What do you think of when you hear the phrase “monstrous insects”? Do you get a mental picture of prehistoric giant dragonflies from the works of Jules Verne? Or of the giant, radiation-mutated bugs omnipresent in films from the 1950s that arose in the wake of atomic testing? Would it interest you to know that giant insects existed long before that— in the imagination of the ancient Greeks?
Perception of the Gorgons as monsters, both in antiquity and in later reception, comes as a result of these early literary and artistic representations that effectively “other” the sisters’ appearances. They are fearsome, dangerous, and—despite having the shape of women—inhuman, which makes them monstrous.
Today’s guest, Dr. Anactoria Clarke, is on the Regional Academic Staff of The Open University, UK, where she is a Staff Tutor in English Literature. Dr. Clarke has not one but two PhDs, the first in English Literature and the second in Classics!
Here Professor Denson, who previously spoke with us about Charybdis, has a very new take on some extremely old sea monsters.
Today’s guest is Ryan Denson, currently Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has previously written in depth on Charybdis’ eerie nature in a 2023 article for the interdisciplinary journal Preternature entitled “Monstrous Disembodiment and Ontological Uncertainty in Charybdis.”
Today we’re speaking with Leanna Boychenko, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Loyola University Chicago. One of her main interests is Ptolemaic Egypt and the cultural and literary connections between Egypt and Greece. She has written a chapter entitled “Spawned from the Nile: Egyptian Monsters in Graeco-Roman Culture” for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.
Today’s guests are Camilla Asplund Ingemark and Dominic Ingemark, co-authors of several works about why ancient societies told stories about monsters. Their book Representations of Fear: Verbalising Emotion in Ancient Roman Folk Narrative (2020) explains how the act of narrating stories about monsters and other threats helps us to make sense of our lives and process our emotions: such stories can have a therapeutic power, providing a space for us to reflect on the difficulties and anxieties in our lives.
“I always think of the Sphinx as the monster who’s come up with the perfect response to mansplaining—when men won’t listen to her riddle properly and try and explain what they think she’s said, she just eats them! Oedipus defeats her by actually listening to her properly, which is a salutary reminder of how rare that quality is in the heroes of Greek myth.”
Today’s guest is Dr. Will Brockliss, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Among his many works, Dr. Brockliss has written Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment (2019) and several articles on Typhoeus, though, surprisingly, this is not his favorite monster!
For today’s discussion on the Chimaera, we welcome R. Scott Smith, Professor of Classics at the University of New Hampshire.