The three gorgon sisters — Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale — were children of Phorcys and Ceto, or sometimes, Typhon and Echidna, in each case chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound, who places both trinities of sisters far off "on Kisthene's dreadful plain":
"Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—" While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as a being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BCE Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa".[3] In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful nymph, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," but when she was raped by the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon in Athena's temple, the goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and she made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn a man to stone.
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{K:13393} 12/29/2007
