#Monsters And Heroes

The hero-vs-beast pattern; taming or slaying the monstrous.

A white marble statue of a nude, laurel-crowned Theseus lunging forward with a club raised overhead in one hand, gripping the horned head of the bull-headed Minotaur with the other as the beast collapses beneath him over a fallen youth, set against a soft-focus ground of bare trees and pale stonework.

Theseus, Hero of Athens

A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.

6 minPlutarch

A nude young hero in a winged cap holds aloft the severed, snake-haired head of Medusa in his raised left hand and a curved sickle in his lowered right, his own gaze cast down and away from the trophy; the Gorgon's decapitated body slumps beneath his feet on an ornate pedestal against a plain pale wall — Benvenuto Cellini's bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence.

Greek

Perseus, Slayer of Medusa

Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus

A severed, snake-haired head with wide staring eyes and mouth open in a scream, blood streaming from the neck, dark serpents writhing outward from the scalp against a green convex ground ringed by a gilt border — Caravaggio's Medusa, painted on a ceremonial parade shield, showing the Gorgon's face in the instant after decapitation.

Greek

Medusa and the Gorgons

A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.

5 minHesiod

An engraving of a colossal, heavily muscled Hercules standing frontally, the Nemean lion-skin worn as a hood over his head and draped down his left side, the knotted olive-wood club resting over his right shoulder; small background vignettes show his combats with Antaeus, Cacus and Achelous in a classical landscape.

Greek

Heracles, the Greatest Hero

The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus

A dim rock cave opening onto a sunlit autumn wood. Two nude, bearded men creep out beneath the bellies of Polyphemus's heavy-fleeced rams: one at left, half in shadow, clings low against a dark ram's underside with his legs drawn up, watching warily; a second, already at the bright mouth of the cave at right, twists his head back over his shoulder as he clears the entrance. The blinded giant is not shown — only his flock and the escaping men — so the whole picture is the ram-escape held at the knife-edge instant before the open air, tense and hushed in Eckersberg's cool Neoclassical light.

Greek

Odysseus and the Cyclops

He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.

7 minHomer

Diana the huntress striding through a dark wood, a gold mantle slipping from her shoulders, reaching back to draw a white-fletched arrow from the quiver at her side while a red recurve bow hangs in her lowered hand. A lean white hound courses at her feet, and a lake glimmers through the trees behind her.

Greek

Artemis, the Huntress

The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.

5 minHomeric Hymn 27

The young Apollo, unbearded and golden-curled, a soft halo of light behind his head, a rose mantle slipping from one shoulder. He holds a laurel branch in his right hand; a lyre rests at his left side and the white-fletched arrows of his quiver show above his shoulder.

Greek

Apollo, God of Light and Prophecy

The newborn who burst his swaddling bands to claim the lyre, the bow and the truth of Zeus, then killed a dragon to found the oracle that spoke for him.

5 minHomeric Hymn 3