Monstrous Insects in the Ancient Imagination

by Debbie Felton

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? If so, this post is for you!

When I think of monstrous insects, the first ones that come to mind are the post-atomic, radiation-enhanced ants of the 1954 film Them! The same postwar period—the 1950s— produced many films about equally terrifying, gigantic insects and arthropods, such as a giant tarantula in the aptly named Tarantula (1955); a giant mantis, in the equally creatively named The Giant Mantis (1957); and the giant locusts in the less obviously titled Beginning of the End (also 1957). Within these films, the creatures’ massive size was inevitably attributed to radiation-induced genetic mutation from nuclear bomb testing. This related not just to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but to Cold War anxieties based on the potential for nuclear annihilation. Alternatively, such fantastical gigantism was sometimes taken less metaphorically and more literally, reflecting fears about real-life insect swarms and the dubious safety of insecticides used to thwart them.

Above: Giant, radiation-mutated, anthropophagous ant from 1954’s Them!

Decades earlier, such invasions had already provided the subject matter for human survival stories including H. G. Wells’s “Empire of the Ants” (1905), in which large ants have learned to make tools and become aggressive; and Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen versus the Ants” (1938), which features ferocious army ants invading a Brazilian plantation and destroying virtually everything in their path. (Army ants can do this sort of thing, but Stephenson’s description of their ability to kill a deer and strip it to the bone in minutes is greatly exaggerated.)

Above left: A bivouac of army ants. Above right: Closeup of an army ant.

Similarly, fear of insect invasions might account for the inclination of various authors to depict extraterrestrial life as insectoid, as Wells did with his Selenites in The First Men in the Moon (1901). This trend continued for decades, as evidenced in many books and films—such as Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) with its alien Bugs and the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth), which theorized large, horned, insectoid Martians.

Above left: Illustration of Wells’s insectoid Selenites. Above right: Martian from Five Million Years to Earth.

Throughout various fiction media, it didn’t matter that enormous insects were physiological impossibilities; even in prehistoric times, such as the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods of 300 million years ago, insects such as dragonflies rarely grew to more than a two-foot wingspan, because their respiratory systems and exoskeletons were unequal to the laws of physics. (I have to say, though, that a two-foot-wide dragonfly would certainly have me ducking for cover.) My point is that giant insectoid creatures, as representations of cultural anxieties, are often thought to have arisen mainly in the twentieth century.

Below left: Illustration showing the comparative size of an average human (male) and Carboniferous Period (ca. 300 million years ago) arthropods. Below right: Scale model of Meganisoptera, the extinct order of giant dragonfly-like insects.

But implausibly huge insects and other arthropods, such as spiders, didn’t arrive on the scene as late as the early twentieth century. They show up in ancient Greece and Rome, in both fiction and non-fiction. (H.G. Wells himself was probably influenced by some of the classical sources.) Accounts of giant insects circulated at least as early as fifth century BCE Greece, when the historian Herodotus, writing about the wonders of the East, claimed that fox-sized “gold-digging ants” lived the deserts of India. Despite having never seen them himself, Herodotus nevertheless reported that these creatures “very much resemble Greek ants in shape.”  This refers to the highly segmented bodies that inspired the name “in-sect,” from the Latin “cut-into” (a loan translation of the Greek en-tomos, which also means “cut into” and gives us the word “entomology”). Despite Herodotus’ description, the creatures have been recently interpreted with an unusual degree of certainty as native marmots, dog-sized rodents closely related to squirrels. In short, Herodotus’ ants may well be ROUSs—Rodents of Unusual Size—mammals rather than insects, but ones that exhibit the behavior attributed to Herodotus’s giant ants, in that they dig into the ground—in this case not actually to dig for gold, but to create burrows in which to pass the winter. Supposedly, local tribes would then find gold nuggets in these burrows. Herodotus’ account influenced those of later writers, such as Pliny the Elder (Natural History 11.31), who also wrote about the (alleged) gold-digging ants of India.

Below top: Illustration from The History of Darius the Great (1850), showing troops fleeing from the gold-digging ants described by Herodotus. Below bottom: Your typical Himalayan marmot. Does this animal look like it has a segmented body?! To be fair, medieval manuscripts picture the “gold-digging ants” as dog-like creatures.

If you’re wondering how on earth someone could mistake a mammal for an ant, here’s another, more personal example: My husband and I were cleaning our basement a while back, and suddenly I heard him yell, “UGH!! A GIANT INSECT!!!” I turned around expecting to see something like a giant cockroach, but what I saw didn’t register immediately. My mind had to readjust to recognize that what I was looking at was actually a mouse. A rather large, possibly pregnant mouse, but still unquestionably a rodent. (Don’t even get me started on why my husband couldn’t recognize a mouse when he saw one.)

Whether such confusion is understandable or not, Herodotus’s successors mocked him for recording accounts of fantastical animals whose existence he could not personally confirm. Most notably, the second-century CE Greek author Lucian, in his True History, satirized Herodotus for believing that unnaturally large insectoid and arachnoid creatures existed. Lucian exaggerated the implausible to an extreme. Describing a war between with Selenites and Heliotes (Moon and Sun people), he details their vast armies. They amassed tens of thousands of troops of elephant-sized fleas and two-hundred-foot-long ants, cavalries of huge mosquitoes, and benign giant spiders tasked with weaving a web in the sky to serve as a battlefield. With these descriptions, Lucian took a trope already common in antiquity to its logical reductio ad absurdum: The ancient Greeks, like many peoples, were ethnocentric, so the farther away from Greece a population was, the odder it had to be behaviorally and physically. So even Herodotus, who hailed from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor and not mainland Greece, imagined that points far to the south and east, on the edges of the known world, had to be populated by the legendary dog-headed men (the Cynocephaloi), by tribes of headless men with eyes in their chests (later called Blemmyae), and by other such physiologically anomalous peoples and bizarre animals. Lucian points out that the populations of other worlds, such as the sun, moon, and stars, would then have to be even stranger. The gigantic insects and spiders were a logical, if farcical, part of that geographically remote, highly imaginary world.

Below left: The unusually large spiders of Lucian’s True History. Below right: The battle on the spider web, showing the spiders at bottom and various other large arthropods throughout.

Aside from satirizing the credulous ethnographies of Herodotus and other authors, Lucian also used his fantastical creatures as philosophical satires. Whereas he might have intended a bird with wings of lettuce as jab at the vegetarian habits of Pythagoreans, his invention of archers riding on giant fleas was probably intended as an inside joke aimed at Socrates, picking up on the satire of the fifth-century BCE Greek comic playwright Aristophanes. Thanks to Aristophanes, the flea became associated with abstruse philosophical speculation when Aristophanes depicted Socrates measuring the length of a flea’s jump (Clouds, lines 144–52). Also, Lucian inverts the order of nature: instead of a tiny flea on a large elephant, he presents fleas as large as twelve elephants apiece—and of course elephants themselves really were used in battle, as the Roman historian Livy tells us (27.48.5), so it’s only logical that a twelve-elephant-sized flea would be used for the same purpose. Similarly, the giant gnats that also serve as mounts for a cavalry have several possible connections: Lucian may be satirizing philosophical discussions speculating about how long gnats live, or he might be alluding more literally to Herodotus’s comment about how the Egyptians occasionally slept in towers try to escape gnats swarming at night (Hdt. 2.95). And Lucian’s immense spiders, rather than being terrors such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Shelob (also mid-1950s, by the way) or at least initially alarming like Roald Dahl’s Miss Spider and other overgrown creatures in 1961’s James and the Giant Peach (including Centipede, Old Green Grasshopper, and Ladybug), barely make an impression. Lucian focuses not on the giant spiders but on their webs, which provide the plain of battle in the sky for the Moon and Sun troops. The web is woven by one side and overrun by the other, possibly representing a philosophical arguing ground.

Also playing into Lucian’s inventions was a tradition of philosophical speculation going back to at least the fifth century BCE that the Moon was a parallel, but hyperbolic counterpart to our Earth . The Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus claimed that the Moon was an Earth-like world inhabited by gigantic flora and fauna—specifically fifteen times larger than earthly counterparts, though how he came by that particular calculation remains unclear. This trope of other words filled with exaggerated or unexpected life forms shows up later in—among other works—Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), with its prehistoric animals and plants; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), with its similarly prehistoric life; and A. Hyatt Verrill’s The World of the Giant Ants (1924). This one has absolutely gigantic butterflies, aphids, flies, beetles, wasps, tarantulas, and two types of ants: aggressive leaf-cutters and kindly agricultural ants which befriend the small group of explorers who have stumbled into this underground world.

Getting back to Lucian, giant arthropods were hardly his oddest creation, given that his True History also included crustacean-human hybrids, vine-women, and enslaved lamp-people. But his exaggerated insects, like those in the films of the 1950s and later decades, remain among his most popular creations. The question is why. The ancient Greeks and Romans seemed to have very different reasons than we do now for their reactions to such creatures. Whereas we might be not only disgusted and repulsed but also terrified even by normal-sized creatures with six and eight legs (because it’s too many!), their unpredictable movements (they jump out at you!), and their ability to gather by the thousands or millions! (swarms are creepy!), the Greeks and Romans generally had no such negative reactions. Some insects, like gnats, could be pests, as indicated by Herodotus’s account of the Egyptians sleeping in their towers. And while malaria was widely recognized by the Greeks and Romans to the extent that Rome had three temples dedicated to the goddess Febris (“fever”), who was believed to protect people from fever and especially malaria, the Romans didn’t recognize insects as vectors for the disease.

Instead, arthropods tended to be viewed favorably rather than negatively. Aesopic fables and Roman novels praised the industrious nature of bees and ants and the utility of spiders. Pliny the Elder devoted an entire book of his Natural History to an appreciative entomology (Book 11). The human characters in Lucian’s True History are alarmed by the giant, three-headed vultures, but Lucian’s humans are not frightened by the gigantic arthropods, none of which Lucian describes as anomalous, let alone dangerous; he presents them as domesticated (like those agricultural ants!). And Lucian didn’t intend these exaggerated creatures only as a scathing criticism of Herodotus, and other authors writing about the wonders of the East; such descriptions were also philosophical allegories about the natural world.

So, the Greeks and Romans viewed giant insects as wonders, but not as “monsters” in either the ancient or modern senses of the word. Unlike the giant insects of 1950s film, in antiquity the creatures were not representations of cultural anxieties. But since the 1950s, there have been many other movies about giant insects and the like that have more clearly reflected various cultural concerns. Spiders, rather than insects, seem to be the main creature of choice. For example, although the tarantulas featured in 1977s Kingdom of the Spiders don’t grow excessively huge, I’ve got to give this film a shout-out for two reasons. The first reason is that the tarantulas do uncharacteristically swarm and attack larger and larger animals—from a dog to a calf to humans—and they do so because of pesticide use which has not only decimated their usual food supply but also caused their venom to become five times stronger. The second reason is that the film stars a post-Star Trek William Shatner as a veterinarian, which is just too good a piece of trivia to pass up. But the point here is the anti-pesticide message. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the devastating environmental effects of indiscriminate pesticide use, had been gaining traction that, along with the energy crisis and several major oil spills (among other things), helped foster the 1970s environmental movement. The 1970s consequently saw quite a few of these “nature out of control” movies. Aside from Kingdom of the Spiders, 1977 also saw Empire of the Ants, loosely based on H.G. Wells’ novel (and starring Joan Collins*); in this film adaptation, as in Them!,ants grow to giant size, only this time because of toxic waste rather than radiation. Similarly, in the 2002 film Eight-Legged Freaks, spiders grow to massive size thanks to a toxic waste spill. There are certainly many more examples, and most (though not all) of them show various animals, mutated through environmental abuse, turning on the humans who created the mess in the first place.

*Trivia buffs will know that William Shatner and Joan Collins co-starred in the award-winning Star Trek: TOG episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” (#1.28, 1967)

In short, giant insects in classical literature didn’t reflect cultural anxieties in the same manner as many other monsters from antiquity. But two thousand years later such creatures clearly expressed very specific concerns, from radiation to pesticide to toxic chemical waste and so on, all related to concerns about environmental destruction. Now we just need to trace giant insects in the intervening two thousand years to see whether the shift developed gradually or whether it developed in close relationship with technological concerns of the twentieth century. Quite possibly these fantastical abnormalities in the animal kingdom relate to the ongoing process of increased urbanization and our decreasing and destructive relationship with the natural world.

Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of Haunted Greece and Rome (1999) and Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021), in addition to being editor of several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024).