Medusa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Medusa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys and his sister Ceto, chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, who places both trinities of sisters far off 'on Kisthene's dreadful plain':
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged
With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—
While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as a being both beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of 'fair-cheeked Medusa'.[5] In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, 'the jealous aspiration of many suitors,' priestess in Athena's temple, but when she and the 'Lord of the Sea' Poseidon lay together in Athena's temple, the enraged virgin goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well-deserved"

Poseidon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Poseidon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Poseidon was a major civic god of several cities: in Athens, he was second only to Athena in importance, while in Corinth and many cities of Magna Graecia he was the chief god of the polis. In his benign aspect, Poseidon was seen as creating new islands and offering calm seas. When offended or ignored, he supposedly struck the ground with his trident and caused chaotic springs, earthquakes, drownings and shipwrecks. Sailors prayed to Poseidon for a safe voyage, sometimes drowning horses as a sacrifice.
According to Pausanias, Poseidon was one of the caretakers of the oracle at Delphi before Olympian Apollo took it over. Apollo and Poseidon worked closely in many realms: in colonization, for example, Delphic Apollo provided the authorization to go out and settle, while Poseidon watched over the colonists on their way, and provided the lustral water for the foundation-sacrifice. Xenophon's Anabasis describes a group of Spartan soldiers in 400–399 BCE singing to Poseidon a paean — a kind of hymn normally sung for Apollo.
Like Dionysus, who inflamed the maenads, Poseidon also caused certain forms of mental disturbance. A Hippocratic text of ca 400 BCE, On the Sacred Disease[1] says that he was blamed for certain types of epilepsy"

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