Chrysaor

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For other uses, see Chrysaor (disambiguation).
Chrysaor
Callirrhoe
ChildrenGeryon and Echidna

In

Gorgon Medusa.

And when Perseus cut off her head, there sprang forth great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus who is so called because he was born near the springs of Ocean; and that other, because he held a golden blade in his hands.

— Hesiod, Theogony[1]

Mythology

In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of the Gorgons, three monstrous siblings. Medusa, unlike her sisters Stheno and Euryale, was mortal, and was beheaded by Perseus. Chrysaor and Pegasus sprang from the blood of her decapitated body.[2]

In art, Chrysaor's earliest appearance seems to be on the great pediment of the

6th century BCE
, where he is shown beside his mother, Medusa.

Offspring

Chrysaor, married to

Erytheis beside his own shambling cattle on that day when Heracles drove those broad-faced cattle toward holy Tiryns, when he crossed the stream of Oceanus and had killed Orthos and the oxherd Eurytion
out in the gloomy meadow beyond fabulous Oceanus.

—Hesiod, Theogony 287

Chrysaor and Callirrhoe may have also been the parents of Echidna.[3]

In an alternate genealogy from

Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, and his son Mylasus goes on to found Mylasa.[4] This ancestry would make Chrysaor a double of Bellerophon.[5]

Notes

  1. ^ "Hesiod, Theogony, line 270". www.perseus.tufts.edu.
  2. ^ Hesiod. Theogony (in Ancient Greek).
  3. Herbert Jennings Rose says simply that it is "not clear which parents are meant", Athanassakis, p. 44, says that Phorcys and Ceto are the "more likely candidates for parents of this hideous creature who proceeded to give birth to a series of monsters and scourges". The problem arises from the ambiguous referent of the pronoun "she" in line 295 of the Theogony. While some have read this "she" as referring to Callirhoe (e.g. Smith "Echidna"; Morford, p. 162), according to Clay, p. 159 n. 32
    , "the modern scholarly consensus" reads Ceto, see for example Gantz, p. 22; Caldwell, pp. 7, 46 295–303; Grimal, "Echidna" p. 143.
  4. ISBN 978-0-7195-4663-1
    .
  5. ^ Kerenyi, Karl (1959). The Heroes of the Greeks. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 80.

References

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