A mother's boast chained Andromeda to a rock and put her in the stars
Queen Cassiopeia claimed to outshine the sea nymphs, so Poseidon loosed a monster on Aethiopia and an oracle demanded her daughter as payment. Perseus, flying home with Medusa's head, intervened. The rescue became the template for every princess-and-dragon story, and a whole corner of the northern sky is named after its cast.
In the Greek myth, Andromeda is the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia. After the queen's vanity offends the gods, Poseidon floods the coast and sends the sea monster Cetus. The oracle of Ammon tells Cepheus the only remedy is to offer Andromeda, and she is bound to a seaside rock, often placed at Jaffa. Her name may mean mindful of her husband, built from the Greek word for man and a verb meaning to take heed or to plan, a root it may share with Medea.
Tellers disagreed on the details. Ovid has Perseus kill the monster with his sword even though he carries Medusa's petrifying head, while the earliest plain account of him using the head on Cetus comes from Lucian in the later 2nd century AD. Hyginus adds a plot by Cepheus and Andromeda's uncle Phineas, whom Perseus turns to stone. The 12th-century Byzantine writer John Tzetzes has the hero swallowed and cutting his way out; Conon turns Cetos into the name of a kidnappers' ship. Afterwards the couple settle at Tiryns, and through their son Electryon they become ancestors of Heracles.
Athena, according to one ancient catalogue of star myths, set Andromeda in the sky with her arms spread as if still chained. Neighbouring constellations carry Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Cetus and Pegasus, and the Andromeda Galaxy lies within hers. Ptolemy recorded the constellation in the 2nd century.
Artists never tired of her. Greek vase painters and Roman fresco makers shifted over time from showing Perseus beheading Medusa to showing the rescue; a fresco from the imperial villa at Boscotrecase, dated to the last decade of the 1st century BCE, paints Perseus twice so that space stands for time. Later retellings folded in Saint George's horse and Ariosto's near-identical Angelica, and Keats compared the tight sonnet form to the bound princess. Patricia Yaker Ekall has criticised artists for almost always painting an Aethiopian princess as white, and others see the scene as reinforcing male heroism over female captivity.
Source: Andromeda (mythology)
