The Tale of Perseus and Andromeda

At a Glance

Central figures: Perseus, son of Zeus and the mortal princess Danaë; Andromeda, princess of Aethiopia, daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia; and Phineus, Andromeda’s former betrothed.
Setting: The island of Seriphos, the coast of Aethiopia, and the kingdom of Argos - drawn from the classical Greek mythological tradition.
The turn: Perseus, flying home with Medusa’s head, sees Andromeda chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the sea monster Cetus and bargains with her father for her hand in exchange for killing the creature.
The outcome: Perseus slays Cetus, defeats Phineus and his men with Medusa’s gaze, marries Andromeda, and returns with her to Argos; their descendants include Heracles.
The legacy: Perseus and Andromeda were immortalized as constellations after their deaths, along with the sea monster Cetus, and their stars still trace the night sky.

Perseus had already done the impossible when he crossed back over the sea. Medusa’s head was in his sack - eyes sealed shut, still capable of stone. He wore Hermes’ winged sandals and Hades’ helmet of invisibility, and he had the reflective bronze shield Athena had given him. Below him, the coastline of Aethiopia stretched out pale and rocky, and chained to a promontory above the waterline was a girl.

The Head of Medusa

King Polydectes of Seriphos had wanted Danaë, Perseus’ mother, and the simplest way to have her was to send her son somewhere he would not return from. The task he set was bringing back the head of Medusa, one of the three Gorgons - the one who was mortal, the one whose gaze turned flesh to stone. It was the kind of task designed to be a death sentence.

Perseus went anyway. Hermes gave him winged sandals. Athena gave him a polished shield and told him to use the reflection, never to look directly. He found the Graeae - three sisters who shared a single eye between them - and stole the eye from their palm mid-transfer, trading it back only when they told him where the Gorgons slept. He found Medusa sleeping among the stone shapes of men who had looked at her full on. He held the shield up and watched the reflection, and he cut her head from her shoulders without meeting her gaze. From the stump of her neck, Pegasus rose - the winged horse, born from Medusa’s blood and Poseidon’s old claim on her. Perseus did not take the horse. He took the head, wrapped it, and flew south.

Queen Cassiopeia’s Boast

Cassiopeia, queen of Aethiopia, had said aloud that her beauty exceeded the Nereids’ - those fifty daughters of the sea-god Nereus who served as companions to Poseidon in the deep. The Nereids heard. Poseidon heard. The sea god’s answer was Cetus: a creature vast enough to devastate coastlines, rising from the water to wreck ships and devour whatever it found on shore. The oracle at Ammon told Cepheus what the price of Cassiopeia’s arrogance was. His daughter Andromeda, chained to the rocks, offered to the monster - that was the only way to end it.

So Cepheus had done it. He was a king with a kingdom being torn apart, and the oracle did not offer alternatives. Andromeda was chained above the tideline on a bare outcropping of stone, and the court waited, and Cassiopeia had said nothing more about the Nereids.

Perseus Above the Coast

Perseus saw her from the air and came down. She was alive, chained at the wrists, the sea moving dark beneath her. He asked what had brought her here and she told him, or her parents did, rushing down from the cliff path where they had gathered to watch what they could not prevent.

Perseus made the bargain plainly: he would kill Cetus in exchange for Andromeda’s hand. Cepheus, who had no position to negotiate from, agreed.

The monster came out of the sea when Perseus was still circling above. Cetus was enormous, trailing water, its movement throwing foam against the rocks where Andromeda was held. Perseus came at it from above and from the sides, using the sandals to keep out of reach, cutting at it with his sword. Some tellings say he drew Medusa’s head from the bag at the crucial moment and held it facing the creature - and Cetus slowed, and hardened, and stilled into stone in the shallows. Others say the sword alone finished it. In either version, the monster died and did not rise again. Perseus broke Andromeda’s chains himself. She stepped down from the rock onto ground that was no longer a place of execution.

Phineus at the Wedding

There was a feast. There was a marriage rite. Andromeda had been promised to Phineus before the oracle spoke and before the chains were brought out, and Phineus had not offered to fight the monster himself, but he arrived at the wedding with armed men and a grievance.

The hall became a battle. Perseus was outnumbered and fighting with a sword in a space full of guests and torchlight and the noise of men who had come to kill a wedding. He held them off as long as he could with the blade, and then he called out a warning to everyone who stood with him to turn their eyes away.

He drew out Medusa’s head.

Phineus and his followers looked at it. Stone spread through them where they stood - men arrested mid-lunge, mid-shout, some with their spears still raised. The hall went quiet. Andromeda’s wedding continued.

Argos and the Stars

Perseus brought Andromeda to Argos, the land where Danaë had been imprisoned in a bronze tower before Zeus came to her and Perseus was conceived. They lived there and had children, and through those children the line ran forward into what would become the greatest generations of Greek heroes - Heracles among their descendants, that laboring, lion-skinned figure who would carry Greek myth into its next age.

Perseus and Andromeda died as mortals die. But the gods placed them in the sky: Perseus to the north with his sword raised, Andromeda beside him still wearing the suggestion of chains in the curve of her stars, and Cetus strung out below them - the monster frozen in the same sky it once terrorized, outrun at last. Cassiopeia circles the pole in her throne, sometimes upright, sometimes tipped upside down, which some said was her perpetual punishment, and some said was simply the way the stars move.