Perseus and Medusa

King Polydectes of Seriphos desired Perseus's mother Danaë and, to remove the young hero from his path, sent him on what was meant to be a suicide mission: to bring back the head of Medusa, the only mortal of the three Gorgon sisters, whose gaze turned any living thing that met it to stone. Perseus received divine aid for his quest from more than one god, which Apollodorus lists item by item: nymphs gave him winged sandals and a cap of invisibility borrowed from Hades; Hermes lent a curved sickle-sword strong enough to cut through scaled Gorgon skin; and Athena gave him her own polished bronze shield to use as a mirror, so he need never look at Medusa directly. Guided to the far edge of the world where the Gorgons lived, Perseus found the three sisters asleep. Watching only her reflection in the shield, he approached Medusa and severed her head with a single stroke. From the wound sprang two children she had conceived with Poseidon before her death: Pegasus, the winged horse, and Chrysaor, a warrior born already holding a golden sword. Perseus sealed the head inside the kibisis, a magic satchel that let him carry it without turning himself to stone by accident, and fled as Medusa's two immortal sisters woke and gave chase; the cap of invisibility kept them from finding him. On the journey home he passed over Aethiopia and found the princess Andromeda chained to a sea cliff, offered up to a monster as punishment for her mother's boast of surpassing the Nereids in beauty. Perseus killed the monster and married Andromeda before continuing on. Back on Seriphos, he found Polydectes still pressing his mother to marry him against her will; Perseus unveiled Medusa's head in the king's own court and turned Polydectes and his men to stone on the spot. He gave the head to Athena afterward, who fixed it to the center of her aegis, where it stayed as a weapon carried by the goddess herself rather than by any mortal hero again.