Γοργώ

Γοργώ (gorgo, "gor-GOH") is the Gorgon, and the record gives her a modest, scattered life: 23 occurrences across 11 works. No single text hoards her. The leader is Euripides' Ion ("EYE-on"), with 6, then Herodotus's Histories with 4, and then a spread of twos — Euripides' Electra and Heracles, Homer's Iliad, and Hesiod's Shield of Heracles (2 each). The rest are single glimpses: Euripides' Orestes, Phoenissae ("The Phoenician Women"), and Rhesus, Prometheus Bound, and Hesiod's Theogony ("Birth of the Gods"). She lives at the edge of many works rather than the center of any — invoked, glimpsed, and dropped, from epic through tragedy to the historian's prose.

The one lexicon in the record, LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940), glosses her simply "the Gorgon" and, in its fuller note, "the Grim One (cf. γοργός)" — pointing the name toward the adjective gorgos ("GOR-goss," "grim"). That is the lexicon's own likeness-note, not a formal derivation. The record's etymology claims are empty and the LSJ entry carries no etymology block, so no etymology pointer is matched here — nothing beyond the resemblance to γοργός can be claimed.

What the record holds thickly is her inflected shapes across the concordance — the word declines as it travels. Herodotus writes the nominative Γοργώ (Gorgo) at Histories 5.48.1 and 5.51.1, and the genitive Γοργοῦς (Gorgous, "of the Gorgon") at 2.91.6, the same genitive Homer keeps at Iliad 8.349. Euripides reaches for the genitive Γοργόνος (Gorgonos) in Electra and at Heracles 990–993, and for the by-form Γοργὼν (Gorgon) — which LSJ marks as an alternate nominative, not an accusative — at Heracles 880–884. She is, on this evidence, less a subject than a byword: the Grim One summoned when a face must turn to terror.

If a word for a monster survives only in glimpses, scattered two by two across a dozen works, is the Gorgon a character the corpus remembers — or only a shudder it keeps reaching for?