And the winner is... Miss XXXX?

April 3, 2007 9:44 AM

If Medusa was in a beauty pageant, what location would be on her sash?

Yeah, this is probably one of the dumber questions I've seen here, but I'm just brainstorming for new designs and I can't seem to find a satisfactory answer to this question.

My understanding of the Medusa story is such:

Hottie McHotHott Mortal girl gets herself in trouble and is turned into a gorgon. Medusa raises hell somewhere but then ends up fleeing to some small island, where she is ganked by Perseus.

I suppose the proper names of either A.) where the mortal girl came from, B.) Where Medusa raised hell before fleeing to the small island or C.) The name of the small island would help me out, but my Google-fu seems to be feeding me incomplete or contradictory information.

One source seems to claim the island was Seriphos, but then about a billion other sources claim Seriphos played a different part in the Perseus myth. Others just call it Gorgon Island, or "A Small Island", but I'm hoping it hap a proper name that would look better on a sash. Was the small island in Hades, or just near it, because then maybe I could use that as a wishy washy half cop out.

Thanks much!

posted by Jezztek to grab bag (8 comments total)

"By him [Phorkys] she [Keto] conceived and bare the Gorgones, fearful monsters who lived in Sarpedon, a rocky island in deep-eddying Okeanos." - Homerica, The Cypria Frag 21 (from Herodian, One Peculiar Diction)
posted by Laura in Canada at 10:05 AM on April 3, 2007

However later it was written:

"Gorgones Tithrasiai (Tithrasian Gorgons): Tithrasos [is a] river, or a location in Libya, where the Gorgons resided." - Suidas "Gorgones Tithrasiai"

I got both references from:
http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Gorgones.html
posted by Laura in Canada at 10:07 AM on April 3, 2007

Greeks usually tended to give quite vague locations for their monsters and placed them in lands that were known in Greece but often times still quite obscure. For this reason you get a lot of the stranger myths placed to the east around the Black Sea (the Amazons, for instance) or further south down into Libya and Egypt. Medusa fits right into this setup. Though references are slight (I think LiC hit the main ones from the earliest period), Perseus' encounter with her is almost always placed across the mountains in Libya, but if you want to make her even more remote and suited to a nautically-oriented tale such as the Cypria, you can put her and the other Gorgons on an island in Okeanos, which itself is a vague name for all the water that the Greeks believed circled the single land mass of Earth.
posted by zeugitai_guy at 10:28 AM on April 3, 2007

Thanks much!

I think either Tithrasos or Okeanos will work just fine for my needs. Another AskMe success story =)
posted by Jezztek at 10:39 AM on April 3, 2007

I just want to say that this is why I love Ask.Metafilter.
posted by lekvar at 12:21 PM on April 3, 2007

I think if this is being done as some kind of costuming joke, just having the sash read GREECE, ATHENS or MT. OLYMPUS would get the biggest laughs, because people can more easily latch onto the mismatched frames of reference (Medusa in a beauty pageant) without trying to wrap their heads around how SARPEDON or TITHRASOS might be pronounced.
posted by frogan at 1:21 PM on April 3, 2007

ObComicGeek answer: The blue area of the moon
posted by browse at 3:21 PM on April 3, 2007

Personally, I like to tell people I'm from Gorgonzola.
posted by medusa at 4:12 PM on April 4, 2007 [1 favorite]