The crucial difference is one of perspective. We are encouraged to imagine Midas’ story from his point of view. What must it be like, we imagine, as we follow his experiences in the Metamorphoses, to have everything we touch turn to gold? How would it feel to crack our teeth on golden bread? How would it taste to have liquid gold in our throats? We imagine the experience from the inside out. But with Medusa, we’re encouraged to see her from the outside: how do we attack her? How do we avoid her gaze? How can we use her decapitated head? We never stop to ask ourselves what it must be like to be her, possessed of a deadly gaze just as Midas is possessed of a deadly touch. And yet, just as Midas discovers with his temporary power, it must be incredibly isolating. Medusa cannot look at a friend, a person, even an animal without killing them. This perhaps explains why she lives in a cave, as a surviving fragment of an Aeschylus play, The Phorcides, tells us.32 Her sisters are either immune to her gaze or they are protected from it by the gloom of the cave, because they all live together without any risk of petrification. Yet her power is sufficient even after death to stop a sea-monster in its tracks, and to turn Atlas – a giant – into a mountain （Perseus petrifies him in a fit of pique, after Atlas refuses to welcome him into his home, having been given a dire warning from an oracle that a son of Jupiter would cause him harm. Oracles are often full of trickery, but in this instance, it has a point）。 So any visual contact with anything mortal – no matter how vast or powerful – is out of bounds to Medusa, unless she is prepared to destroy it. Her world must be one of darkness and statues.
*
The objectification of Medusa is nowhere more obvious than when we consider what happens to her head after her death. Perseus uses her to assist him against giants, monsters and assorted human irritants: her lethal gaze creates far more carnage after her death than it ever did before. Perseus apparently doesn’t share Medusa’s desire to minimize the harm she causes. Once he has seen off the sea-monster and rescued Andromeda, he stops for a rest on the shore. He washes his hands （cleanliness is next to demi-godliness）， but pauses before putting Medusa’s head down on the dura harena – ‘hard sand’，33 in case he damages it. He makes a small cushion for it, out of leaves. It is a horrible moment in the story: the concern Perseus takes to avoid harming Medusa’s head – which has proved so useful to him – could not be more different from the way he treated her when she was alive. She is more valuable to him as a weapon than she was as a living creature.
But what happens to Medusa after she has been used to kill everyone Perseus has taken exception to? She becomes what her artistic antecedents always were: a gorgoneion. Not only because she is now just a head, but because her head is given by Perseus to Athene. We can see the exact moment this happens on a vase held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and attributed to the Tarporley Painter,34 which was made in southern Italy in the early fourth century BCE. On the left-hand side of the scene is Perseus, still sporting his winged boots and fancy hat. He has just handed Medusa’s head to Athene; she holds it in her right hand. On the right, Hermes leans on a tree trunk, his legs idly crossed. But we shouldn’t be deceived by his casual body language: all three figures are looking down at the ground as Athene holds the head up. They clearly believe Medusa’s gaze would turn them to stone, gods or not. Athene holds a spear in her left hand which is so long that its tip extends beyond the parameters of the painting. Propped against her right hip is her round shield. Because it is at an angle, it catches the reflection of Medusa’s head. The artist had obviously studied reflections, because he has painted her head upside down in the shield face, as it would be. Pseudo-Apollodorus tells us that Athene fastened the Gorgon head to the centre of her shield,35 in which case this reflection is showing us exactly what’s to come.
This story, then, takes us all the way back to where we began – in literary terms – with the earliest representation of a Gorgon in Homer’s Iliad. There, Athene wore the Gorgon head on her aegis （although Medusa is not specifically named by Homer, and nor does he mention Perseus in relation to beheading a Gorgon）。 But is it really possible that the whole Perseus saga was created to explain why Gorgons are so often shown as only heads, gorgoneia? Why not? Greek storytellers created a monster. As so often with female deities, she becomes tripled, acquires two sisters （there are three Seasons, three Furies, three Graiai, three Graces . . .）。 Then they needed an explanation for why she was so often depicted as just a head. So the decapitation story develops.