Medusa Medusa In Greek mythology, Medusa (; Μέδουσα "guardian, protectress") was a monster, a Gorgon, generally described as a winged human female with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those who gazed upon her face would turn to stone. Most sources describe her as the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, though the author Hyginus makes her the daughter of Gorgon and Ceto. According to Hesiod and Aeschylus, she lived and died on an island named Sarpedon, somewhere near Cisthene. The 2nd-century BCE novelist Dionysios Skytobrachion puts her somewhere in Libya, where Herodotus had said the Berbers originated her myth, as
Greek mythology in popular culture Lord Tennyson's "Oenone" is her lament that Paris deserted her for Helen. When poets of the German Romantic tradition, such as Friedrich Schiller, wrote about the Greek gods, their works were frequently "erotically charged", "openly sensual and hedonistic". In his poem "The Waste Land", T. S. Eliot incorporates a range of elements and inspirations from Greek mythology to pop music to Elizabethan history to create a ""tour-de-force" exposition of Western culture, from the elite to the folk to the utterly primitive". The Indian poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio's work was heavily influenced by Greek mythology. Nina Kosman published a book