Chimera

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The Chimera (Greek Chimaira, “she-goat”) is a fire-breathing monster of Greek myth: a single creature compounded of three animals — a lion in front, a goat rising from its back, and a serpent for a tail. The earliest surviving notice is in the Iliad, where Homer calls it a thing “of divine stock, not of men,” lion before, serpent behind, goat in the middle, breathing out the force of blazing fire. Hesiod’s Theogony gives it parents and kin — born of the monster Typhon and the half-serpent Echidna, sister to the Hydra and the dog Cerberus — and fixes the count of three heads that later art kept returning to.

The narrative attached to it is the Bellerophon story. The Lycian king Iobates, prompted by a forged charge against the hero, sent Bellerophon to kill the Chimera, expecting the monster to kill him instead. Mounted on the winged horse Pegasus, he attacked from above and destroyed it — in one version by fitting a lump of lead to his spear, which the creature’s own fire melted and poured down its throat. The myth was localized in Lycia, in southwestern Anatolia, and ancient writers connected the beast with a real place: Mount Chimaera, a hillside where natural gas vents burned with flames that never went out. Whether the flames named the monster or the monster the flames, the geography was taken seriously; the fires still burn at the site now called Yanartaş.

In antiquity the Chimera was a fixed image of the impossible composite — a body assembled from parts that nature does not join. From that the word passed into later European languages with its second life: a chimera came to mean a fancy, an idle or unfounded imagining, something put together in the mind that has no answering reality. The two senses run in parallel — the monster slain in Lycia, and the figure of speech for a delusion — and the second has long outlived belief in the first. Modern biology has since borrowed the term again, for an organism made of cells from more than one source, returning the word to its first, literal meaning of a single body of mixed origin.

Because the creature was so thoroughly a composite, it drew the allegorist early. Already in late antiquity commentators read the three animals as the ages of a year or the passions of the soul, and the medieval and Renaissance mythographers who inherited the Greek myths treated such monsters as ciphers to be decoded rather than beings to be feared. The reading is interpretation laid over the myth, not anything the early poets state; what the texts give is the shape and the death of the thing. The Chimera endures less as a story than as a form — the standing emblem of whatever joins what ought not to be joined.

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