with R. Scott Smith
For today’s discussion on the Chimaera, we welcome R. Scott Smith, Professor of Classics at the University of New Hampshire.
The Chimaera of Arezzo. Etruscan bronze statue, c. 400 BCE. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. Image by Sailko. Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Professor Smith, how did you first get interested in studying ancient monsters?
Well, I’ll be something of a downer here and confess that monsters haven’t been the main focus in my scholarship and teaching. I’ve usually considered monsters mainly as foils for Greek heroes and heroines to show their superior physical or intellectual chops. Yet I’ve always been fascinated by the Chimaera and other serpentine creatures that seem to populate the known world and all its distant, hidden corners. So when I was asked to write a piece on the Chimaera for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, I jumped at the chance to dig even deeper into this fascinating creature.
Why does the Chimaera fascinate you?
Ok, it all started in my first myth class at the University of New Hampshire, where I took the position that the Chimaera was an absurd creature that would inspire fear in exactly no one—what one scholar has called “the oddest and least satisfying of the mythical monsters.” A monster that was part lion? Check. Part serpent? Sure. But a…goat? How fearsome was a goat? Well, sure enough, amid the sea of 230 students a hand rose, hesitantly, to tell me of a previous fearsome encounter. There was much laughter, but it drove home the point that maybe, just maybe, we should take the goat-monster seriously. And I simply love the bronze Chimaera of Arezzo—pictured above—so much so that we put it on the cover of the book on myth I co-authored with Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’s Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology, Hackett 2007).
As it happens, several versions seem to imply that the goat part of the creature was the one that breathed fire—ok, that’s pretty dope. But in at least two versions, one an early piece of art work on a vase (around 650 BCE), another in a play of the fifth-century BCE tragic playwright Euripides, the fire-breathing part was the lion(ess), which totally makes sense since that’s the front part.
What do you think might have given rise to this monster—does it express some human fear or explain some natural phenomenon?
For the Chimaera, this is the million-dollar question. Where did such a creature come from? Did the Greeks take it from a Near Eastern version? There’s no evidence of this, though hybrid monsters are common there. A mistaken interpretation of an image on a gemstone (yes, this has been proposed)? Or is it a bilingual pun, where a Greek speaker used the Greek word (chimaira) closest in sound to the Semitic word for “burn” (chmr)? I’ve always been of the mindset that by searching for what are often unknowable origins, we lose sight of what the myth means in the contexts we do know.
That the Chimaera resides in non-Greek Lycia (southwestern Turkey) adds to the notion of foreign origins, but the Greek myth as early as Homer connects it—through the Greek hero Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus—to Greek Corinth and its environs. The story has Bellerophon exiled from his hometown Corinth to Argos (accidental murder!), only to be hit on by the older queen there. When he rejects her advances, she accuses him of hitting on her, so the king sends him to Lycia, the queen’s hometown, so that her father could off poor Bellerophon. And good ol’ Pegasus has been plausibly connected linguistically to the Luwian god dU pihaššaššis (the Luwians were an ancient people in and near Lycia). So, it’s clear that the myth is tying together Greek and non-Greek elements, though the myth itself is told firmly from a Greek perspective.
Are there any modern uses of the Chimaera that you find particularly interesting?
A lot of ancient Greek monsters are hybrid combinations of two different creatures, but the Chimaera is the only Greek monster that is a combination of three separate elements, and because of that it was and continues to be useful to think about hybridity across the millennia, from ancient authors such as Plato and Seneca down into the modern world. The modern genetic term “chimera” is applied to organisms and tissue that are composed of more than one set of DNA, including grafted plants, human chimeras (natural or through transplant), and the ethically controversial animal-human embryos being created artificially. Now that is frightening—even if Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt rescues us like he did in the threat of the artificially created Chimera virus with the Bellerophon antidote (nicely done, Mission Impossible 2!).
What other things might people want to know about the Chimaera?
I’m fascinated by how Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera. The method varies, as we expect from the plastic nature of myth. On some vases, Bellerophon attacks the Chimaera with a spear from below as the monster and Pegasus rear up in battle, but that may simply reflect the needs of the vase painter. In a bas-relief in the British Museum (c. 490–470 BCE), he wields a sword. Others more logically depict him taking on the beast on Pegasus’ back from above. The Chimaera of Arezzo displays wounds on the top of its body, almost certainly delivered by a Bellerophon-on-Pegasus statue that has been lost. A tantalizing fragment of the fifth-century BCE Greek tragedian Euripides tells us that Bellerophon stabs at the throat of the Chimaera (the goat’s? the lion’s?) head on while he and Pegasus are lashed by the monster’s flames. Late authors, relying on earlier ancient scholarship on Homer, tell us that Bellerophon attached lead to his spear and thrust it into the lion’s mouth, whereupon the lead melted, killing the beast.
Finally, even the ancients thought that the Chimaera was ludicrous and came up with (equally ludicrous) explanations to account for the myth. Some supposed that the Chimaera was just a well-forested mountain called “Chimaera” that was guarded by a lion on one side, a serpent on the other. Bellerophon sails in on the Pegasus (here his “flying” ship) and sets fire to the mountain, killing the beasts (hooray!). More philosophically minded folks supposed that the Chimaera was simply representing the multiple functions of the soul, the many vices of humankind, or the three stages of lust: the lion (the onrush of desire), the randy goat (consummation), and the serpent (the bitter bite of regret)!
Professor R. Scott Smith. Illustration by Raul Aris, with permission.
R. Scott Smith is Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 2000. His major field of study is ancient myth and mythography, with special focus on the intersection of mythography, space, and geography. He is currently co-director of a digital database of Greek myth, MANTO: https://manto.unh.edu. In addition, he is interested in how mythography operates in scholia and commentaries and is undertaking a student-supported project to translate mythographical narratives in the Homeric scholia, Servius, and other scholiastic texts. He also produces the podcast, The Greek Myth Files: https://manto-myth.org/gmf.