Andromeda, the chained princess rescued by Perseus

Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess, the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia, who was chained to a rock by the sea as an offering to a monster — and then rescued and married by Perseus. She is the classic innocent scapegoat: it was her mother, not she, who offended the sea goddesses. Through her marriage she also becomes the root of one of the most important family trees in Greek myth, the line that leads to Heracles.

A princess from the edge of the world

For the Greeks, Andromeda’s “Ethiopia” was not a precise country but the rim of the known world, to the south or the east, where the sun burned people’s faces. Writers therefore place her kingdom in Africa or on the Levantine coast. Strabo, Pausanias and Pliny all set the rock at Joppa — modern Jaffa, in Israel — where visitors were shown the marks of her chains and a spring stained red by the monster’s blood (Strabo 16.2.28; Pausanias 4.35.9; Pliny 5.69).

What she looked like was already a question in antiquity. In the Heroides, Ovid calls her “dark with the colour of her native land” (15.35-36), while Philostratus, describing a painting, remarks with some surprise that the Ethiopian princess has been given pale skin (Imagines 1.29). European painting overwhelmingly followed the second image; the texts remain divided.

Cassiopeia’s boast

The disaster starts with a beauty contest nobody asked for. Cassiopeia claimed to be lovelier than the Nereids, the nymphs of the sea — or, in some versions, that her daughter was. The Nereids were outraged and Poseidon took their side, flooding the country and sending a sea monster, a kêtos, against it. Cepheus consulted the oracle of Ammon, which told him the kingdom would be spared if he gave his daughter to the beast (Apollodorus, Library 2.4.3). Pressed by his people, he had Andromeda fastened to a rock on the shore.

It is a pattern Greek myth returns to again and again: a parent’s arrogance lands on an innocent child. Iphigenia, sacrificed to settle her father’s offence against Artemis, is the closest parallel.

The rescue

Perseus arrives at exactly this moment, flying home on winged sandals with the head of Medusa in his bag. Ovid says that at first he took her for a marble statue — only the breeze stirring her hair and the tears on her cheeks showed she was alive (Metamorphoses 4.672-677). He asks her name; she hesitates out of modesty, then tells him everything as the monster rises from the waves.

Before fighting, Perseus makes a deal: he will save Andromeda if her parents give her to him in marriage, and Cepheus agrees. In Ovid, the hero then swoops on the beast from above and drives his sword into it again and again until it dies (4.706-734). Afterwards he lays Medusa’s head face down on a bed of seaweed, which hardens into the first coral (4.740-752) — a typically Ovidian origin story tucked into the action.

A bloody wedding

Andromeda had already been promised to her uncle Phineus, Cepheus’s brother. During the wedding feast, Phineus bursts in with armed supporters to reclaim her. Ovid devotes almost half of book 5 to the fight that follows; outnumbered, Perseus finally lifts Medusa’s head, and Phineus is turned to stone in the posture of a suppliant (Metamorphoses 5.1-235). Apollodorus covers the same episode in a single sentence (2.4.3). Ovid’s Perseus makes the moral explicit: Phineus had every chance to save his bride on the rock and did nothing.

Mother of the Perseids

Andromeda follows Perseus to Seriphos and then to the Argolid. Their first son, Perses, stays behind with Cepheus; Herodotus makes him the ancestor after whom the Persians were named (7.61), a connection Greeks and Persians both exploited in diplomacy (7.150). In Greece she bears Alcaeus, Sthenelus, Electryon, Mestor and Heleus, and a daughter, Gorgophone (Apollodorus 2.4.5).

That family is load-bearing for the whole heroic cycle. Electryon is the father of Alcmene, mother of Heracles; Alcaeus is the father of Amphitryon; Sthenelus is the father of Eurystheus, the king who sets Heracles his labours. Andromeda is therefore great-grandmother both to Heracles and to his tormentor. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women already knew this genealogy.

On stage and in the sky

Sophocles and Euripides each wrote an Andromeda, both now lost. Euripides’ version, staged in 412 BC, opened with the girl alone in chains, trading lines with the Echo of a nearby cave. It was such a hit that Aristophanes parodied it the following year in Women at the Thesmophoria, where one character dresses up as Andromeda and another, dangling from the stage crane, plays Perseus (1010-1135).

The myth also has an unusually large footprint in the sky. According to Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Athena set Andromeda among the stars together with her whole family: Cepheus, Cassiopeia on her throne, Perseus and even the monster, as Cetus (Catasterisms 15-17 and 22). Today the name is best known through that constellation, which contains the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own.

Versions and sources

• Apollodorus (2.4.3-5) gives the standard account: Cassiopeia’s boast, the oracle of Ammon, the rescue, Phineus and the children.
• Ovid (Metamorphoses 4-5) expands the rock scene, the aerial fight, the invention of coral and the wedding battle.
• Euripides (fragments) and Aristophanes show how popular the subject was on the fifth-century stage.
• Strabo, Pausanias and Pliny place the rock at Joppa; Pliny adds that the aedile Marcus Scaurus had the bones of a sea monster brought from there to Rome (9.11).
• Versions where the monster is petrified by Medusa’s head rather than killed with a sword are mostly late and iconographic.

Further reading

For the whole quest, from the Graeae to the rock, read Perseus and Medusa. For the hero and his mother, see Perseus and Danae. To follow Andromeda’s descendants, continue with Alcmene and Heracles. For the god who sends the monster, read Poseidon.