by Debbie Felton
Although a discussion of Einstein’s theories of relativity might be fun, we’re not exactly qualified to cover them—and might have difficulty tying them in with monsters, apart from “monstrous” (i.e., supermassive) black holes—our “monstrous relativity” instead involves the cultural relativity of what might be considered monstrous.
A very brief introduction to monster theory
Medieval scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen coined the phrase “monster theory” in his essay collection Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996) to describe the study of monsters and their meanings within and beyond their cultural contexts. Monsters, Cohen and his contributors argued, symbolically express a society’s anxieties; if we think about why a culture invents this or that monster, we may better understand that culture. Although monster theory originated in medieval studies, Cohen stressed that monsters from the distant past remain highly relevant to conceptions of the monstrous in the immediate present.
And, in fact, classicists had started thinking about monsters at around the same time: Catherine Atherton’s Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture (1997) coincided with Cohen’s and covered part of that “distant past.” Her collection’s vital contribution was to emphasize that monsters tend to be culturally determined: Each culture has its own anxieties and fears, its own definitions of what is “normal” and acceptable. And even within cultures people have different viewpoints about what constitutes “the monstrous.”
For peoples of ancient West Asia and the Mediterranean, monsters embodied many unconscious fears: fear of chaos’s potential to overcome order, fear of nature pushing back against encroaching human civilization, fear of irrationality winning out over reason, and even fear of the little-understood nature of the female in contrast with the male. These ancient stories repeatedly presented monsters being conquered by gods and men. The forces of order, civilization, reason, and patriarchy prevailed in ancient thought.
Monsters also provided a means to express fear of the Other or Others, that is, any individual or group seen as different in a fundamental way from the culture telling the story. Whereas the Other can often be someone (or a group) of a different skin color, social class, religion, sexual orientation, and the like, this was rarely the case in antiquity, where the Other was most often simply a faraway people. For example, from ancient Greece through Medieval Europe, people received reports of the Cynocephali, a “dog-headed” people living in Africa (according to Herodotus) or India (according to Ctesias), largely without questioning the existence of such hybrid humans but instead accepting that such oddities were likely to exist on the fringes of the known world.
“Geographical Monsters,” left to right: Monopod (also called Skiapod), Cyclops, Blemmye, Cynocephalus. Stay tuned for entries on these monstrous peoples!
.png){kind=link}
Definitions of “monster” vary, but the word generally indicates creatures that exhibit several main basic characteristics, including physical anomalies such as an excess or deficit of limbs, unusually large size, and/or jarring hybridity. These creatures also, in some way or another, transgress literal or metaphorical boundaries. Often a monster’s main purpose in a story is to act as a disruptive agent. At a minimum, these creatures prove unsettling in their unexpectedness; at a maximum, they pose dire threats to humans and human attempts to settle into and impose order on the natural world.
Also, as representatives of the natural world (preferably one devoid of humans), monstrous creatures in ancient myths almost invariably lived outside of settled, urban areas, in places such as mountains, caves, cliffs, and other natural, often liminal places bordering on or largely untouched by human settlement. The farther from major urban centers people went, it was believed, the more likely they were to encounter the monstrous, and the edges of known civilization were full of strange, threatening creatures. The Sphinx, for example, lived on a mountain outside of the city of Thebes; the Cyclops Polyphemus and his kin lived in caves; the snaky-haired Medusa and her Gorgon sisters traditionally were said to live on a rocky island in the Mediterranean. Similarly, bodies of water including lakes, marshes, and the often-hostile sea held many monsters.
A matter of perspective: “The Satyr and the Traveler”
The importance of monstrous relativity is nicely presented in an Aesopian fable, “The Satyr and the Traveler.” Here, the creature normally considered as monstrous is the satyr, whose hybrid human-animal mixture varied across Greek and Roman culture from having a horse’s ears and tail (Greek) to having a goat’s ears, tail, legs, and even horns (Roman), but whose allegedly monstrous behavior was limited to human-like drunkenness and unsuccessful attempts to seduce nymphs or the occasional human female.
Similarly, centaurs (half-horse, half-human) were known for being violent drunks, a notable exception being Chiron, who, unlike his brethren, was highly educated by the god Apollo in various skills (including medicine, music, astronomy, and archery). But over time, satyrs, unlike centaurs, were portrayed less as ribald and more as a type of nature-spirit that guarded the woodland. This fable (my translation) provides a helpful example of the shifting and relative cultural conceptions of what was considered anomalous and therefore monstrous:
“When rough winter set in with thick frost, and every field congealed under the hard ice, a traveler found himself stuck in a dense fog. The path was no longer visible, preventing him from continuing. The story goes that a satyr, one of the guardians of the forest, took pity on the man and offered to shelter him in his cave. The satyr, as a native of the wild countryside, was straightaway both amazed and greatly afraid upon observing the immense power of the man. For first, to restore some vitality to his freezing limbs, the man thawed his hands by blowing hot air onto them. After the cold had dissipated, he began to enjoy the generous hospitality of his host; the satyr, eager to show off country life, had set out the best of what the forest had to give, and offered a bowl filled with hot Lyaean wine, so that its warmth would spread through the man’s limbs and relieve the chill. But then the man cringed at touching the hot bowl with his lips and blew again—with a cool breath! At this, his host, utterly terrified, was dumbstruck at the double portent (monstro), and, driving the man out into the woods, ordered him to go far, far away. “I do not want anyone ever to come into my cave again,” said the satyr, “who breathes two different ways from the same mouth!”
Walter Crane’s illustration of the fable of “The Satyr and the Peasant” from Baby’s Own Aesop (London, 1887).
This anecdote is usually interpreted as providing a metaphorical attack against lies and duplicity, as it ironically points out man’s unreliable, deceptive dual nature—“to blow hot and cold”—rather than overtly referencing the monstrous dual nature of the hybrid satyr, who instead appears as a perfectly normal representative of nature. The satyr, rather than the human, exhibits the emotions in this story: he pities (miseratus) the lost traveler, but then feels awe (miratur) and extreme fear (pavet, perterritus) and is stunned (obstipuit) at what he perceives as the highly unnatural and therefore monstrous ability demonstrated by his guest. That is, the satyr demonstrates the emotions typically associated with human reactions to monsters, where instead in this fable we have a monster’s reaction to a human.
Herodotus on cultural relativity
This type of cultural relativity was not new. The fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus provides an anecdote about Darius, king of the Persians (reigned 522–486), that illustrates how monstrous one culture’s customs can seem to another:
“During his reign, Darius summoned the Greeks of his court and asked them for what price they would be willing to eat their fathers’ bodies when they died, and they replied that they would not do it for any amount. Darius next summoned those Indians called ‘Callatiae,’ who eat their parents; in the presence of the Greeks, who understood through a translator what was being said, he asked what it would take for them to burn their dead fathers. Horrified, the Callatiae cried out that Darius should not speak such ill-omened words, so firmly entrenched are one’s customs” (Histories 3.38.3–4).
This sort of perspective-taking appears with increasing frequency in modern literature. For example, we hear the perspective of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel (via various reported speeches), of the Minotaur in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The House of Asterion” (1947), of Beowulf’s antagonist in John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), and of Medusa in Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind (2022). In related news, Gregory Maguire has made a good living writing novels told from the viewpoint of the so-called villains of well-know stories: the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked, 1995), one of Cinderella’s stepsisters (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, 1999), and many more.
Above: Cartoonist Gary Larson understood the concept.
Such stories help remind us that “monstrosity” need not equal “evil,” and more recent studies on the monstrous tend toward inclusive treatments of the differences represented by physically anomalous bodies and atypical behavior. By studying the concepts of monsters and monstrosity across cultures and time, we learn about the shifting concerns of those cultures and observe how monsters represent various aspects of the unknown, the inexplicable, and the feared. But we also learn how to face what causes us discomfort and dread, to make peace with it, and, with any luck, to change our attitudes toward the monstrous by empathizing with it.
Further reading:
Atherton, C., ed. 1998. Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture. Bari.
Cohen, J. J., 1996. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. J. J. Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis.
Felton, D. 2024. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, ed. D. Felton, 1–7. Oxford University Press.
Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021) as well as editor of A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024).