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Rh 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 ), 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 (, 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 and . 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.

 GORGON, GORGONS (Gr. , 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 (, 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 ), 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