Graeae

Past the last reach of the sun, on cold grey flats where no day breaks and no moon ever climbs, three old women sit in a cave and pass a single eye between them. One cups it in her palm and stares into the dark. After a while her sister’s hand opens beside her, the eye is set gently into the waiting fingers, and for one breath all three of them are blind. The tooth makes the same slow round, one yellow tooth shared among three mouths. They have kept this rhythm since before the world had any heroes in it to disturb them.

The Greeks called them the Graeae, the grey ones, and grey is what they were from the very start. No childhood waits behind them, no smooth-cheeked girls who weathered into this. Hesiod, who counts only two, Pemphredo and Enyo, still gives them fair faces beneath the white hair, as though great age and a kind of beauty could rest on the same bone. Later poets added a third, Deino, and the names line up like a low drumbeat: dread, the warlike one, the terror that arrives before the thing itself. Hyginus swaps in Persis, the destroyer. By any of these names they are the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ancient powers of the deep, which makes them full sisters to the snake-haired Gorgons and cousins to half the monsters in the sea. The white foam that rides the crest of a breaking wave, there and then gone, was said to be the thing they were under the story.

What they actually looked like is harder to fix, because the old writers will not settle on one picture. Most simply show worn crones, bent and unhurried, feeling their way. Aeschylus, who put them on stage as the chorus of a play now lost, gave them the bodies of swans with the heads and arms of aged women, heavy white birds shuffling in the dark, which makes the passing of the eye stranger still. The one detail nobody drops is the arithmetic. Three sisters. One eye. One tooth. Everything about them narrows down to that.

They came into being as their family did, born of the marriage of the sea’s old salt powers, and most who wrote of them treated them less as creatures than as something the sea does, a personification of its pale froth given three grey faces and set at the edge of the map. Their home is named as the plains of Cisthene, near the Gorgons, in a country the sunlight has never found. Cold sits on everything there. The air smells of brine and wet stone.

For all of that, they are remembered for a single afternoon’s robbery. Perseus, sent by a king who wanted him dead to fetch the head of Medusa, could not begin the work without first finding the nymphs who kept the winged sandals, the wallet to hold the head, and the cap that turns its wearer invisible. Only the Graeae knew the road to them. With Hermes and Athena steering him, the young man came to the lightless cave and waited, watching the eye go from hand to hand, learning the timing of it. He chose the gap. In the instant the eye left one palm and had not yet reached the next, when all three sisters held nothing and saw nothing, his hand closed over it in the air.

Then came the groping, the sudden scrabble of fingers in the dark, the demand to know who had taken it and the demand to have it back. He would return it, he said, once they told him the way. Some say he kept his word and gave the eye back when they had pointed him onward. One harsher telling has him fling it into Lake Tritonis instead, leaving the three of them blind for good before he walked on to find the Gorgon asleep. Pindar puts it without ornament: the hero made blind the old offspring of Phorcys.

Their power was never in claw or strength. It was knowledge. They held the one secret the whole quest hung on, and their borrowed eye kept a watch that, between the three of them, never wholly closed. They were deathless, old as the foam, beyond persuasion and beyond any honest sort of bribe. One eye for three is a terrible way to keep watch. That single shared eye was the whole of their strength and the whole of their undoing, because watchfulness divided among three has a seam in it, a half-second of total blindness every time the eye changes hands, and a patient thief needs nothing more than that. They could not be reasoned with. They could be robbed, and they were.

What became of them afterward the stories mostly leave alone. The eye lies somewhere on the bottom of a Libyan lake, or back in its socket, and the three grey sisters go on passing the tooth between them on the dark shore, watching a sea that no longer holds the only thing anyone ever came to them for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Graeae in Greek mythology?

The Graeae are three sisters of Greek myth, daughters of the primordial sea gods Phorcys and Ceto and siblings of the Gorgons. Grey-haired from birth, they share a single eye and a single tooth among the three of them. Their names are usually given as Deino, Pemphredo, and Enyo, though Hesiod names only two and Hyginus substitutes Persis for one.

Why do the Graeae share one eye and one tooth?

The Graeae possess only a single eye and a single tooth between all three sisters, and they take turns using them by passing them from hand to hand. This is their defining trait in every version of the myth. It is also their fatal weakness, because in the moment the eye changes hands all three sisters are momentarily blind.

How did Perseus defeat the Graeae?

Perseus did not fight the Graeae, he robbed them. Watching them pass their shared eye, he snatched it in the instant it left one hand and had not yet reached the next, leaving all three blind, and he refused to return it until they revealed the directions he needed. In some versions he gave the eye back once they had told him, and in others he threw it into Lake Tritonis and left them blind permanently.

What did the Graeae know that Perseus needed?

The Graeae knew the location of the nymphs who guarded the equipment Perseus needed to kill Medusa: the winged sandals, the special wallet to carry the severed head, and the cap of Hades that grants invisibility. In other tellings they instead knew the whereabouts of the Gorgons themselves. Either way, their secret was the hinge the whole quest turned on.

Where do the Graeae live?

The Graeae live in a cave on the plains of Cisthene, at the far edge of the world near their sisters the Gorgons, in a land where neither the sun nor the moon ever shines. They are closely tied to the sea and were thought to personify the white foam of breaking waves.

Related Entries

Perseus, Medusa, Gorgon, Chrysaor, Pegasus, Cetus, Danae, Athena, Hermes, Echidna, Scylla, Charybdis, Hesperides, Lamia, Norns