Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

NARRATOR: If looks could kill, you would be dead.

Turned to stone with just one glance,

this is the myth of Medusa, a monstrous female feared

by all men on the battlefield and beyond.

But she will be challenged by a surprising enemy.

Behind the story lurks a stunning reality.

Is Greece's most famous monster inspired by a human corpse?

And is her story based on actual science as seen in our night

sky?

Discover the hidden meaning behind one of the greatest

stories ever told--

the hunt for the head of Medusa.

[growling]

[snakes hissing]

[dramatic music]

[rattling]

This was once a garden.

Now, it is a graveyard littered with dead bodies.

Each face frozen in a moment of terror.

The fatal moment when it gazed upon Medusa.

Her gaze penetrates right into your inner being

and petrifies you from the inside out.

NARRATOR: The myth of Medusa has captivated us

for almost 3,000 years.

Today, her image still commands instant recognition

around the world.

SCOTT LEONARD: The Medusa that we often see depicted on vases

features a woman with boar's tusks,

snakes curling around her head instead of hair.

Sometimes she is bearded.

Very often, she is grimacing facing us directly

with her tongue lolling out of her mouth and her eyes

staring straight at you.

NARRATOR: In ancient Greece, myths

made sense of a confusing world.

Their stories recorded history, explained nature, and dictated

how people should live.

The Medusa myth was no exception.

PETER STRUCK: They teach lessons to the society

and help them organize things, and I think the Medusa story

gives us a window into certain kinds of values

in ancient Greek society.

It surely gives a sense of a rich portrait

of men's experience in so far as they may well

have felt, at some point in their lives,

completely under the spell of some bewitching type of woman.

NARRATOR: Medusa can crush a man with a single, penetrating

look.

It is a power that makes her nearly invincible.

The Medusa myth awakens a number of fears

in people, especially men.

This image of the all-powerful woman whose gaze can't

be averted, whose gaze can see right through you

to expose everything inside of you,

that can freeze you in your tracks

and somehow devour you and consume you.

And I think men, in particular, are very

afraid of this strong woman.

[dramatic music]

NARRATOR: To the ancient Greeks, Medusa's deadly image

was one of the most terrifying in all of mythology,

but she was not always a monster.

According to the myth, Medusa was once a ravishing woman.

Every man in Greece wanted to possess her.

What she's described as is she's

a beautiful woman with long, flowing locks of hair.

Every suitor wants to marry her.

She causes envy among everyone.

NARRATOR: But Medusa can't get married.

She is a priestess of Athena, the goddess of war,

and bound by an eternal vow of chastity.

PETER STRUCK: Athena is the patron goddess

of the great city of ancient Athens.

She's also a virgin goddess.

Sex is not a part of her world.

She's actually beyond the reach of any male desire.

SCOTT LEONARD: Servants in her temple

would have been expected to be virginal so they could devote

their energies not to domestic issues and child rearing

but to the goddess's service.

NARRATOR: Medusa, the hideous image of evil,

starts out as a symbol of purity.

This is the story, but could it be based on reality?

Athena's temple is no myth.

It still stands today high atop the Acropolis in Athens.

The Parthenon.

In Greek, it means place of the virgin.

When it was completed in 430 BC, it

towered over the city of Athens.

PETER STRUCK: Any great city should have a great temple.

It would be like any city in America

having some kind of great sports stadium.

So Athens, being the most prominent city

in ancient Greece, wanted to have also a temple

that befitted its magnificence, and so they created

the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: At the center of the temple

stood a colossal statue of Athena,

nearly 40 feet high carved out of ivory and gold.

It was one of the most impressive sites

in the ancient world.

In the myth, this is where Medusa's tragic fate unfolds.

Medusa's beauty is off limits, locked away in service

to Athena, but one suitor will not

let her vow of chastity stand in his way.

Poseidon, god of the sea.

REBECCA KENNEDY: Poseidon is this very prominent,

masculine power.

He is a god of the sea and a god of storms

and a god of earthquakes.

Earthquakes don't just creep up on you.

They hit you very hard.

If he was angered, even just a little bit,

he could explode violently and really do harm to you.

NARRATOR: In a fit of raw lust, Poseidon

makes his move and ravages the virgin priestess.

[suspenseful music]

MEDUSA: [screams]

He raped her inside of Athena's temple,

a sacrilegious act.

STEPHEN WILK: He stole from her her virginity.

Certainly, this would be a crime in any time of the world.

NARRATOR: Medusa is devastated.

Her innocence has been stolen, her life changed forever.

She was a rape victim, and so she was no longer

eligible for ordinary marriage according

to the mores of Greek times.

And she is no longer a virgin either,

so she wasn't able to be devoted to service to a goddess.

EMILY ALLEN: For certain religious rights,

you had to purify yourself from intercourse.

So actually having intercourse in the temple

is desecrating that space, hence Athena's anger.

And Athena is furious.

NARRATOR: But not with Poseidon.

As a powerful male god, this is expected of him.

In the eyes of Athena, it is Medusa

who deserves to be punished.

The victim is about to become the accused.

PETER STRUCK: Athena is one of the guys,

so she has this role that places her in the male camp.

She is going to side with the men.

REBECCA KENNEDY: In a way, it reflects a society where they

considered women more as property value.

They recognized at some point that rape is necessarily

harmful to the woman, but it doesn't

seem, in most of these myths, that there's

any sympathy at all.

And frequently, the female figure who is raped

is the one who is punished.

NARRATOR: Athena will impose a devastating sentence

on her shattered priestess.

She will transform Medusa from a beauty into a beast.

MEDUSA: [screaming, growls]

NARRATOR: Her new look will bear a terrifying resemblance

to a frequent and real sight in ancient Greece.

Human corpses.

Medusa, mythology's heinous, snake-haired beast,

can turn her enemies to stone with a single glance.

Once, she was Greece's greatest beauty desired

by both men and gods.

But after Poseidon raped her, Medusa's world changed forever.

The Medusa story is a tragedy because she wasn't even

the perpetrator of the deed.

It was Poseidon who raped her in Athena's temple.

But she's then turned into a hideous monster.

MEDUSA: [screaming]

NARRATOR: In the myth, the goddess Athena curses Medusa

without warning.

She begins an agonizing transformation,

clawing desperately at her face.

[snakes hissing]

MEDUSA: [screaming]

NARRATOR: Her skin cracks and withers,

and her long, silken hair becomes a writhing mass

of poisonous snakes.

Medusa's horrific transformation is almost complete.

[snakes hissing]

MEDUSA: [screaming, growling]

NARRATOR: But there's one more twist.

PETER STRUCK: She's now going to have

to undergo the most powerful and most gut-wrenching of all

the aspects of her curse.

She'll have to be now a person whose very sight turns

the looker into stone.

It's now going to isolate her from all of human society.

Medusa is now no longer going to have any interactions

with anyone else.

So what Athena has effectively done

is consign this poor girl to a kind of solitary confinement

for the rest of her life.

NARRATOR: For the tragic crime of being raped,

Medusa has lost her status, her beauty, and her ability to look

at anyone without killing them.

Now, the final blow.

She is banished to a remote and desolate island for life.

PETER STRUCK: Medusa is now going to live out

this curse for eternity.

And for all eternity, things don't really change.

All that matters is that her stone garden grows by one

every time someone tries to come close to her.

NARRATOR: In the myth, Medusa has become a type of monster

called a Gorgon, a name that comes

from the ancient Greek word for terrible.

STEPHEN WILK: The Gorgon is this horrible monster.

It's got scaly skin, huge staring eyes,

and it can turn you to stone by looking at you.

The earliest traditions that we have of Gorgons mention

Medusa.

Medusa becomes first a human being who was then transformed

into one of these nasty beasts.

NARRATOR: In Greek myth, Gorgons represent

the physical embodiment of death.

In fact, death is what inspired them.

The broad, wide-opened eyes, the marks on the face,

the bloated face itself, that pulled-back skin showing

the teeth and the tongue protruding was inspired

by the sight of a dead body.

NARRATOR: In the days after dying,

the skin of a human corpse begins to shrink around

the various parts of the body.

The face becomes grotesquely bloated, the eyes expand out

of their sockets, and the tongue swells pushing itself out

of the mouth.

Gradually, the corpse morphs from man to monster.

On photographs of dead bodies, you

can see all these changes that are

characteristic of the Gorgon taking place.

This is one of the things that people today

aren't so familiar with.

We get separated from death very early.

We have specialists who take care of dead bodies.

But the truth is that, in ancient times,

you wouldn't be insulated from this.

People would see this sort of thing.

NARRATOR: Death was everywhere in the ancient world.

In fact, many other historical monsters

are modeled on corpses.

STEPHEN WILK: In the middle of the Aztec calendar,

you find exactly the same features.

You've got exactly the same oversized eyes.

You've got the broad nose.

You've got the rictus grin.

You have the protruding tongue.

You find it in Bes, in Egypt.

In India, you find many of the same features on Rahu,

the demon responsible for the eclipse.

In Southeast Asia, Rangda, the demon that kidnaps children,

also has huge pop eyes and a very, very long tongue

scrolling out of her mouth.

PETER STRUCK: The prominence of this Gorgon symbol

in many different spots in the ancient world

gives us a real sense of just how widespread these myths

were.

NARRATOR: In the story, Medusa is now a Gorgon,

the mythical face of death.

But her physical transformation is only the beginning

of her punishment.

Her hideous looks will make her an outcast,

but her petrifying power will make her a target

because the warrior who beheads Medusa will possess

the ultimate battlefield advantage.

Her severed head will still turn men to stone.

Men from all over the Mediterranean

set out to slay Medusa and claim that power for themselves.

One of them has more than glory at stake.

His name is Perseus, and his hunt for Medusa's head

is one of mythology's greatest adventures.

The story of Perseus begins in Argos, a real region

of southern Greece.

KRISTINA MILNOR: In antiquity, a lot of myths

were actually situated in specific locations.

Now, this was important for the people

who lived in those places.

They could actually claim connection

to one of these divine heroes.

NARRATOR: In the myth, Argos is ruled

by a tyrant named Acrisius.

The king has a problem.

He has no male heir.

The Greek world tried to retain property in families,

and the way you retain it in families

is you leave it to the firstborn son or the eldest male heir.

NARRATOR: Acrisius's only child is a daughter, Danae.

She has no children of her own, so the king

consults a prophetess to ask if she will ever

bear him a grandson.

Acrisius is told in prophecy that if his daughter ever

had a child, that child would rise up and kill him.

[non-english speech]

REBECCA KENNEDY: He finds out that the son of his daughter

is in fact going to kill him.

He sort of freaks out and decides

that he needs to prevent her from ever having

a child to begin with.

ACRISIUS: [groaning]

DAVID GEORGE: This fear of generational shift, this fear

of losing your power to the next generation, was real.

If you had a kid and you had something worth taking,

at some point, you needed to keep an eye on the kid.

NARRATOR: Overcome by terror, the king hatches a plan

to save his own skin.

SCOTT LEONARD: Acrisius had his daughter Danae walled up inside

of a tower where no one could see her.

It was a pretty miserable existence.

NARRATOR: Danae is trapped with no fresh air and barely

any food.

It is the king's way of killing her without getting blood

on his hands.

The King kept waiting for news that his daughter had died

and was very surprised that he never received news

that she had died of starvation or thirst.

SCOTT LEONARD: After a while, they

began to see lights on and hear noise and sound coming

from the tower, and so Acrisius went to see

what his daughter was up to.

NARRATOR: The King enters his daughter's chamber

and discovers, to his horror, that Danae is not only still

alive, she's a mother to a son, Perseus.

Acrisius is stunned that someone accessed the secure tower

and impregnated his daughter.

But the baby's father isn't a mortal man.

He is king of the Greek gods, mythology's most prolific

womanizer, Zeus.

Zeus, who seduced so many women in so many myths,

sees Danae through the grating and falls in love with her.

So he comes down to her, in about the only shape

that could come through the bars, which

is a shower of gold.

PETER STRUCK: He took the form of a cascade of gold

and poured himself into the room and then

was able to make love to her in that way.

NARRATOR: Zeus's shower of gold may

have been inspired by a real natural phenomenon, one named

after Perseus.

Probably the most impressive and the most visible meteorite

shower in the sky is the Persean meteorite shower.

Certainly, it looks like a shower of gold

coming down if you've ever stopped and watched it

in August.

You can see the individual streaks

with the yellowish color to them.

In mythologies around the world, women

can be impregnated by various natural forces.

It's not just the shower of gold that we

have in the legend of Perseus.

We have women and animals sometimes being

impregnated by the wind.

Or in various mythologies, women become pregnant by the Sun.

NARRATOR: Perseus is born both divine and immortal, a type

of hero known as a demigod.

GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: So this demigod idea

means that this person has some features that are very godly,

some divine powers.

But at the same time, he's mortal.

He can die.

I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea of a demigod

because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible,

to create images of themselves that are closer

and closer to the gods.

NARRATOR: To fulfill his destiny as a demigod,

Perseus must first survive his grandfather's wrath.

King Acrisius fears the boy will fulfill the prophecy he dreads

and grow up to kill him.

His first impulse is to murder both mother and child,

but he fears Zeus's revenge, so he devises a plan to let nature

do the killing for him.

IOANNIS MYLONOPOULOS: Acrisius decided

to put both the mother and the child

into a boat-like construction and throw them into the sea.

[thunder rumbling]

NARRATOR: Danae and Perseus have been left for dead

with no food, no direction, and no protection

from the dangers of the sea.

[thunder rumbling]

Meanwhile, on a dismal island beyond the waves,

Medusa is adding statues to her garden of death.

Warriors turn to stone trying to capture her head.

She possesses a power every conqueror desires, even

real conquerors like Alexander the Great.

Medusa's power to turn men to stone

may have spawned the famous phrase, looks that kill.

But the ancient Greeks believed her power could be

used for good as well as evil.

In their language, the name Medusa actually

had a positive connotation.

It meant guardian.

Her image was often used to ward off danger.

She even appeared on the armor of some of the world's most

feared warriors.

Evidence of this can be found in one of the time capsules

of the ancient world, Pompeii.

KRISTINA MILNOR: When they were excavating

the city in the 1830s, archaeologists

found a very large mosaic which depicts

a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian King,

Darius.

And on Alexander's breastplate is an image of Medusa.

NARRATOR: The battlefield wasn't the only place where

Medusa's powers were sought.

[clattering, grunting]

She was also used to scare children.

The idea was that you would put the symbol on the outside

of your stove, and this would prevent children

from opening up the oven door.

GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: Now, the Medusa was something

that Greek parents used to use in order to scare the kids

in order to eat their food.

Say, eat your food or I'll ask the Medusa to get you.

So it was something that was very horrendous, very horrible,

very mesmerizing, very frightening.

NARRATOR: In the myth, Medusa has a price on her head.

Warriors from across the Greek world

traveled to her remote island seeking to steal it and use

its petrifying power as a weapon against their enemies.

So far, all who have tried have made the same fatal mistake.

They looked at her first.

PETER STRUCK: The ancient sources

are relatively silent on what Medusa must have thought

as she's just sitting there living out

her life amid a huge panoply of stone corpses.

You can imagine that it would've been a very strange situation.

You've got little stalagmites of people all over the place.

And there she is all alone but never

had the satisfaction of actually being

able to engage with anybody.

So you can imagine Medusa living out her life waiting

for the next person to waft into her purview

and get turned into stone.

NARRATOR: But one hero is determined to break her spell.

As Medusa languishes among her statues,

Perseus is coming of age across the sea.

When he was a baby, he and his mother Danae

were cast out to sea by his grandfather, King Acrisius.

Mother and son were expected to die,

but Perseus's divine father, Zeus, protected them.

They washed up on an island called Serifos

and settled there.

REBECCA KENNEDY: He grows up into a nice, strapping young

lad, as it were.

Very strong, and also very strong-willed and very

protective of his mother.

NARRATOR: Perseus has a very good reason to feel protective.

The ruler of Serifos has plans for his mother.

KRISTINA MILNOR: The King of Serifos

was not enthusiastic about having Perseus around, partly

because he had his eye on Danae, who was still a young woman

and beautiful, and he wanted to marry her.

NARRATOR: The king hatches a plan to take Perseus out

of the picture.

He demands an expensive gift from all of his subjects

and vows to banish any who don't comply.

He knows that Perseus is poor and won't be able to deliver.

Perseus, being a young man without a father

and really without a family--

if you didn't have a father in ancient Greece,

it meant that you were really very much

a kind of social outcast--

didn't have any gift to bring to the king.

NARRATOR: Perseus is cornered.

If he is exiled, his mother will be

forced into an unwanted marriage and be separated from him

forever.

He makes an impulsive decision with deadly ramifications.

Perseus says, well, I may not be able to buy a great gift

because I am poor, but I'm going to do something that no one

else has been able to do.

I will bring you the head of Medusa.

NARRATOR: It's a suicide mission.

No one has ever returned from Medusa's island alive.

But for Perseus, there's no turning back.

It's a matter of honor.

He can't get out of it.

He has to bring the head of the Gorgon.

[non-english chattering]

NARRATOR: If Perseus succeeds, he will return home

a hero with the stature to challenge the king

and protect his mother.

But if he fails, he'll be turned to stone.

In Greek mythology, the names Perseus

and Medusa are forever linked.

The consummate hero and the ultimate monster.

It is a story that began here, among these ruins.

This is ancient Mycenae.

According to legend, this once great civilization

was founded by Perseus himself.

PETER STRUCK: Mycenae was the greatest of ancient city-states

back in the Bronze Age, and it ruled sway over a large swath

of ancient Greece.

NARRATOR: For millennia, it was thought

that Mycenae, just like Perseus and Medusa, was a myth.

The only surviving reference to it

was in Homer's epic story, "The Iliad."

But in the late 19th century, a lost civilization

was rediscovered.

Using Homer's epic poems as a guide,

archaeologists in the 19th century

were actually able to locate these great ancient citadels.

And what an amazing adventure it must have been to find out

that not only was Homer talking about something

that really existed, but now they, themselves, were

in contact with it as well.

NARRATOR: Mycenae lies near Argos, the city where Perseus

was born in the myth.

Its ruins are a window into the people who invented

the story of Perseus and Medusa, ancient Greeks who

used mythology to explain life's mysteries.

The city structures were so massive,

later generations of Greeks believed

they were built by gods.

They would look at the ruins of those palaces

and see monumental masonry.

This was a kind of feat that they couldn't imagine

themselves doing.

It seemed like something that only heroes could do.

NARRATOR: It was from these ruins

that the story of Perseus sprang, the hero

remembered for building the city and taking on Medusa.

It is the ultimate challenge.

Perseus confronts it with the bravado of a boy who

was eager to prove himself a man,

but he is woefully unprepared for the task at hand.

Perseus has no weapons, no experience, and no idea

how to kill his target.

Another piece that makes Medusa so terrifying

is that they wouldn't have had a real sense of exactly what she

looked like.

Anyone who had seen her before Perseus

would not have lived to tell the tale.

So all he knew about was that there was this monster that

was so hideous that if you ever caught eyes on her,

you would be frozen and turned to stone.

SCOTT LEONARD: He stalked off and began his adventure,

and it wasn't long before he realized that he

had no idea where he was going.

But as heroes often do, and especially heroes

whose fathers are gods, he soon gets supernatural aid.

NARRATOR: Lost in the wilderness,

Perseus does what many ancient Greeks would have done

under the same circumstances.

He prays, and the gods hear him.

[thunderclap]

His father Zeus sends down a divine messenger, Hermes,

who gives Perseus the jumpstart he needs.

A pair of winged sandals.

GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: One of the things

that Perseus has to do is travel long distances very fast,

and being an era without airplanes,

here comes Hermes to offer a solution of those sandals

with wings that he, himself, as a messenger of the gods, uses.

So he gives them to Perseus, so Perseus wears them,

and he can fly through continents at the speed of a--

well, faster than a jet.

NARRATOR: Now that Perseus has a set of wings,

what he really needs is a set of weapons.

PETER STRUCK: Perseus has got everything going for him.

I mean, he has divine blood, he's got great powers,

he's been brought up on the cusp of manhood.

He's ready to take on these nasty beasts,

but he needs more.

He's got to have technology.

NARRATOR: Hermes offers Perseus an inside tip.

He advises him to locate the Stygian Nymphs, beautiful women

who possess the magical weapons he needs to kill Medusa.

EMILY ALLEN: The nymphs are these female divinities

who are associated with natural elements.

And they inhabit them, so they are in springs.

They are in mountains.

They're in trees.

They're typically the objects of deep and powerful

sexual desire.

And from this, we get the idea of a nymphomaniac.

NARRATOR: The whereabouts of these nymphs are a mystery.

Only three hideous women know how to find them.

The Graeae sisters.

They have been old, withered hags

since the day they were born, and they don't like visitors.

Perseus must get them to talk so he can save his mother

and survive his face-off with Medusa.

It's a battle we can still see in today's night skies

if we look closely.

[thunderclap]

MEDUSA: [growling]

NARRATOR: Medusa, a deadly Gorgon,

has turned countless warriors into stone.

But someone is still stalking her, Perseus,

and he wants her head.

His success will require more than boyish bravado.

Perseus will need a powerful set of weapons to slay Medusa.

To get them, he must find the Stygian Nymphs,

but only three wretched old women know where they live.

The Graeae sisters.

PETER STRUCK: They are very strange.

None of them have eyes except this one

that they pass between each other

whenever one wants to try to have a look at something,

so they need to share it.

That eye is very precious to them.

NARRATOR: The island of the Graeae Sisters

is a dark realm where even the Moon does not shine.

Perseus uses his trusty winged saddles to get there.

Perseus is also not just a hothead and brawny,

but he's also pretty clever.

When he gets to the island, he realizes

he should do some reconnaissance and find out

what their weaknesses might be before he proceeds.

When he realizes they all have the one eye

and they're blind while they don't have it,

he steals the eye from them as they're passing it around.

GRAEAE SISTERS: [yelling]

NARRATOR: The sisters fly into a blind panic.

They're in a very abject position.

It's like a beggar having his last farthing stolen from him.

They're falling all over each other trying

to get that eye back from him.

NARRATOR: Perseus has the upper hand.

He demands the location of the nymphs.

The Graeae Sisters reveal that they live on the River Styx,

the waterway that separates the land of the living

from the land of the dead.

Perseus has what he came for.

He tosses the eye onto the sand and takes to the skies.

This is the myth, but how does it connect to reality?

This story, like many others in Greek mythology,

may literally have fallen from the sky.

Since the dawn of civilization, mankind

has looked to the heavens to explain the past, present,

and future.

An awful lot of storytelling revolved around the things

that you saw in the sky, the constellations that you see.

Certainly, we know that an awful lot of myths

were tied to the constellations.

GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: We have, in the 5th century,

Greeks naming the constellations by the names

of mythical beings.

And at that time, people not only saw the mythical creatures

up in the sky as symbols, as mere representations,

but they actually believed that the constellations were divine.

NARRATOR: One especially curious pattern exists in the heavens.

A hero holding a curved sword and the head of a Gorgon.

This is the constellation known as Perseus,

a celestial blueprint for the myth.

But there may be more to this cluster of stars.

It may also reveal how the story of the Graeae Sisters

originated.

The constellations themselves did things that

inspired portions of the myth.

The second brightest star in the constellation of Perseus

is Algol.

Now, Algol is a very peculiar star.

NARRATOR: In the Perseus constellation,

Algol forms a point on Medusa's head.

It is known as an eclipsing binary star.

It appears as a single point of light in the sky,

but it's actually two stars that orbit around one another.

As they go, they eclipse each other's light

making Algol appear to dim and then get bright again.

It is a three-day cycle that may have inspired the story

of the three Graeae Sisters.

Algol is very bright for a while, and then it goes out,

rather rapidly, every third day.

This represents the stealing of the eye of the Graeae

by Perseus.

And as it tries to pass to the third Graeae,

Perseus is in there among them and he steals the eye.

And when he takes the eye, you can see it go out.

Well, if you're a good storyteller

and you've kept track of this, you

know when the star is going to disappear,

so you can start telling your story

when the star is still bright.

Then, when you get to the part of the story

where Perseus has stolen the eye,

you can point up in the sky and say, look, it's gone.

NARRATOR: Algol's impact on the myth

may not end with the Graeae Sisters.

Some experts believe it also inspired

the climax of the story.

Medusa's gruesome demise.

The myth continues.

Perseus is on a collision course with Medusa.

The odds are stacked against him.

To take on the monster, he needs the right battle gear.

He finds it along the River Styx, the gateway to Hades,

where he encounters the Stygian Nymphs.

They present Perseus with three weapons

essential to his survival--

the sword of Zeus, the shield of Athena,

and the helmet of Hades, god of the dead.

STEPHEN WILK: It reminds them irresistibly of James Bond

getting all the fabulous devices from Q. Not only because he

gets all these things to carry out his mission,

but because they also have magical properties to them.

NARRATOR: Now, Perseus is ready to fulfill his destiny,

and not a moment too soon.

Back home, on the island of Serifos,

a royal wedding is in the works, and Perseus's mother

is the unwilling bride.

Will her son slay Medusa and bring back her head

before it's too late?

And how can he succeed where so many others before him

have failed?

The secret lies in his shield.

Perseus's dangerous quest for the head of Medusa

has taken him on a journey over thousands of miles.

Now, his moment of truth has arrived.

He stands at the threshold of Medusa's deadly lair.

The gods helped him get here, but the rest is up to him.

PETER STRUCK: All that's around Medusa

is rocks, very hard things.

Anything that would have been living

would have been turned to stone, so it must have been a very

bleak and desolate place.

NARRATOR: Perseus is frightened as he takes the first steps

toward his fate, but they are not steps forward.

The young hero is slowly creeping backwards.

PETER STRUCK: Perseus is very smart,

and he realizes that trying to attack Medusa head-on

would be his own undoing.

He'd be turned to stone.

So what he does instead is get his shield, turn it round,

and actually approach her from behind.

And he walks up to her backwards looking at her in his shield

so that he's safe.

You can imagine the tension building

as he gets closer and closer.

As far as he knows, that shield will protect him,

but he must not have really known for sure.

NARRATOR: Perseus cautiously makes his way through the lair,

eyes locked on his shield.

The slightest misstep will prove fatal.

[snakes hissing]

At last, Perseus locks onto his target, closes his eyes,

and swings his sword.

[metal clangs]

With one clean stroke, the head of Medusa rolls to the floor.

Her years of torment and isolation are finally over.

There would have been great fascination for Medusa

among ancient audiences.

And whether they were rooting for her or rooting against her,

there would have been a great sympathy

for this poor, poor person.

I mean, think about what she'd been through and all that she'd

lost and the horrible life she was fated to live.

And then, her end point is to have a hero chop her head off.

NARRATOR: It is a tragic end for a tragic figure,

but Medusa's story doesn't end here.

SCOTT LEONARD: One of the remarkable things

about Medusa's head is even after she is dead,

even after it's been removed and stuffed in a bag,

it still has the power to transform anyone who looks

on it to stone.

PETER STRUCK: Medusa's unstoppable and terrifying,

but those forces can also be harnessed,

and Perseus's story talks about that.

When the head is inside the bag, then it

becomes a weapon that could be used for good as well as evil.

NARRATOR: Perseus is now the owner of the most dangerous

weapon on Earth.

He can turn anyone to stone, and he has a few targets in mind.

His mother, Danae, has been left with no one

to protect her from the lecherous King of Serifos.

She's about to be made a queen against her will.

For Perseus, it is a race against time.

[suspenseful music]

[wind whistling]

As the hero flies home, it becomes clear just how powerful

Medusa's head still is.

REBECCA KENNEDY: As Perseus is flying with his winged sandals

back across to get to Greece, drops from her blood drop

into the sand, and from this spring up hundreds and hundreds

of poisonous snakes.

[snakes hissing]

Some nasty monsters in antiquity

are so mean and so awful that their blood actually

produces other monsters.

Medusa is one of those that have such powerful blood.

The dripping blood from her head,

as Perseus was flying away, was thought, in later tellings

of the story, to have given rise to all the snakes

that ancient Romans knew to exist in North Africa.

NARRATOR: In the myth, the royal wedding day has arrived.

The father of the bride has come from Argos, Perseus's

own grandfather, King Acrisius.

He has long feared the prophecy that his grandson would kill

him.

Perseus arrives just as the wedding ceremony

is getting underway.

When Perseus returns to Serifos

and sees that his mother is about to marry the king,

he becomes very angry.

So he lifts up the head of Medusa and says,

King, I have brought you your gift.

NARRATOR: One glance turns the king to stone, his face frozen

in an eternal scream.

But he's not the only king who gets caught looking.

Acrisius is also petrified.

Danae has been saved by her son, and Perseus

has earned his place as one of mythology's bravest heroes.

His death-defying journey has transformed him from a boy

into a man.

PETER STRUCK: Perseus is particularly

relatable among the ancient heroes.

He's cast out at different points along the way.

And only because of the extra love of his mother

is he able to make his way through some very difficult

times.

He makes his mark in the world, and he grows into his own.

He becomes a real, true, powerful hero, someone

that the Greeks can look up to.

NARRATOR: After he saves his mother,

Perseus presents Medusa's head as a tribute to Athena,

the goddess who created the monster.

In the end, it is Medusa's original punisher

who inherits her power.

PETER STRUCK: There is a poetic quality to the ending

of this story as Medusa's head becomes the icon

on the breastplate of Athena.

After all, this poor young girl started off

this great misadventure by running afoul of that goddess.

Athena has the first and the last laugh.

NARRATOR: Medusa's story has come full circle.

Our myth ends where it began, in ancient Greece's greatest

temple, the Parthenon.

Above it, she and the man who took her life

are forever linked in the night sky.