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The apotropaic Gorgon-face is everywhere in archaic and classical Greece. The oldest surviving Greek stone pediment, on the Temple of Artemis at Corfu (Kerkyra), about 580 BCE, is dominated by an enormous running Gorgon flanked by panthers, with the tiny figures of Pegasus and Chrysaor at her sides — a monstrous guardian set over the god's house to ward it. Gorgon-faces were moulded onto the antefixes that capped temple roof-tiles, so that a ring of grimacing Gorgons warded the sacred building from its edges. Warriors bore the gorgoneion on the boss of the hoplite shield and on the breastplate — most famously on the aegis of Athena herself, whose great cult-statues (including Phidias's Athena Parthenos) wore the Gorgon at the breast. Cities stamped the face on their coins — Neapolis in Macedonia, Parion on the Hellespont, and others — as a civic guardian. In every case the logic is the same: the face that killed the living was set to guard the living, its terror turned outward against whatever might do harm.
Beyond the guardian-face, the sisters lived in poetry and on painted pottery as the very type of monstrous terror at the edge of things. Vase-painters loved the beheading and the pursuit: the running Gorgons with their frontal staring masks, the fleeing Perseus, the falling Medusa — among the earliest identifiable myth-scenes in Greek art, painted with relish for the horror. The archaic Gorgon-type is unmistakable: a broad grinning mask, tongue thrust out between boar's tusks, snakes knotted in the hair or writhing at the chin, the eyes huge and staring straight out of the picture at the viewer — a face deliberately made to be looked at, breaking the fourth wall to fix the beholder as the myth said it fixed men into stone. Whether over a temple door or on the inside of a drinking-cup, the Gorgon's frontal glare did in art what it did in myth: it stopped you where you stood.
+The way the Gorgons were drawn changed strikingly across the centuries, and the change is itself part of their story. In archaic art the sisters in motion — above all the running Gorgon of the Corfu pediment and the fleeing Medusa of black-figure vase-paintings — are shown in the Knielauf, the "kneeling-run": one knee dropped almost to the ground, the other leg flung forward, arms pumping, wings spread. This stylised convention was the archaic painter's shorthand for a monster rushing at full, unnatural speed, and combined with the frontal grinning mask it makes the creature seem to hurtle straight out of the picture at the viewer. Then, from the fifth century BCE onward, the Gorgon's face was slowly made beautiful. The grotesque archaic mask — bulging eyes, boar's tusks, tongue thrust out — softened; the tusks and the lolling tongue fell away, and in their place came a calm, still, and often sorrowful woman's face, the snakes now knotted decorously in the hair or bound beneath the chin. This is the so-called "beautiful Gorgon," known best from the marble type called the Medusa Rondanini (surviving in a later Roman copy), whose lovely, mournful features are worlds away from the leering monster of Corfu. The two images bracket the whole ancient life of the type — the horror that guards by frightening, and the humane, pitiable beauty that would let later ages re-imagine Medusa as a wronged woman rather than a monster.
No monster of antiquity has had a longer afterlife as a symbol than the Gorgon, and the ancient logic of the gorgoneion — a guardian-face that protects by frightening — survives in surprising places. The serpent-wreathed Gorgon head sits at the very centre of the flag of Sicily, the Trinacria, where it marks the meeting-point of the island's three legs. The luxury house Versace took the Medusa head as its logo, chosen (the designers said) because whoever fell under her gaze could not turn back — beauty and danger fused into a brand. Heraldry, coats of arms, tattoo art, and countless modern emblems still deploy the frontal Gorgon-face for exactly the reason the archaic Greeks did: it is arresting, and it wards.
Pasiphaë bore a son with the head and often the tail of a bull upon the body of a man, and she named him Asterion — "the starry one." It is the most quietly heartbreaking detail in the whole myth: the name of a mother who, for a moment, tried to love the child she had borne, and gave him a name fit for the grandson of the Sun. But Crete could not have such a creature in the daylight. He was living proof of Poseidon's curse and of Minos's broken faith, an heir to the throne who could never be shown, and as he grew he grew dangerous, for he would eat nothing but human flesh. The name Asterion faded, and in its place the people gave him the only name history kept — Minotauros, "the Bull of Minos" — as though he were not a person but a possession, the king's animal, the king's shame. Consulting an oracle on what to do with him, Minos was told to shut the creature away where he could never be found.
For this Minos again turned to Daedalus, and the craftsman built the thing his name has been bound to ever since: the Labyrinth (Λαβύρινθος), a structure of such intricate and winding passages that whoever entered it could never find the way out again. Ovid describes Daedalus confounding the usual marks of direction and leading the eye astray with a maze of turnings, so that the maker himself could scarcely return to the entrance he had made. Somewhere at the unreachable centre of this maze the Minotaur was walled in — sealed away from the sun and from every human face, fed on the only food that would keep him, and left to pace the dark. Whatever else the Labyrinth was, for him it was a prison and a life sentence, imposed for the circumstances of his birth. The later Greeks and Romans placed the Labyrinth at Knossos, the seat of Minos's power, and the very word became the name for any inescapable maze.
+For this Minos again turned to Daedalus, and the craftsman built the thing his name has been bound to ever since: the Labyrinth (Λαβύρινθος), a structure of such intricate and winding passages that whoever entered it could never find the way out again. Apollodorus describes it as a house "that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way" (Bibliotheca 3.1.4), and Ovid describes Daedalus confounding the usual marks of direction and leading the eye astray with a maze of turnings, so that the maker himself could scarcely return to the entrance he had made. Somewhere at the unreachable centre of this maze the Minotaur was walled in — sealed away from the sun and from every human face, fed on the only food that would keep him, and left to pace the dark. Whatever else the Labyrinth was, for him it was a prison and a life sentence, imposed for the circumstances of his birth. The later Greeks and Romans placed the Labyrinth at Knossos, the seat of Minos's power, and the very word became the name for any inescapable maze.
The Minotaur might have remained only a family secret walled up in Crete, but for a death far away. Minos's son Androgeos was killed while visiting Athens — cut down out of envy after winning every event at the Panathenaic games, some said, or destroyed by the very Cretan Bull that Athens's king set him against. In grief and fury Minos made war on Athens, and when the city was brought low (by his fleet, by plague, by famine, the sources differ), he imposed a monstrous peace. At fixed intervals Athens was to send seven youths and seven maidens — its finest young people, chosen by lot — as tribute to Crete, where they were driven into the Labyrinth to be devoured by the Minotaur. (How often the tribute fell is disputed even in antiquity: Apollodorus says every year, while Plutarch reports the more famous tradition of once every nine years, "the third year." Either way, it was a horror renewed on schedule.) So the imprisoned creature became the instrument of a kingdom's terror: a caged thing weaponised against a rival city, fed on the children of the conquered. It is worth seeing plainly that the youths were sent to be eaten — the tribute is a story of human sacrifice — and that the Minotaur at the centre of it was, in his way, as much used by Minos as the Athenians were.
(Content note: her parentage is one of the most tangled in myth; the sources flatly disagree.) Homer names only her mother, Crataeis (Κράταιις, "the mighty one"), and Circe urges Odysseus to pray to Crataeis for mercy that Scylla strike but once (Odyssey 12.124–126); no father is given. Apollonius of Rhodes (Argonautica 4.828–829) makes her the child of Phorcys — the old sea-god of the deep's dangers — and of "night-wandering Hecate, whom men call Crataeis," identifying the shadowy mother with the goddess of witchcraft. Other traditions call her a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, the sea's mother of monsters; Hyginus (Fabulae, Preface and 151) instead files her among the fearsome brood of Typhon and Echidna, alongside Cerberus, the Chimaera, and the Hydra; still others make her a daughter of Triton or of the river Crataeis. Because the sources cannot be reconciled, the tree here uses only the well-attested father Phorcys, and leaves the rest of the quarrel to this paragraph. What the traditions share is a sense that she is born of the sea's oldest and darkest powers.
The most beloved story of how Scylla became a monster is late — Roman, from Ovid (Metamorphoses 13.730–14.74) — and should be read as the poet's brilliant elaboration rather than early myth. In it, Scylla begins as a beautiful nymph who plays along the Sicilian shore and scorns every suitor. The sea-god Glaucus — himself once a mortal fisherman transformed into a green merman — falls hopelessly in love with her, and when she flees him, he goes to the witch Circe to beg for a charm to win her. But Circe conceives a violent passion for Glaucus, and when he refuses her, declaring he will love Scylla though the sea run dry, the spurned enchantress turns her fury on the innocent girl. She poisons the still pool where Scylla loves to bathe, steeping it with the juices of dreadful roots and chanting a dark spell three times nine times over. When Scylla wades in waist-deep, the water around her hips erupts into a ring of snarling, yelping dogs; she flinches and flees, not knowing at first that the baying hounds are now part of her own body, sprung where her thighs and feet had been. So the lovely nymph is fixed forever as the barking horror of the rock — Circe's jealousy made flesh — while Glaucus weeps and turns from the witch who used her herbs so cruelly.
+The most beloved story of how Scylla became a monster is late — Roman, from Ovid (Metamorphoses 13.730–14.74) — and should be read as the poet's brilliant elaboration rather than early myth. In it, Scylla begins as a beautiful nymph who plays along the Sicilian shore and scorns every suitor. The sea-god Glaucus — himself once a mortal fisherman transformed into a green merman — falls hopelessly in love with her, and when she flees him, he goes to the witch Circe to beg for a charm to win her. But Circe conceives a violent passion for Glaucus, and when he refuses her, declaring he will love Scylla though the sea run dry, the spurned enchantress turns her fury on the innocent girl. She poisons the still pool where Scylla loves to bathe, steeping it with the juices of dreadful roots and chanting a dark spell three times nine times over. When Scylla wades in waist-deep, the water around her hips erupts into a ring of snarling, yelping dogs; she flinches and flees, not knowing at first that the baying hounds are now part of her own body, sprung where her thighs and feet had been. So the lovely nymph is fixed forever as the barking horror of the rock — Circe's jealousy made flesh — while Glaucus weeps and turns from the witch who used her herbs so cruelly. A parallel version keeps the same shape but changes the jealous party: in the later scholiastic tradition (Tzetzes on Lycophron, Alexandra 650) it is Poseidon who loves Scylla, and his consort Amphitrite who, in jealousy, steeps the nymph's bathing-pool with poisonous herbs and works the same transformation. Whether the wronged rival is Circe or Amphitrite, the moral is identical — an innocent girl is monstered by another's spite — and both alike are late elaborations, not part of Homer's older, parentless horror on the cliff.
The most famous passage of the strait is Odysseus' — his story is told on his own page. Warned by Circe, he faces the arithmetic she set him: better to lose six men to Scylla than the whole ship to Charybdis. Steering close under Scylla's cliff to keep clear of the deadly whirlpool, he watches in helpless horror as the six heads dart down and each snatches a comrade from the deck; the men are hauled up screaming, calling his name, reaching for him, and are eaten in the mouth of the cave — "the most pitiful sight," he says, of all his wanderings (Odyssey 12.234–259). He keeps his ship, at the price of six lives, exactly as Circe foretold.
His second passage is worse. After his surviving crew slaughter the cattle of the Sun and Zeus wrecks the ship, Odysseus is carried back alone toward the strait — and this time straight over Charybdis, just as she gulps the sea down. His makeshift raft is swallowed whole, but he leaps and clings to the wild fig tree overhanging the whirlpool, hanging on "like a bat" through the long hours until, at evening, Charybdis belches up the timbers again; he drops onto the floating keel and paddles clear with his hands (Odyssey 12.426–446). He alone, of all who ever met Charybdis, is spat back out alive.
@@ -33,4 +33,4 @@Scylla's grotesque, arresting form — the fair woman above, the ring of dogs and the fishy coils below — made her a favourite of ancient vase-painters, coin-engravers (the city of Akragas struck her image), and mosaicists, and she has kept her hold on artists from Renaissance painters and emblem-books to modern illustration, film, and fantasy. Ovid's tender, cruel tale of the jilted witch and the poisoned pool gave her a tragic inner life that later poets and playwrights returned to again and again; Scylla and Charybdis appear in operas, novels, and screen adaptations of the Odyssey down to the present day.
And the two of them still guard their strait in fact as well as fable. The town of Scilla stands on Scylla's Calabrian rock; the Strait of Messina still runs its swift, reversing tides; and mariners still speak of the whirlpools off the Sicilian coast. The monsters have dissolved back into the geography that first suggested them — a narrow, beautiful, dangerous stretch of sea between Italy and Sicily that carries their names on the map, so that to sail those waters is, in a quiet way, still to pass between Scylla and Charybdis.
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