with Dominic Ingemark and Camilla Asplund Ingemark
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. Their chapter on “Sea Monsters and Sea Serpents in Ancient Myth” for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024) discusses how threats from sea life (both real and mythical) affected ancient attitudes toward the sea and sea-faring.
Black-figure hydria (water-jug) from Caere, Etruria, ca. 525 BCE. Detail: male figure (possibly Heracles) fighting a sea-monster (kētos), with depictions of real sea life such as a seal, octopus, and dolphins.
How did you first get interested in ancient sea monsters as opposed to, say, land or air monsters?
Our interest in sea-monsters was specifically sparked by chance. We found a passage in the Natural History of Roman author Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24–79)—an encyclopedic work about the natural world—telling the story of a gargantuan octopus emerging through the sewers in Puteoli (present-day Pozzuoli) and breaking into a warehouse packed with amphorae full of salted fish. The similarities with urban legends of the recent past—such as those from the 1930s onward about alligators supposedly dwelling in New York’s sewers—were striking. Urban legends were long thought to belong to our modern world; indeed, in Swedish they are known as “modern legends.” But this octopus story and several other examples demonstrate that urban legends were as widespread two millennia ago as they are in our modern age.
Do you have a favorite ancient sea monster? If so, can you theorize about its cultural origins?
Even if we have written about various real monstrous creatures such as killer whales, and about monsters in Graeco-Roman myth such as the sea-serpents that attacked the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons, the octopus in the sewers remains our absolute favorite. The Romans were immensely proud of their engineering abilities, arguing that while the Greeks may have been better sculptors, the skills behind Roman sewers surpassed most works of art. Yet beyond that sense of pride, sewers evoked a deep sense of fear and disgust. What was really down there, deep below the streets?
This monstrous creature did not just represent fears felt in the urban context; rather, it—and indeed all sea monsters—also equally embodied the fear and dread that the depths of the sea induced in the human mind. The Mediterranean was not only thought to teem with terrifying monsters, but also in itself represented danger and death in the form of sudden storms. What made the Mediterranean particularly fearsome was that those who died at sea in many cases did not receive a proper burial, as their bodies were often never recovered. A recurrent topos (theme) in classical literature from Homer (ca. 700 BC) onward was the prospect of drowning at sea and being eaten by fish, and thereby being deprived of the correct funerary rituals.
Another favorite monster
Another one of our favorite sea monsters—or rather favorite features of sea monsters—is that, besides having serpentine shapes and dwelling in dark caves, in some cases (such as Homer’s Scylla, Odyssey 12.89–92) they were described in ancient literature as having triple jaws. This brings the Mediterranean moray eel to mind. Over the years different scholars have pointed to the likelihood that various sea monsters were inspired by real animals: whales, sharks, crocodiles, snakes, and dogs have all contributed features to mythical sea monsters. To these we want to add the moray eel. After the moray first bites its prey, a second set of sharp-toothed jaws known as pharyngeal jaws, further back in the throat, extend into the mouth cavity to grab hold of the prey and then retract to pull the prey down into the gullet.
Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s movie Alien (1979) knows what we mean. This film features a xenomorphic monster with a double set of jaws, created by the Swiss artist H. R. Giger (1940–2014). Giger did not point to the moray eel as a source of inspiration; in fact, the exact functioning of the moray eel’s second set of jaws was not fully understood until two marine biologists from California, Rita Mehta and Peter Wainwright, published a study in Nature in 2007. But the similarities between the jaws of the moray eel and Alien‘s xenomorph are nevertheless salient and the monsters equally disturbing.
Moray eels were feared by fishermen in the ancient Mediterranean, and today scuba-divers often describe these eels as truly terrifying, because they defend themselves very fiercely when threatened. Their bite was and still is especially dreaded, because beyond having powerful jaws and sharp teeth, the moray eel’s bite is poisonous: although not lethal, the pain it causes has been described as incredibly intense. We think that there can be no doubt that the moray eel, alongside many other animals, was a source of inspiration for ancient sea monsters. But the monsters found in Greco-Roman myth were truly massive, in stark contrast to the actual size of the Mediterranean Moray eel: adult individuals are on average only 100 to 130 centimeters long (ca. 3–4 feet).
Dominic Ingemark is Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, Sweden. Camilla Asplund Ingemark is Senior Lecturer in Ethnology at Uppsala University, Sweden. They have a mutual interest in ancient folklore and storytelling in Greco-Roman culture, and have written a number of papers as well as two monographs on these topics.