There are two Medusas, and between them lies a lesson in how we still tell the story of violence against women today. The first is the one we all know: a monster with snakes for hair, able to turn people to stone with her gaze, defeated by the hero Perseus. The second emerges from a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where we are told that the woman, beautiful and desired by many suitors, was approached by Poseidon in Minerva’s temple and involved in an encounter that tradition has always read as a violation committed within a sacred place. Athena, outraged by the profanation of her temple, turns Medusa’s hair into snakes: a punishment that falls, paradoxically, on the victim and not on the guilty party.

Before Ovid, however, there was already another Medusa, told by Hesiod 700 years earlier. In the Theogony, Hesiod simply says that Medusa “was joined” to Poseidon “in a soft meadow among the spring flowers.” The Greek text does not speak explicitly of violence or consent: it is an ambiguity that later tradition resolved in two opposite directions, depending on the age and the narrative purpose. When one wanted to justify Medusa’s monstrosity from the moment of her birth, the reading of a natural, almost complicit encounter was emphasized; when, centuries later, Ovid wanted to tell the story of a victim, he chose the word vitiasse - to violate, to corrupt - restoring to her the status of someone who had suffered an injustice.

This oscillation between the two ancient sources is not a philological detail: it proves that every era has told the Medusa it needed, or the one it wanted to reaffirm. When the goal was to feed fear of the feminine as a threatening and uncontrollable force, she was described as a pure monster, beyond redemption, guilty of her own nature. When, instead, the aim was to reflect on violence and its consequences, she was told as a victim punished twice: first by the aggressor, then by the very divinity that should have protected her. It is precisely this double mechanism - being a victim of the act and then a victim of the narrative built around that act - that makes the myth of Medusa so relevant to anyone who analyses journalistic language about gender-based violence today: whoever controls the narrative controls the meaning.

It is no coincidence that Medusa’s face has been reproduced throughout the centuries on shields and coins in antiquity as an apotropaic image against evil, and in contemporary times as a symbol reclaimed by feminist movements to represent legitimate rage and the power of self-defense. Her face continues to oscillate between a threat to be neutralized and a victim to be avenged, just as still happens in media coverage today: the same story of violence can be told by placing responsibility at the center of the account, or by turning the person who suffered into someone to be judged, scrutinized, and suspected.

The question the myth leaves to anyone who writes news stories is as simple as it is uncomfortable: which Medusa am I choosing to tell?

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, lines 794-801
2. Ibid., lines 799-801
3. Hesiod, Theogony, lines 277-279
4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, line 798