See J. P. Baxter (ed.), Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his Province of Maine (3 vols., Boston, 1890; in the Prince Society Publications), the first volume of which is a memoir of Gorges, and the other volumes contain a reprint of the Briefe Narration, Gorges’s letters, and other documentary material.
GORGET (O. Fr. gorgete, dim. of gorge, throat), the name
applied after about 1480 to the collar-piece of a suit of armour.
It was generally formed of small overlapping rings of plate, and
attached either to the body armour or to the armet. It was
worn in the 16th and 17th centuries with the half-armour,
with the plain cuirass, and even occasionally without any
body armour at all. During these times it gradually became a
distinctive badge for officers, and as such it survived in several
armies—in the form of a small metal plate affixed to the front
of the collar of the uniform coat—until after the Napoleonic wars.
In the German army to-day a gorget-plate of this sort is the
distinctive mark of military police, while the former officer’s
gorget is represented in British uniforms by the red patches or
tabs worn on the collar by staff officers and by the white patches
of the midshipmen in the Royal Navy.
GORGIAS (c. 483–375 B.C.), Greek sophist and rhetorician,
was a native of Leontini in Sicily. In 427 he was sent by his
fellow-citizens at the head of an embassy to ask Athenian
protection against the aggression of the Syracusans. He subsequently
settled in Athens, and supported himself by the practice
of oratory and by teaching rhetoric. He died at Larissa in
Thessaly. His chief claim to recognition consists in the fact that
he transplanted rhetoric to Greece, and contributed to the
diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.
He was the author of a lost work On Nature or the Non-existent
(Περὶ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος ἢ περὶ φύσεως, fragments edited by M. C.
Valeton, 1876), the substance of which may be gathered from
the writings of Sextus Empiricus, and also from the treatise
(ascribed to Theophrastus) De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia.
Gorgias is the central figure in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias.
The genuineness of two rhetorical exercises (The Encomium
of Helen and The Defence of Palamedes, edited with Antiphon by
F. Blass in the Teubner series, 1881), which have come down
under his name, is disputed.
For his philosophical opinions see Sophists and Scepticism. See also Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Eng. trans. vol. i. bk. iii. chap. vii.; Jebb’s Attic Orators, introd. to vol. i. (1893); F. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, i. (1887); and article Rhetoric.
GORGON, GORGONS (Gr. Γοργώ, Γοργόνες, the “terrible,”
or, according to some, the “loud-roaring”), a figure or figures
in Greek mythology. Homer speaks of only one Gorgon, whose
head is represented in the Iliad (v. 741) as fixed in the centre of
the aegis of Zeus. In the Odyssey (xi. 633) she is a monster of the
under-world. Hesiod increases the number of Gorgons to three—Stheno
(the mighty), Euryale (the far-springer) and Medusa
(the queen), and makes them the daughters of the sea-god
Phorcys and of Keto. Their home is on the farthest side of the
western ocean; according to later authorities, in Libya (Hesiod,
Theog. 274; Herodotus ii. 91; Pausanias ii. 21). The Attic
tradition, reproduced in Euripides (Ion 1002), regarded the
Gorgon as a monster, produced by Gaea to aid her sons the
giants against the gods and slain by Athena (the passage is a
locus classicus on the aegis of Athena).
The Gorgons are represented as winged creatures, having the form of young women; their hair consists of snakes; they are round-faced, flat-nosed, with tongues lolling out and large projecting teeth. Sometimes they have wings of gold, brazen claws and the tusks of boars. Medusa was the only one of the three who was mortal; hence Perseus was able to kill her by cutting off her head. From the blood that spurted from her neck sprang Chrysaor and Pegasus, her two sons by Poseidon. The head, which had the power of turning into stone all who looked upon it, was given to Athena, who placed it in her shield; according to another account, Perseus buried it in the market-place of Argos. The hideously grotesque original type of the Gorgoneion, as the Gorgon’s head was called, was placed on the walls of cities, and on shields and breastplates to terrify an enemy (cf. the hideous faces on Chinese soldiers’ shields), and used generally as an amulet, a protection against the evil eye. Heracles is said to have obtained a lock of Medusa’s hair (which possessed the same powers as the head) from Athena and given it to Sterope, the daughter of Cepheus, as a protection for the town of Tegea against attack (Apollodorus ii. 7. 3). According to Roscher, it was supposed, when exposed to view, to bring on a storm, which put the enemy to flight. Frazer (Golden Bough, i. 378) gives examples of the superstition that cut hair caused storms. According to the later idea of Medusa as a beautiful maiden, whose hair had been changed into snakes by Athena, the head was represented in works of art with a wonderfully handsome face, wrapped in the calm repose of death. The Rondanini Medusa at Munich is a famous specimen of this conception. Various accounts of the Gorgons were given by later ancient writers. According to Diod. Sic. (iii. 54. 55) they were female warriors living near Lake Tritonis in Libya, whose queen was Medusa; according to Alexander of Myndus, quoted in Athenaeus (v. p. 221), they were terrible wild animals whose mere look turned men to stone. Pliny (Nat. Hist. vi. 36 [31]) describes them as savage women, whose persons were covered with hair, which gave rise to the story of their snaky hair and girdle. Modern authorities have explained them as the personification of the waves of the sea or of the barren, unproductive coast of Libya; or as the awful darkness of the storm-cloud, which comes from the west and is scattered by the sun-god Perseus. More recent is the explanation of anthropologists that Medusa, whose virtue is really in her head, is derived from the ritual mask common to primitive cults.
See Jane E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903); W. H. Roscher, Die Gorgonen und Verwandtes (1879); J. Six, De Gorgone (1885), on the types of the Gorgon’s head; articles by Roscher and Furtwängler in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie, by G. Glotz in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités, and by R. Gädechens in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie; N. G. Polites (Ὁ περὶ τῶν Γοργόνων μῦθος παρὰ τῷ Ἑλληνικῷ λαῷ, 1878) gives an account of the Gorgons, and of the various superstitions connected with them, from the modern Greek point of view, which regards them as malevolent spirits of the sea.
GORGONZOLA, a town of Lombardy, Italy, in the province
of Milan, from which it is 11 m. E.N.E. by steam tramway.
Pop. (1901) 5134. It is the centre of the district in which is
produced the well-known Gorgonzola cheese.
GORI, a town of Russian Transcaucasia, in the government
of Tiflis and 49 m. by rail N.W. of the city of Tiflis, on the river
Kura; altitude, 2010 ft. Pop. (1897) 10,457. The surrounding
country is very picturesque. Gori has a high school for girls, and
a school for Russian and Tatar teachers. At one time celebrated
for its silk and cotton stuffs, it is now famous for corn, reputed
the best in Georgia, and the wine is also esteemed. The climate
is excellent, delightfully cool in summer, owing to the refreshing
breezes from the mountains, though these are, however, at times
disagreeable in winter. Gori was founded (1123) by the Georgian
king David II., the Renovater, for the Armenians who fled their
country on the Persian invasion. The earliest remains of the
fortress are Byzantine; it was thoroughly restored in 1634–1658,
but destroyed by Nadir Shah of Persia in the 18th century.
There is a church constructed in the 17th century by Capuchin
missionaries from Rome. Five miles east of Gori is the remarkable
rock-cut town of Uplis-tsykhe, which was a fortress in the time
of Alexander the Great of Macedon, and an inhabited city
in the reign of the Georgian king Bagrat III. (980–1014).
GORILLA (or Pongo), the largest of the man-like apes, and
a native of West Africa from the Congo to Cameroon, whence
it extends eastwards across the continent to German East Africa.
Many naturalists regard the gorilla as best included in the same
genus as the chimpanzee, in which case it should be known as
Anthropopithecus gorilla, but by others it is regarded as the
representative of a genus by itself, when its title will be Gorilla
savagei, or G. gorilla. That there are local forms of gorilla is
quite certain: but whether any of these are entitled to rank as
distinct species may be a matter of opinion. It was long supposed
that the apes encountered on an island off the west coast of
Africa by Hanno, the Carthaginian, were gorillas, but in the
