Andromeda

Andromeda (an-DROM-uh-duh), in Greek Ἀνδρομέδα, "ruler of men," is the chained princess of Greek myth — the innocent daughter offered up to a sea-monster to pay for her mother's pride, and rescued at the last moment by the hero Perseus, who took her as his bride. Hers is the second half of the Perseus story, the reward that crowns his quest; but she is more than a prize won, and the Greeks kept her name alive as the very image of endangered innocence delivered from death. She is the princess of Aethiopia, the far southern kingdom at the edge of the known world, daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia.

Her ordeal is not her own fault, and that is the heart of her story: she is punished for a boast she never made. When her mother set her family's beauty above that of the sea-nymphs, an offended god sent a monster against the coast, and an oracle demanded the girl herself as the price of peace. Chained to a rock at the water's edge and left for the beast, Andromeda is the type of the pure victim — the sacrifice exacted for another's sin — until the winged hero drops out of the sky, kills the monster, strikes off her chains, and turns her doom into a wedding.

Her afterlife is written across the heavens. When her life on earth was over, Andromeda was set among the stars as the constellation that still bears her name, the chained maiden — and she was not set there alone. Her whole family went up with her: her husband Perseus, her father Cepheus, her mother Cassiopeia, and even the sea-monster Cetus that had threatened her, so that the entire cast of her rescue wheels together through the northern autumn sky, a myth preserved in constellations. To trace her story is to complete the tale of Perseus and to read one of the oldest and most enduring rescue-narratives in all of Western myth.

The kingdom of Aethiopia and the boast of Cassiopeia

Andromeda was the only daughter of Cepheus, king of Aethiopia, and his queen Cassiopeia — a far land the Greeks set at the southern rim of the world, beyond Egypt, on the shore of the great Ocean. The trouble that engulfed her began not with any deed of her own but with her mother's pride. Cassiopeia was a woman of surpassing beauty, and she let her vanity run past all bounds: she boasted aloud that she — or, in the commoner version, that her daughter Andromeda — was more beautiful than the Nereids, the fifty sea-nymphs who were the daughters of the sea-god Nereus and the loveliest of all the powers of the deep. It was the classic sin of the Greek imagination, a mortal setting herself above the divine, and it did not go unheard. The Nereids, stung by the insult, carried their complaint to the sea itself.

Poseidon's punishment and the monster Cetus

(Content note: what follows turns on human sacrifice and the exposure of a young woman to death.) The Nereids appealed to Poseidon, lord of the sea and the natural champion of his own nymphs, and the god answered with a double scourge: he sent a great flooding of the waters over the land, and out of the sea he sent a monster — Cetus, a vast sea-beast that came surging along the coast of Aethiopia, wrecking the shore, devouring men and cattle, and laying the whole kingdom waste. The people could neither fight the thing nor flee it, and their king, helpless before a divine punishment, did what a Greek king in such straits always did: he sent to consult an oracle — in the tradition, the oracle of Ammon in the Libyan desert — to learn how the plague might be lifted and his land saved.

The oracle's terrible price

The answer the oracle gave was as cruel as the monster itself: there would be no deliverance for Aethiopia unless Cepheus and Cassiopeia gave up their own daughter, Andromeda, to the sea-beast — exposed as a sacrifice to the very creature their pride had summoned. The people of the land, ruined and desperate, pressed the king to obey, and at last he yielded to them. So the innocent girl was led out to the sea's edge, stripped and chained by her arms to a rock rising from the water, and left there alone to wait for the monster — a princess bound naked to the stone as bait, paying with her life for a boast that was not even hers. It is one of the starkest images in Greek myth: beauty and innocence fettered to the rock, the sea heaving before her, and no help anywhere in sight.

Perseus, fresh from Medusa, finds her chained to the rock

Into that scene, out of the empty sky, came Perseus. He was flying home from the far western edge of the world, wearing the winged sandals the nymphs had lent him and carrying in his wallet the freshly severed head of Medusa, whose gaze still turned the living to stone (his slaying of the Gorgon is told on his own page). Passing high over the coast of Aethiopia, he looked down and saw the girl bound to her rock — so still, her arms fixed by the chains and her hair stirred only by the wind, that in Ovid's telling he took her at first for a marble statue, until he saw the tears on her cheeks and her hair moving in the breeze. Struck at once with love, Perseus checked his flight and dropped down beside her, and asked her name, her country, and why she was chained there. Shy and ashamed, she told him — or would have, but that the sea broke open and the monster came on, driving through the water toward its prey.

The slaying of the sea-monster

Perseus went straight to her parents, who stood weeping helpless on the shore, and struck his bargain: if he killed the beast and saved their daughter, Andromeda should be his wife. In their terror they agreed at once, and promised the kingdom itself as her dowry. Then Perseus rose into the air to meet the monster. The two great tellings of the fight differ in their method. In the older tradition, followed by Apollodorus, he fell upon Cetus with the harpe, the curved adamantine sickle-sword with which he had beheaded Medusa, and hacked the creature to death from above, diving and wheeling out of reach of its jaws like a hawk. In the version made famous by Ovid, the fight is a long aerial duel — Perseus stabbing again and again from the air as the beast lunges and the sea-water runs red — and some later tellers say he ended it, or could have, by drawing out the Gorgon's head and turning the monster to stone, the same weapon that petrified his other enemies. Either way the beast was slain, the sea grew calm, and Perseus came down to the rock and struck the chains from Andromeda's wrists, and gave her back, alive, to her overjoyed mother and father.

The wedding-feast and the fight with Phineus

The rescue should have ended in a simple wedding, and for a moment it did: Cepheus and Cassiopeia welcomed Perseus as a son, and the marriage was celebrated with a great feast in the palace of Aethiopia, torches and singing and the whole court at the tables. But there was a claim on Andromeda older than Perseus's. She had already been betrothed to her uncle Phineus, the king's own brother — a man who had done nothing to save her when the monster threatened, and had let her be chained to the rock without lifting a hand, but who now, seeing her rescued and married to another, burst into the wedding-hall at the head of an armed mob to seize the bride he had abandoned. A pitched battle broke out among the banquet tables. Perseus, badly outnumbered, fought with spear and with the very stones and torches of the feast, and Ovid's account lingers on the carnage of the wrecked wedding, the guests cut down among the overturned tables and mixing-bowls. At last, seeing he could not win by the sword, Perseus shouted a warning to any friend of his to turn away and shield his eyes — and lifted the head of Medusa high above the crowd. Phineus and his warriors, caught mid-charge with their weapons raised, were turned to stone where they stood, a whole hall of grey statues frozen in the postures of the fight; Ovid shows Phineus himself petrified in the cringing attitude of a coward begging for his life. So Perseus won Andromeda outright, and no rival was left to dispute her.

Her life with Perseus and the line of Heracles

Andromeda went home with Perseus, and unlike so many women of Greek myth her story after the rescue is one of steadfast marriage rather than abandonment or grief. She left Aethiopia and lived with him in the Argolid, at Tiryns and at Mycenae — the great citadel that Perseus, the tradition says, founded, having its Cyclopean walls raised for him. There she bore him a large family of sons and daughters. From this line, in prose the Greeks traced almost the whole later heroic age: among their children were Perses (said to be the ancestor of the kings of Persia), and Electryon, whose daughter Alcmene would in time bear Heracles to Zeus — so that the greatest of all Greek heroes counted Andromeda among his great-grandmothers. Andromeda and Perseus, alone among the great couples of myth, grew old together and were never parted; and when their mortal lives were done, the tradition held that the gods honoured them by setting them together in the sky.

Set among the stars — a whole family in the heavens

Andromeda's final destiny is a catasterism, a translation into the stars, and it is the grandest in all of myth because it took up not one figure but her entire story. Athena, in the account preserved by the mythographers, set Andromeda among the constellations in memory of her ordeal and her deliverance — the constellation Andromeda, still drawn today as a woman with her arms outstretched and chained. And around her the gods placed the rest of the cast, so that the whole drama hangs together in the northern autumn sky: her husband Perseus stands beside her with the Gorgon's head in his hand, ready to defend her still; her father Cepheus and her mother Cassiopeia are the neighbouring constellations, the king with his sceptre and the vain queen bound to her throne (set, the storytellers said, so that she wheels upside-down around the pole for half of every night as a lasting punishment for her pride); and the sea-monster Cetus lies below them all, the beast forever held off from the maiden it was sent to devour. No other Greek myth left so complete a memorial in the heavens — an entire family, villain and rescuer alike, fixed among the stars, where the great galaxy that bears Andromeda's name is the most distant thing the unaided human eye can see.

A heroine remembered, not a goddess petitioned

Andromeda was not a goddess and received no divine cult of her own; she belonged, like her husband Perseus, to the order of heroes and heroines — the great mortals of the legendary past whose memory was kept and whose stories were told, honoured at tombs and local shrines rather than worshipped at temples with the sacrifices given to the Olympians. Her fame in the ancient world was carried above all by story and spectacle rather than by rite. The Greeks pointed to places that claimed a piece of her legend, and pointed above all to the sky, where her constellation kept her tale in front of every generation that ever looked up.

Joppa and the marks of the monster

The ancient geographers fixed the scene of Andromeda's rescue at a real place: the coastal city of Joppa (Jaffa, on the shore of what is now Israel), which local and Greek tradition alike named as the spot where she had been chained to the rock. Pausanias (Description of Greece 4.35.9) reports that at Joppa the people showed a spring stained red — they said with the blood of the sea-monster — and pointed out marks of Andromeda's ordeal. Most famously, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (Natural History 5.69, 9.11) records that the bones of the sea-monster were exhibited as a marvel: the general Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, he says, brought the vast skeleton from Joppa to Rome in 58 BC and put it on show, a monster's ribs and spine forty feet long, physical "proof" of the myth for the Roman crowds. The rock to which Andromeda was bound was still pointed out to travellers at Joppa in imperial times.

The chained maiden on stage and vase

Andromeda's ordeal was one of the favourite subjects of Athenian tragedy and Greek art. Both Sophocles and Euripides wrote tragedies titled Andromeda; Euripides' play of 412 BC was so celebrated for its beauty and its passionate love-scenes — Perseus falling in love with the chained girl before the audience's eyes — that Aristophanes parodied it at length in his comedy the Thesmophoriazusae the very next year, and an ancient story has a whole city (the men of Abdera) falling sick with fever after seeing it and wandering the streets reciting its lines. On the painted pottery of Greece and the wall-paintings of Roman houses, the rescue of Andromeda — the maiden at the rock, the hero and the monster — was among the most beloved of all mythological scenes, so that her image was one of the most widely reproduced in the whole ancient repertoire.

A heroine honoured in remembrance

As a heroine rather than a goddess, Andromeda is honoured today in the reflective key proper to the great figures of myth rather than through the petition and sacrifice owed to a deity. A person drawn to her story might keep her memory as a patron of endangered innocence, of courage under helplessness, and of deliverance against all hope — the values her ordeal and rescue embody. A candle lit, her tale retold, a quiet act of protection offered to someone bound and helpless as she was: these sit well as living tributes to a heroine whose whole meaning is rescue.

Written in the sky

Far more than through any cult, Andromeda lives on where the ancients set her — in the stars. The constellation Andromeda still rides the northern autumn sky, the chained maiden with her arms outstretched, flanked by her husband Perseus, her parents Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and the sea-monster Cetus below — the one Greek myth that any clear night still tells in full. And her name marks the most famous object in that patch of sky: the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31), the great spiral two and a half million light-years away that is the most distant thing the naked human eye can see, and the nearest large galaxy to our own. Every stargazer who finds that faint smudge of light is, without knowing it, keeping the princess's name alive in exactly the way the ancients meant a catasterism to work.

The rescued princess in art and story

Andromeda endures, too, as one of the most painted women in the history of Western art. From the Roman frescoes of Pompeii through Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Pre-Raphaelites — Frederic Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda, Edward Burne-Jones's great Perseus cycle — the chained maiden and her winged rescuer have drawn painters for two thousand years, and the scene remains a touchstone of the whole rescue-narrative tradition. Her story stands behind every later tale of the captive maiden freed by a hero, from the dragon-slaying legends of the Middle Ages to the fairy tales and films of the present day; the image she gave the world — innocence bound to the rock and delivered at the last moment — is one of the oldest and most enduring patterns in storytelling.