as well.
Mycenae lies near Argos, the city where Perseus was born in the myth.
Its ruins are a window into the people who invented the story of Perseus and Medusa.
Ancient Greeks who used mythology to explain life's mysteries.
The city structures were so massive later generations of Greeks believed they were built by gods.
They would look at the ruins of those palaces and see monumental masonry.
This was a kind of feat that they couldn't imagine themselves doing, it seemed like something that only heroes could do.
It was from these ruins that the story of Perseus sprang.
The hero remembered for building the city and taking on Medusa.
It is the ultimate challenge.
Perseus confronts it with the bravado of a boy who is eager to prove himself a man.
But he is woefully unprepared for the task at hand.
Perseus has no weapons, no experience, and no idea how to kill his target.
Another piece that makes Medusa so terrifying is that they wouldn't have had a real sense of exactly what she looked like.
Anyone who had seen her before Perseus would not have lived to tell the tale.
So all he knew about was that there was this monster that was so hideous that if you ever caught eyes on her you would be frozen and turned to stone.
He stalked off and began his adventure, and it wasn't long before he realised that he had no idea where he was going.
But, as heroes often do, and especially heroes whose fathers are gods, he soon gets supernatural aid.
Lost in the wilderness, Perseus does what many ancient Greeks would have done under the same circumstances.
He prays and the gods hear him.
His father Zeus sends down a divine messenger, Hermes, who gives Perseus the jumpstart he needs, a pair of winged sandals.
One of the things that Perseus has to do is travel long distances very fast.
And being an era without airplanes here comes Hermes to offer a solution - those sandals with wings that he himself, as a messenger of the gods uses.
So he gives them to Perseus, he wears them and he can fly through continents at the speed of Well, faster than a jet.
Now that Perseus has a set of wings, what he really needs is a set of weapons.
Perseus has everything going for him, I mean, he has divine blood, he's got great powers, he's been brought up to just on the cusp of manhood, he's ready to take on these nasty beasts.
But he needs more, he's got to have technology.
Hermes offers Perseus an inside tip.
He advises him to locate the Stygian Nymphs, beautiful women who possess the magical weapons he needs to kill Medusa.
The Nymphs are these female divinities who are associated with natural elements, and they inhabit them, so they are in springs, in mountains, they're in trees.
They're typically the objects of deep and powerful sexual desire and from this we get the idea of a "nymphomaniac".
The whereabouts of these nymphs are a mystery.
Only three hideous women know how to find them.
The Graeae sisters.
They had been old, withered hags since the day they were born, and they don't like visitors.
Perseus must get them to talk so he can save his mother and survive his face-off with Medusa.
It's a battle we can still see in today's night skies if we look closely.
Medusa, a deadly gorgon, has turned countless warriors into stone.
But someone is still stalking her, Perseus, and he wants her head.
His success will require more than boyish bravado.
Perseus will need a powerful set of weapons so slay Medusa.
To get them he must find the Stygian Nymphs.
But only three wretched old women know where they live, the Graeae sisters.
They are very strange.
None of them have eyes except this one that they pass between each other whenever one wants to have a look at something, so they need to share it.
Their eye is very precious to them.
The island of the Graeae sisters is a dark realm where even the Moon does not shine.
Perseus uses his trustee winged sandals to get there.
Perseus is not just a hot-headed brawny but he's also pretty clever.
When he gets to the island he realises he should do some reconnaissance and find out what their weaknesses might be before he proceeds.
When he realises they only have the one eye and they're blind while they don't have it, he steals the eye from them as they're passing it around.
The sisters fly into a blind panic.
They're in a very abject position.
It's like a beggar having his last farthing stolen from him.
They're falling all over each other trying to get that eye back from him.
Perseus has the upper hand.
He demands the location of the nymphs.
The Graeae sisters reveal that they live on the river Styx, the waterway that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.
Perseus has what he came for.
He tosses the eye onto the sand and takes to the skies.
This is the myth, but how does it connect to reality? This story, like many others in Greek mythology, may literally have fallen from the sky.
Since the dawn of civilisation, mankind has looked at the heavens to explain the past, present and future.
An awful lot of storytelling revolves around the things that you saw in the sky, the constellations that you see.
Certainly we know that an awful lot of myths were tied to the constellations.
We have, in the 5th century, Greeks naming the constellations by the names of mythical beings.
And at that time, people not only saw the mythical creatures up in the sky as symbols, as mere representations, but they actually believed that the constellations were divine.
One especially curious pattern exists in the heavens.
A hero holding a curved sword and the head of a gorgon.
This is the constellation known as Perseus.
A celestial blueprint for the myth.
But there may be more to this cluster of stars.
It may also reveal how the story of the Graeae sisters originated.
The constellations themselves did things that inspired portions of the myth.
The second brightest star in the constellation of Perseus is Algol, which is a very peculiar star.
In the Perseus constellation, Algol forms a point on Medusa's head.
It is known as an eclipsing binary star.
It appears as a single point of light in the sky, but is actually two stars that orbit around one another.
As they go they eclipse each other's light making Algol appear to dim and then get bright again.
It is a three-day cycle that may have inspired the story of the three Graeae sisters.
Algol is very bright for a while and then it goes out further rapidly every third day.
This represents the stealing of the eye of the Graeae by Perseus.
As it tries to pass to the third Graeae, Perseus is in there among them and he steals the eye.
And when he takes it, you can see it go out.
Well, if you're a good storyteller, and if you kept track of this, you know when the star is going to disappear, so you can start telling your story when the star is still bright.
And when you get to the part of the story where Perseus has stolen the eye you can point up at the sky and say, "Look, it's gone.
" Algol's impact on the myth may not end with the Graeae sisters.
Some experts believed it also inspired the climax of the story.
Medusa's gruesome demise.
The myth continues.
Perseus is in a collision course with Medusa.
The odds are stacked against him.
To take on the monster he needs the right battle gear.
He finds it along the River Styx.
The gateway to Hades where he encounters the Stygian Nymphs.
They present Perseus with three weapons essential to his survival.
The sword of Zeus.
The shield of Athena.
And the helmet of Hades, god of the dead.
It reminds us irresistibly of James Bond getting all the fabulous devices from Q.
Not only because he gets all these things to carry out his mission but because they have magical properties to them.
Now Perseus is ready to fulfil his destiny.
And not a moment too soon.
Back home in the island of Serifos a royal wedding is in the works, and Perseus' mother is the unwilling bride.
Will her son slay Medusa and bring back her head before it's too late? And how can he succeed where so many others before him have failed? The secret lies in his shield.
Perseus' dangerous quest for the head of Medusa has taken him on a journey over thousands of miles.
Now his moment of truth has arrived.
He stands at the threshold of Medusa's deadly lair.
The gods helped him get here but the rest is up to him.
All that's around Medusa is rocks, very hard things, anything that would have been living would have been turned to stone, so it must have been a very bleak and desolate place.
Perseus is frightened as he takes the first steps toward his fate.
But they are not steps forward.
The young hero is slowly creeping backwards.
Perseus is very smart, and he realises that trying to attack Medusa head-on would be his own undoing.
He'd be turned to stone.
So what he does instead is gets his shield turn it round and actually approach her from behind.
And he walks up to her backwards looking at her in a shield so that he's safe.
You can imagine the tension building as he gets closer and closer.
As far as he knows, the shield will protect him.
But he must not have really known for sure.
Perseus cautiously makes his way through the lair.
Eyes locked on his shield.
The slightest misstep will prove fatal.
At last, Perseus locks onto his target.
Closes his eyes.
And swings his sword.
With one clean stroke the head of Medusa rolls to the floor.
Her years of torment and isolation are finally over.
There would have been great fascination for Medusa among ancient audiences and whether they were rooting for her or against her, there would have been a great sympathy for this poor person.
I mean, think about what she'd been through, and all that she'd lost, and the horrible life she was fated to live.
And her end point is to have a hero chop her head off.
It is a tragic end for a tragic figure.
But Medusa's story doesn't end here.
One of the remarkable things about Medusa's head is even after she is dead, even after she has been removed and stuffed in a bag, it still has the power to transform anyone who looks on her to stone.
Medusa's unstoppable and terrifying, but those forces can also be harnessed, and Perseus' story talks about that.
When the head is inside the bag then it becomes a weapon that can be used for good as well as evil.
Perseus is now the owner of the most dangerous weapon on Earth.
He can turn anyone to stone.
And he has a few targets in mind.
His mother, Danaë, has been left with no one to protect her from the lecherous King of Serifos.
She's about to be made a queen against her will.
For Perseus it is a race against time.
As the hero flies home it becomes clear just how powerful Medusa's head still is.
As Perseus is flying with his winged sandals back across to get to Greece, drops from her blood drop into the sand, and from this spring up hundreds and hundreds of poisonous snakes.
Some nasty monsters in antiquity are so mean and awful that their blood actually produces other monsters.
Medusa is one of those that have such powerful blood.
The dripping blood from her head as Perseus was flying away was thought, in later tellings of the story, to have given rise to all these snakes that ancient Romans knew to exist in North Africa.
In the myth, the royal wedding day has arrived.
The father of the bride has come from Argos.
Perseus' own grandfather, King Acrisius.
He has long feared the prophecy that his grandson would kill him.
Perseus arrives just as the wedding ceremony is getting under way.
When Perseus returns to Serifos and sees that his mother is about to marry the King, he becomes very angry.
So he lifts up the head of Medusa and says, "King, I have brought you your gift!" One glance turns the King to stone.
His face frozen in an eternal scream.
But he's not the only king who gets caught looking.
Acrisius is also petrified.
Danaë has been saved by her son.
And Perseus has earned his place as one of mythology's bravest heroes.
His death-defying journey has transformed him from a boy into a man.
Perseus is particularly relatable among the ancient heroes.
He is cast out at different points along the way and only because of the extra love of his mother is he able to make his way through some very difficult times.
He makes his mark in the world and he grows into his own.
He becomes a real, true powerful hero.
Someone that the Greeks can look up to.
After he saves his mother Perseus presents Medusa's head as a tribute to Athena, the goddess who created the monster.
In the end, it is Medusa's original punisher who inherits her power.
There's a poetic quality to the ending of this story as Medusa's head becomes the icon on the breastplate of Athena.
After all, this poor young girl started off this great misadventure by running a afoul of that goddess.
Athena has the first and the last laugh.
Medusa's story has come full circle.
Her myth ends where it began: In ancient Greece's greatest temple, the Parthenon.
Above it, she and the man who took her life are forever linked in the night sky.
Turned to stone with just one glance.
This is the myth of Medusa.
A monstrous female feared by all men.
On the battlefield and beyond.
But she will be challenged by a surprising enemy.
Behind the story lurks a stunning reality.
Is Greece's most famous monster inspired by a human corpse? And is her story based on actual science as seen on our night sky? Discover the hidden meaning behind one of the greatest stories ever told.
The hunt for the head of Medusa.
This was once a garden, now it is a graveyard littered with dead bodies.
Each face frozen in a moment of terror.
The fatal moment when it gazed upon Medusa.
Her gaze penetrates right into your inner being and petrifies you from the inside out.
The myth of Medusa has captivated us for almost 3,000 years.
Today her image still commands instant recognition around the world.
The Medusa that we often see depicted on vases features a woman with boar's tusks, snakes curling around her head instead of hair, sometimes she is bearded, very often she's grimacing, facing us directly with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, her eyes staring straight at you.
In ancient Greece, myths made sense of a confusing world.
Their stories recorded history, explained nature, and dictated how people should live.
The Medusa myth was no exception.
They teach lessons to the society and help them organise things.
And I think the Medusa story gives us a window into certain kinds of values in ancient Greek society.
It surely gives a sense of a rich portrait of men's experience insofar as they may well have felt, at some point in their lives, completely under the spell of some bewitching type of woman.
Medusa can crush a man with a single, penetrating look.
It is a power that makes her nearly invincible.
The Medusa myth awakens a number of fears in people, especially men.
This image of the all-powerful woman whose gaze can't be averted, whose gaze can see right through you, to expose everything inside of you, that can freeze you in your tracks, and somehow devour you and consume you, I think men in particular are very afraid of this sort of strong woman.
To the ancient Greeks, Medusa's deadly image was one of the most terrifying in all of mythology.
But she was not always a monster.
According to the myth, Medusa was once a ravishing woman.
Every man in Greece wanted to possess her.
She's described as a beautiful woman with long flowing locks of hair, every suitor wants to marry her, she causes envy among everyone.
But Medusa can't get married.
She is a priestess of Athena, the goddess of war, and bound by an eternal vow of chastity.
Athena is the patron goddess of the great city of ancient Athens.
She's also a virgin goddess, sex is not a part of her world, she's actually beyond the reach of any male desire.
Servants in her temple would have been expected to be virginal so they could devote their energies not to domestic issues and child rearing but to the goddess' service.
Medusa, the hideous image of evil starts out as a symbol of purity.
This is the story, but could it be based on reality? Athena's temple is no myth.
It still stands today high atop the Acropolis in Athens.
The Parthenon.
In Greek it means "place of the virgin".
When it was completed in 430 BC it towered over the city of Athens.
Any Greek city should have a great temple.
It would be like any city in America having some kind of great sports stadium.
So Athens being the most prominent city in ancient Greece, wanted to have also a temple that befitted its magnificence, and so they created the Parthenon.
At the centre of the temple stood a colossal statue of Athena.
Nearly 40 feet high, carved out of ivory and gold.
It was one of the most impressive sights in the ancient world.
In the myth, this is where Medusa's tragic fate unfolds.
Medusa's beauty is off-limits, locked away in the service to Athena.
But one suitor will not let her vow of chastity stand in his way - Poseidon, god of the sea.
Poseidon is this sort of very prominent, masculine power.
He is the god of the sea and the god of storms and the god of earthquakes.
Earthquakes don't creep up on you, they hit you very hard.
If he was angered, even just a little bit, he could explode violently and really do harm to you.
In a fit of raw lust Poseidon makes his move.
And ravages the virgin priestess.
He raped her inside of Athena's Temple, a sacrilegious act.
He stole from her her virginity.
Certainly this would be a crime in any time of the world.
Medusa is devastated.
Her innocence has been stolen.
Her life changed forever.
She was a rape victim and so she was no longer eligible for ordinary marriage according to the mores of Greek times.
And she's no longer a virgin either so she wasn't able to be devoted to service to a goddess.
For certain religious rites you had to purify yourself from intercourse so actually having intercourse in the Temple is desecrating that space.
Hence Athena's anger.
Athena is furious.
But not with Poseidon.
As a powerful male god, this is expected of him.
In the eyes of Athena, it is Medusa who deserves to be punished.
The victim is about to become the accused.
Athena's one of the guys.
She has this role that places her in the kind of male camp.
She's going to side with the men.
In a way, it reflects a society where they considered women more as property value.
They recognised at some point that rape is necessarily harmful to the woman, but it doesn't seem in most of these myths that there's any sympathy at all.
And frequently, the female figure who is raped is the one who's punished.
Athena will impose a devastating sentence on her shattered priestess.
She will transform Medusa from a beauty into a beast.
Her new look will bear a terrifying resemblance to a frequent and real sight in ancient Greece.
Human corpses.
Medusa, mythology's heinous snake-haired beast can turn her enemies to stone with a single glance.
Once, she was Greece's greatest beauty.
Desired by both men and gods.
But after Poseidon raped her Medusa's world changed forever.
The Medusa story is a tragedy because she wasn't even the perpetrator of the deed, it was Poseidon who raped her in Athena's Temple, but she's then turned into a hideous monster.
In the myth, the goddess Athena curses Medusa without warning.
She begins an agonizing transformation.
Clawing desperately at her face.
Her skin cracks and withers.
And her long, silken hair becomes a writhing mass of poisonous snakes.
Medusa's horrific transformation is almost complete.
But there's one more twist.
She's now gonna have to undergo the most powerful and gut-wrenching of all the aspects of her curse.
She'll have to be now a person whose very sight turns the looker into stone.
It's now gonna isolate her from all of human society.
Medusa is now no longer have any interactions with anyone else.
So what Athena has effectively done is consign this poor girl to a kind of solitary confinement for the rest of her life.
For the tragic crime of being raped, Medusa has lost her status, her beauty and her ability to look at anyone without killing them.
Now, the final blow, she is banished to a remote and desolate island for life.
Medusa is now gonna live out this curse for eternity.
And for all eternity, things don't really change.
All that matters is that stone garden grows by one every time someone tries to come close to her.
In the myth, Medusa has become a type of monster called a Gorgon.
A name that comes from the ancient Greek word for terrible.
The gorgon is this horrible monster.
It's got scaly skin, huge staring eyes that can turn you to stone by looking at you.
The earliest traditions that we have of gorgons mention Medusa.
Medusa becomes first a human being who's then transformed into one of these nasty beasts.
In Greek myth, gorgons represent the physical embodiment of death.
In fact, death is what inspired them.
The broad, wide-open eyes, the marks on the face, the bloated face itself, the pulled-back skin showing the teeth and the tongue protruding was inspired by the sight of a dead body.
In the days after dying, the skin of a human corpse begins to shrink around the various parts of the body.
The face becomes grotesquely bloated.
The eyes expand out of their sockets.
And the tongue swells pushing itself out of the mouth.
Gradually, the corpse morphs from man to monster.
On photographs of dead bodies, you can see all these changes that are characteristic of the gorgon taking place.
This is one of the things that people today aren't so familiar with, we get separated from death very early.
We have specialists to take care of dead bodies.
But the truth is that in ancient times you wouldn't be insulated from this.
People would see this sort of thing.
Death was everywhere in the ancient world.
In fact, many other historical monsters are modelled on corpses.
In the middle of the Aztec calendar you find exactly the same features, you've got exactly the same oversized eyes, you've got the broad nose, you've got the rictus grin, you've got the protruding tongue.
You find it in Bes, in Egypt.
In India, you find many of the same features on Rahu, the demon responsible for the eclipse.
In southeast Asia, Rangda, the demon that kidnaps children also has huge pop-eyes and a very, very long tongue scrolling out of her mouth.
The prominence of this gorgon symbol in many different spots in the ancient world gives us a real sense of just how widespread these myths were.
In the story, Medusa is now a gorgon, the mythical face of death.
But her physical transformation is only the beginning of her punishment.
Her hideous looks will make her an outcast.
But her petrifying power will make her a target.
Because the warrior who beheads Medusa will possess the ultimate battlefield advantage.
Her severed head will still turn men to stone.
Men from all over the Mediterranean set out to slay Medusa and claim that power for themselves.
One of them has more than glory at stake.
His name is Perseus.
And his hunt for Medusa's head is one of mythology's greatest adventures.
The story of Perseus begins in Argos, a real region of southern Greece.
In antiquity a lot of myths were situated in specific locations.
Now, this was important for the people who lived in those places.
They could actually claim connection to one of these divine heroes.
In the myth, Argos is ruled by a tyrant named Acrisius.
The king has a problem.
He has no male heir.
The Greek world tried to retain property in families.
And the way you retain it families is you leave it to the first born son or the eldest male heir.
Acrisius' only child is a daughter, Danaë.
She has no children of her own.
So the King consults a prophetess to ask if she will ever bear him a grandson.
Acrisius is told in prophecy that if his daughter ever had a child, that child would rise up and kill him.
He finds out that the son of his daughter is in fact going to kill him, and he sort of freaks out and decides that he needs to prevent her from ever having a child to begin with.
This fear of generational shift, this fear of losing your power to the next generation, was real.
If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some point you needed to keep an eye on the kid.
Overcome by terror, the King hatches a plan to save his own skin.
Acrisius had his daughter Danaë walled up inside of a tower where no on could see her.
It was a pretty miserable existence.
Danaë is trapped with no fresh air and barely any food.
It is the King's way of killing her without getting blood on his hands.
The King kept waiting for news that his daughter had died, and was very surprised that he never received news that she had died of starvation or thirst.
After a while, they begin to see lights on and hear noise and sound coming from the tower.
So Acrisius went to see what his daughter was up to.
The King enters his daughter's chamber and discovers to his horror that Danaë is not only still alive, she's a mother to a son, Perseus.
Acrisius is stunned that someone accessed the secure tower and impregnated his daughter.
But the baby's father isn't a mortal man.
He is king of the Greek gods.
Mythology's most prolific womaniser.
Zeus.
Zeus, who seduced so many women in so many myths, sees Danaë through the grating and falls in love with her.
He comes down to her in about the only shape that could come through the bars, which is a shower of gold.
He took the form of a cascade of gold and poured himself into the room and then was able to make love to her that way.
Zeus' shower of gold may have been inspired by a real natural phenomenon, one named after Perseus.
Probably the most impressive and visible meteorite shower in the sky is the Persean meteorite shower.
Certainly, it looks like a shower of gold coming down if you've ever stopped and watched it in August.
You can see the individual streaks with the yellowish colour to them.
In mythologies around the world women can be impregnated by various natural forces.
It's not just the shower of gold that we have in the legend of Perseus, we have women and animals sometimes being impregnated by the wind.
Or in various mythologies women become pregnant by the sun.
Perseus is born both divine and mortal.
A type of hero known as a demi-god.
So this demi-god idea means that this person has some features that are very godly, some divine powers, but at the same time he is mortal, he can die.
I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea of the demi-gods because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible.
To create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods.
To fulfil his destiny as a demi-god Perseus must first survive his grandfather's wrath.
King Acrisius fears the boy will fulfil the prophecy he dreads and grow up to kill him.
His first impulse is to murder both mother and child.
But he fears Zeus' revenge.
So he devises a plan to let nature do the killing for him.
Acrisius decided to put both the mother and the child into a boat-like construction and throw them into the sea.
Danaë and Perseus have been left for dead with no food, no direction and no protection from the dangers of the sea.
Meanwhile, on a dismal island beyond the waves, Medusa is adding statues to her garden of death.
Warriors turned to stone trying to capture her head.
She possesses a power every conqueror desires.
Even real conquerors like Alexander the Great.
Medusa's power to turn men to stone may have spawned the famous phrase "looks that kill".
But the ancient Greeks believed her power could be used for good as well as evil.
In their language, the name "medusa" actually had a positive connotation, it meant "guardian".
Her image was often used to ward off danger.
She even appeared on the armour of some of the world's most feared warriors.
Evidence of this can be found in one of the time capsules of the ancient world, Pompei.
When they were excavating the city in the 1830s, archaeologists found a very large mosaic which depicts a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian King Darius.
And on Alexander's breast plate is an image of Medusa.
The battlefield wasn't the only place where Medusa's powers were sought.
She was also used to scare children.
The idea was that you would put the symbol on the outside of your stove and this would prevent children from opening up the oven door.
Now, the Medusa was something that Greek parents used to use in order to scare the kids in order to eat their food.
"Eat your food or I'll ask the Medusa to get you.
" So it was something very horrendous, very horrible, mesmerizing, frightening.
In the myth, Medusa has a price on her head.
Warriors from across the Greek world travel to her remote island seeking to steal it and use its petrifying power as a weapon against their enemies.
So far, all who have tried made the same fatal mistake.
They looked at her, first.
The ancient sources are relatively silent on what Medusa must have thought and she is just sitting there living out her life amid a huge panoply of stone corpses.
You can imagine that it would have been a very strange situation.
You've got little stalagmites of people all over the place, and there she is, all alone.
But never had the satisfaction of actually being engaged with anybody.
So you can imagine Medusa living out her life, kind of waiting for the next person to waft into her purview and get turned into stone.
But one hero is determined to break her spell.
As Medusa languishes among her statues Perseus is coming of age across the sea.
When he was a baby, he and his mother Danaë were cast out to sea by his grandfather, King Acrisius.
Mother and son were expected to die.
But Perseus' divine father, Zeus, protected them.
They washed up on an island called Serifos and settled there.
He grows up into a nice and strapping young lad, as it were, very strong, and also very strong-willed and very protective of his mother.
Perseus has a very good reason to feel protective.
The ruler of Serifos has plans for his mother.
The king of Serifos was not enthusiastic about having Perseus around, partly because he had his eye on Danaë who was still a young woman and beautiful and he wanted to marry her.
The king hatches a plan to take Perseus out of the picture.
He demands an expensive gift from all of his subjects and vows to banish any who don't comply.
He knows that Perseus is poor and won't be able to deliver.
Perseus, being a young man without a father and without a family, if you didn't have a father in ancient Greece, it meant that you were very much a kind of social outcast, didn't have any gifts to bring to the king.
Perseus is cornered.
If he is exiled, his mother will be forced into an unwanted marriage and be separated from him forever.
He makes an impulsive decision with deadly ramifications.
Perseus says, well, I may not be able to buy a great gift because I am poor, but I'm gonna do something that no one else has been able to do, I will bring you the head of Medusa.
It's a suicide mission.
No one has ever returned from Medusa's island alive.
But for Perseus there is no turning back.
It's a matter of honour.
He can't get out of it.
He has to bring the head of the Gorgon.
If Perseus succeeds, he will return home a hero with the stature to challenge the King and protect his mother.
But if he fails, he'll be turned to stone.
In Greek mythology, the names Perseus and Medusa are forever linked.
The consummate hero and the ultimate monster.
It is a story that began here, among these ruins.
This is ancient Mycenae.
According to legend, this once great civilisation was founded by Perseus himself.
Mycenae was the greatest of the ancient city-states back in the Bronze Age.
And it ruled sway over a large swath of ancient Greece.
For millennia, it was thought that Mycenae, just like Perseus and Medusa, was a myth.
The only surviving reference to it was in Homer's epic story, The Illiad.
But in the late 19th century, a lost civilisation was rediscovered.
Using Homer's epic poems as a guide, archaeologists in the 19th century were able to locate these great ancient citadels.
And what an amazing adventure it must have been to find out that not only was Homer talking about something that existed but now they themselves were in contact with it as well.
Mycenae lies near Argos, the city where Perseus was born in the myth.
Its ruins are a window into the people who invented the story of Perseus and Medusa.
Ancient Greeks who used mythology to explain life's mysteries.
The city structures were so massive later generations of Greeks believed they were built by gods.
They would look at the ruins of those palaces and see monumental masonry.
This was a kind of feat that they couldn't imagine themselves doing, it seemed like something that only heroes could do.
It was from these ruins that the story of Perseus sprang.
The hero remembered for building the city and taking on Medusa.
It is the ultimate challenge.
Perseus confronts it with the bravado of a boy who is eager to prove himself a man.
But he is woefully unprepared for the task at hand.
Perseus has no weapons, no experience, and no idea how to kill his target.
Another piece that makes Medusa so terrifying is that they wouldn't have had a real sense of exactly what she looked like.
Anyone who had seen her before Perseus would not have lived to tell the tale.
So all he knew about was that there was this monster that was so hideous that if you ever caught eyes on her you would be frozen and turned to stone.
He stalked off and began his adventure, and it wasn't long before he realised that he had no idea where he was going.
But, as heroes often do, and especially heroes whose fathers are gods, he soon gets supernatural aid.
Lost in the wilderness, Perseus does what many ancient Greeks would have done under the same circumstances.
He prays and the gods hear him.
His father Zeus sends down a divine messenger, Hermes, who gives Perseus the jumpstart he needs, a pair of winged sandals.
One of the things that Perseus has to do is travel long distances very fast.
And being an era without airplanes here comes Hermes to offer a solution - those sandals with wings that he himself, as a messenger of the gods uses.
So he gives them to Perseus, he wears them and he can fly through continents at the speed of Well, faster than a jet.
Now that Perseus has a set of wings, what he really needs is a set of weapons.
Perseus has everything going for him, I mean, he has divine blood, he's got great powers, he's been brought up to just on the cusp of manhood, he's ready to take on these nasty beasts.
But he needs more, he's got to have technology.
Hermes offers Perseus an inside tip.
He advises him to locate the Stygian Nymphs, beautiful women who possess the magical weapons he needs to kill Medusa.
The Nymphs are these female divinities who are associated with natural elements, and they inhabit them, so they are in springs, in mountains, they're in trees.
They're typically the objects of deep and powerful sexual desire and from this we get the idea of a "nymphomaniac".
The whereabouts of these nymphs are a mystery.
Only three hideous women know how to find them.
The Graeae sisters.
They had been old, withered hags since the day they were born, and they don't like visitors.
Perseus must get them to talk so he can save his mother and survive his face-off with Medusa.
It's a battle we can still see in today's night skies if we look closely.
Medusa, a deadly gorgon, has turned countless warriors into stone.
But someone is still stalking her, Perseus, and he wants her head.
His success will require more than boyish bravado.
Perseus will need a powerful set of weapons so slay Medusa.
To get them he must find the Stygian Nymphs.
But only three wretched old women know where they live, the Graeae sisters.
They are very strange.
None of them have eyes except this one that they pass between each other whenever one wants to have a look at something, so they need to share it.
Their eye is very precious to them.
The island of the Graeae sisters is a dark realm where even the Moon does not shine.
Perseus uses his trustee winged sandals to get there.
Perseus is not just a hot-headed brawny but he's also pretty clever.
When he gets to the island he realises he should do some reconnaissance and find out what their weaknesses might be before he proceeds.
When he realises they only have the one eye and they're blind while they don't have it, he steals the eye from them as they're passing it around.
The sisters fly into a blind panic.
They're in a very abject position.
It's like a beggar having his last farthing stolen from him.
They're falling all over each other trying to get that eye back from him.
Perseus has the upper hand.
He demands the location of the nymphs.
The Graeae sisters reveal that they live on the river Styx, the waterway that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.
Perseus has what he came for.
He tosses the eye onto the sand and takes to the skies.
This is the myth, but how does it connect to reality? This story, like many others in Greek mythology, may literally have fallen from the sky.
Since the dawn of civilisation, mankind has looked at the heavens to explain the past, present and future.
An awful lot of storytelling revolves around the things that you saw in the sky, the constellations that you see.
Certainly we know that an awful lot of myths were tied to the constellations.
We have, in the 5th century, Greeks naming the constellations by the names of mythical beings.
And at that time, people not only saw the mythical creatures up in the sky as symbols, as mere representations, but they actually believed that the constellations were divine.
One especially curious pattern exists in the heavens.
A hero holding a curved sword and the head of a gorgon.
This is the constellation known as Perseus.
A celestial blueprint for the myth.
But there may be more to this cluster of stars.
It may also reveal how the story of the Graeae sisters originated.
The constellations themselves did things that inspired portions of the myth.
The second brightest star in the constellation of Perseus is Algol, which is a very peculiar star.
In the Perseus constellation, Algol forms a point on Medusa's head.
It is known as an eclipsing binary star.
It appears as a single point of light in the sky, but is actually two stars that orbit around one another.
As they go they eclipse each other's light making Algol appear to dim and then get bright again.
It is a three-day cycle that may have inspired the story of the three Graeae sisters.
Algol is very bright for a while and then it goes out further rapidly every third day.
This represents the stealing of the eye of the Graeae by Perseus.
As it tries to pass to the third Graeae, Perseus is in there among them and he steals the eye.
And when he takes it, you can see it go out.
Well, if you're a good storyteller, and if you kept track of this, you know when the star is going to disappear, so you can start telling your story when the star is still bright.
And when you get to the part of the story where Perseus has stolen the eye you can point up at the sky and say, "Look, it's gone.
" Algol's impact on the myth may not end with the Graeae sisters.
Some experts believed it also inspired the climax of the story.
Medusa's gruesome demise.
The myth continues.
Perseus is in a collision course with Medusa.
The odds are stacked against him.
To take on the monster he needs the right battle gear.
He finds it along the River Styx.
The gateway to Hades where he encounters the Stygian Nymphs.
They present Perseus with three weapons essential to his survival.
The sword of Zeus.
The shield of Athena.
And the helmet of Hades, god of the dead.
It reminds us irresistibly of James Bond getting all the fabulous devices from Q.
Not only because he gets all these things to carry out his mission but because they have magical properties to them.
Now Perseus is ready to fulfil his destiny.
And not a moment too soon.
Back home in the island of Serifos a royal wedding is in the works, and Perseus' mother is the unwilling bride.
Will her son slay Medusa and bring back her head before it's too late? And how can he succeed where so many others before him have failed? The secret lies in his shield.
Perseus' dangerous quest for the head of Medusa has taken him on a journey over thousands of miles.
Now his moment of truth has arrived.
He stands at the threshold of Medusa's deadly lair.
The gods helped him get here but the rest is up to him.
All that's around Medusa is rocks, very hard things, anything that would have been living would have been turned to stone, so it must have been a very bleak and desolate place.
Perseus is frightened as he takes the first steps toward his fate.
But they are not steps forward.
The young hero is slowly creeping backwards.
Perseus is very smart, and he realises that trying to attack Medusa head-on would be his own undoing.
He'd be turned to stone.
So what he does instead is gets his shield turn it round and actually approach her from behind.
And he walks up to her backwards looking at her in a shield so that he's safe.
You can imagine the tension building as he gets closer and closer.
As far as he knows, the shield will protect him.
But he must not have really known for sure.
Perseus cautiously makes his way through the lair.
Eyes locked on his shield.
The slightest misstep will prove fatal.
At last, Perseus locks onto his target.
Closes his eyes.
And swings his sword.
With one clean stroke the head of Medusa rolls to the floor.
Her years of torment and isolation are finally over.
There would have been great fascination for Medusa among ancient audiences and whether they were rooting for her or against her, there would have been a great sympathy for this poor person.
I mean, think about what she'd been through, and all that she'd lost, and the horrible life she was fated to live.
And her end point is to have a hero chop her head off.
It is a tragic end for a tragic figure.
But Medusa's story doesn't end here.
One of the remarkable things about Medusa's head is even after she is dead, even after she has been removed and stuffed in a bag, it still has the power to transform anyone who looks on her to stone.
Medusa's unstoppable and terrifying, but those forces can also be harnessed, and Perseus' story talks about that.
When the head is inside the bag then it becomes a weapon that can be used for good as well as evil.
Perseus is now the owner of the most dangerous weapon on Earth.
He can turn anyone to stone.
And he has a few targets in mind.
His mother, Danaë, has been left with no one to protect her from the lecherous King of Serifos.
She's about to be made a queen against her will.
For Perseus it is a race against time.
As the hero flies home it becomes clear just how powerful Medusa's head still is.
As Perseus is flying with his winged sandals back across to get to Greece, drops from her blood drop into the sand, and from this spring up hundreds and hundreds of poisonous snakes.
Some nasty monsters in antiquity are so mean and awful that their blood actually produces other monsters.
Medusa is one of those that have such powerful blood.
The dripping blood from her head as Perseus was flying away was thought, in later tellings of the story, to have given rise to all these snakes that ancient Romans knew to exist in North Africa.
In the myth, the royal wedding day has arrived.
The father of the bride has come from Argos.
Perseus' own grandfather, King Acrisius.
He has long feared the prophecy that his grandson would kill him.
Perseus arrives just as the wedding ceremony is getting under way.
When Perseus returns to Serifos and sees that his mother is about to marry the King, he becomes very angry.
So he lifts up the head of Medusa and says, "King, I have brought you your gift!" One glance turns the King to stone.
His face frozen in an eternal scream.
But he's not the only king who gets caught looking.
Acrisius is also petrified.
Danaë has been saved by her son.
And Perseus has earned his place as one of mythology's bravest heroes.
His death-defying journey has transformed him from a boy into a man.
Perseus is particularly relatable among the ancient heroes.
He is cast out at different points along the way and only because of the extra love of his mother is he able to make his way through some very difficult times.
He makes his mark in the world and he grows into his own.
He becomes a real, true powerful hero.
Someone that the Greeks can look up to.
After he saves his mother Perseus presents Medusa's head as a tribute to Athena, the goddess who created the monster.
In the end, it is Medusa's original punisher who inherits her power.
There's a poetic quality to the ending of this story as Medusa's head becomes the icon on the breastplate of Athena.
After all, this poor young girl started off this great misadventure by running a afoul of that goddess.
Athena has the first and the last laugh.
Medusa's story has come full circle.
Her myth ends where it began: In ancient Greece's greatest temple, the Parthenon.
Above it, she and the man who took her life are forever linked in the night sky.