Well originally I didn't have much of a reason for choosing Perseus and Medusa and my story to focus on from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In fact, I originally searched for a picture of a different story. After I couldn't find any decent representations of my original story, I decided to go with something a little more well known. Immediately I thought of the early 1980's movie Clash of the Titans and remembered how cool I thought it was when I watched it as a kid.
The story of Perseus and Medusa from Ovid's Metamorphoses is a little more than Perseus beheading Medusa and using that head to turn people to stone. It also contains a mini-tragedy of how Medusa came to become what she did. She was once a woman of great beauty, whose hair, in particular, was more beautiful than one can imagine. Her beauty was so great that she was highly contended for by many jealous suitors. This led her to being kidnapped and raped by the God of the sea. Out of jealousy Zeus' daughter (Aprodite maybe??) turned her hair into snakes and cursed her gaze.
It's sometimes a little disturbing to see how vicious the mythology of ancient culture's sometimes is. It's hard to imagine that Medusa was deserved to be raped. It's even harder to imagine her being punished with a curse because of this rape. However, it is an example of how bad things still sometimes happen to good people, and stories such as this perhaps help serve as an example of this to the member's of the society it arose from.
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