The Gorgons themselves are to be encountered in all parts of the sea; but their favourite resort, especially on Saturday nights, is reputed to be the Black Sea, where if one of them meets a ship, grasping the bows with her hand she asks, ‘Is king Alexander living?’ To this the sailors must reply ‘he lives and reigns,’ and may add ‘and he keeps the world at peace,’ or ‘and long life to you too!’; for then the awful and monstrous Gorgon in gladness at the tidings transforms herself into a beautiful maiden and calms the waves and sings melodiously to her lyre. If on the contrary the sailors make the mistake of saying that Alexander is dead, she either capsizes the ship with her own hand or by the wildness of her lamentations raises a storm from which there is no escape nor shelter[491]. The mention of Alexander the Great in these stories of the Gorgons, as also sometimes in connexion with the Nereids, is unimportant; it is not an instance of purely oral tradition, but has its source in the history of Alexander by Pseudocallisthenes[492], of which there exist paraphrases in the popular tongue. The interest of such fables lies in the association of beauty and melody as well as of horror with the Gorgons, and in the rôle of marine deity which they play.
In general however it is upon the monstrous and terrifying aspect of the Gorgons that the common-folk seize, so that the name Gorgon is metaphorically applied to ill-favoured and malevolent women[493]. Thus in Rhodes it is used of any large fierce-looking virago[494]; in Cephalonia (where also the word Μέδουσα, Medusa, survives in the same sense) of any lady conspicuously ill-featured[495]. Allusion too has already been made to the case where a child possessed by a mania of bloodthirstiness is occasionally called a Gorgon[496].
But there is another and fresh aspect of the Gorgon’s nature suggested by the use of the word in Cythnos. There it is metaphorically applied to depraved women[497]; and this isolated usage is in accord with one description of the Gorgon which has come down from the middle ages. This description forms part of a poem entitled ‘The Physiologus[498]’ (written in the most debased ecclesiastical Greek and supposed to date from before the thirteenth century), which gives a fantastic account of the habits of many birds and beasts among which the Gorgon is included.
‘The Gorgon is a beast like unto a harlot; the hair of her head is all auburn; the ends thereof are as it were heads of snakes; and her body is bare and smooth, white as a dove, and her bosom is a woman’s with breasts fair to behold; but the look of her face brings death; whatsoever looks upon her falls down and dies. She dwells in the regions of the West. She knows all languages and the speech of wild beasts. When she desires a mate, she calls first to the lion; for fear of death he draws not near to her. Again she calls the dragon, but neither does he go; and even so all the beasts both small and great. She pipes sweetly and sings with charm beyond all; lastly she utters human voice: “Come, sate fleshly desire, ye men, of my beauty, and I of yours.” The men, knowing then their opportunity against her, lay snares that she may lose her pleasure; and stand afar off, that they may not see her, and raise their voice and cry and say unto her: “Dig a deep pit and put thy head therein, that we may not die and may come with thee.” She straightway then goes and makes a great hole and puts her head therein and leaves her body; from the waist downward it is seen naked; so she remains and awaits the pains of lewdness. The man goes from behind, cuts off her head, holds it face downward, and places it in a vessel, and if he meet dragon or lion or leopard, he shows the head, and the beasts die.’
These modern or mediaeval descriptions of the Gorgons, though they are by no means consistent one with another, offer four main aspects in which the modern Gorgon may be compared with the creatures of ancient mythology. Her face is terrible either in its surpassing loveliness or in its overwhelming hideousness. She possesses the gift of entrancing melody. She is voluptuous. She dwells in the sea.
The first aspect may be derived directly from the ancient conception of the Gorgons. The word Γοργώ itself is a name formed from the adjective γοργός and means simply ‘fierce’ or ‘terrible’ in look, without implying anything of beauty or the opposite; while of Medusa, the Gorgon par excellence, tradition relates that once she was a beautiful maiden beloved of Poseidon, and that it was only through the wrath of Athena that her hair was changed into writhing snakes and her loveliness lost in horror. Moreover in ancient works of art the representation of the Gorgon’s head varies from a type of cruel beauty to a grinning mask. But it is also possible that the idea of their beauty is due to a confusion of Gorgons with Sirens, from whom, as we shall see, certain traits have certainly been borrowed.
These traits are the two next aspects of the modern Gorgons which we have to consider, the sweetness of their singing and their voluptuousness. These were the essential qualities of the Sirens, and have undoubtedly been transferred to the Gorgons no less than to the Lamia of the Sea[499].
Possibly also from the same source comes the mixed shape, half woman and half fish, in which the Gorgon is now pourtrayed. The Sirens were indeed originally terrestrial, dwelling in a meadow near the sea, yet not venturing in the deep themselves, but luring men to shipwreck on the coast by the spell of their song; and an echo perhaps of this conception, though the Sirens themselves are no longer known, lives on in a folk-song which pictures the enchantment of a maiden’s love-song wafted to seafarers’ ears from off the shore: ‘Thereby a ship was passing with sails outspread. Sailors that hearken to that voice and look upon such beauty, forget their sails and forsake their oars; they cannot voyage any more; they know not how to set sail[500].’ But by the sixth century[501] the traditional habitat of the Sirens had changed. ‘The Sirens,’ says an anonymous work on monsters and great beasts, ‘are mermaids, who by their exceeding beauty and winning song ensnare mariners; from the head to the navel they are of human and maidenly form, but they have the scaly tails of fishes[502].’ This description establishes an unquestionable connexion between the Sirens and the modern Gorgons.
But the fourth aspect of the Gorgons on which I have to touch, their connexion with the sea, is not, I think, to be explained as another loan from the Sirens. On the contrary the Gorgons were it would seem deities of the sea, when the Sirens were still dwellers upon the shore; and it was their originally marine character which enabled them to absorb the qualities once attributed to the Sirens. Thus according to Hesiod[503] the three Gorgons were daughters of the sea-deities Phorcys and Ceto, and their home was at the western bound of Ocean. Further one of their number, Medusa, was loved by the sea-god Poseidon, and gave birth both to the horse Pegasus whose name may be a derivative of πήγη, ‘water-spring,’ and whose resort was certainly the fountain of Pirene[504], and also to Chrysaor whose bride was ‘Callirrhoe, daughter of far-famed Ocean.’ Whether this mythological problem is capable of solution in terms of natural phenomena[505] does not here concern us; but it is a straightforward and necessary inference from these genealogical data, that an early and intimate connexion existed between the Gorgons and the sea. And here art comes to the support of literature. In the National Museum of Athens are two vases of about the sixth century, depicting Gorgons in the company of dolphins. The first, an early Attic amphora[506] represents the three Gorgons, of whom Medusa appears headless, surrounded by a considerable number of them. The second, a kylex[507] with offset lip of the Kleinmeister type, pourtrays a single Gorgon with a dolphin on either side. These artistic presentments furnish the strongest possible corroboration of Hesiodic lore, and justify the assertion that from the earliest times the Gorgons were deities of the sea. It was clearly then in virtue of their own marine character that they were able later to usurp also the place of the Sirens.
But the Sirens are not the only ancient beings who have contributed to the formation of the popular conception of modern Gorgons. In one story[508] the personality of Scylla is unmistakeable beneath the disguise of name. This fusion is the more natural in that Scylla was from the beginning[509] a monster of the sea, whose form, according to Vergil[510], terminated like that of latter-day Gorgons in a fish’s tail; a monster too fully as terrible in her own way as any Gorgon. The following extract from the story contains all that is pertinent.