The Chimera was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature
of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of three animals – a lion, a snake and
a goat. Usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat arising from its back, and
a tail that ended in a snake's head, the Chimera was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna
and a sibling of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra.
The term chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken
from various animals, or to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived
as wildly imaginative or implausible.
Description
Homer's brief description in the Iliad is the earliest surviving literary reference:
"a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and
snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire". Elsewhere in the Iliad, Homer
attributes the rearing of Chimera to Amisodorus. Hesiod's Theogony follows the Homeric description:
he makes the Chimera the issue of Echidna: "She was the mother of Chimaera who breathed
raging fire, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a
grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth
a fearful blast of blazing fire. Her did Pegasus and noble Bellerophon slay" The author of
the Bibliotheca concurs: descriptions agree that she breathed fire. The Chimera is generally
considered to have been female despite the mane adorning its lion's head, the inclusion
of a close mane often was depicted on lionesses, but the ears always were visible. Sighting
the Chimera was an omen of storms, shipwrecks, and natural disasters.
While there are different genealogies, in one version the Chimera mated with her brother
Orthrus and mothered the Sphinx and the Nemean lion.
The Chimera finally was defeated by Bellerophon, with the help of Pegasus, at the command of
King Iobates of Lycia. Since Pegasus could fly, Bellerophon shot the Chimera from the
air, safe from her heads and breath. A scholiast to Homer adds that he finished her off by
equipping his spear with a lump of lead that melted when exposed to the Chimera's fiery
breath and consequently killed her, an image drawn from metalworking.
Robert Graves suggests, "The Chimera was, apparently, a calendar-symbol of the tripartite
year, of which the seasonal emblems were lion, goat, and serpent."
The Chimera was situated in foreign Lycia, but her representation in the arts was wholly
Greek. An autonomous tradition, one that did not rely on the written word, was represented
in the visual repertory of the Greek vase-painters. The Chimera first appears at an early stage
in the proto-Corinthian pottery-painters' repertory, providing some of the earliest
identifiable mythological scenes that can be recognized in Greek art. The Corinthian
type is fixed, after some early hesitation, in the 670s BC; the variations in the pictorial
representations suggest to Marilyn Low Schmitt a multiple origin. The fascination with the
monstrous devolved by the end of the seventh century into a decorative Chimera-motif in
Corinth, while the motif of Bellerophon on Pegasus took on a separate existence alone.
A separate Attic tradition, where the goats breathe fire and the animal's rear is serpent-like,
begins with such confidence that Marilyn Low Schmitt is convinced there must be unrecognized
earlier local prototypes. Two vase-painters employed the motif so consistently they are
given the pseudonyms the Bellerophon Painter and the Chimaera Painter. A fire-breathing
lioness was one of the earliest of solar and war deities in Ancient Egypt and influences
are feasible. In Etruscan civilization, the Chimera appears
in the Orientalizing period that precedes Etruscan Archaic art; that is to say, very
early indeed. The Chimera appears in Etruscan wall-paintings of the fourth century BC.
In Medieval art, though the Chimera of Antiquity was forgotten, chimerical figures appear as
embodiments of the deceptive, even Satanic forces of raw nature. Provided with a human
face and a scaly tail, as in Dante's vision of Geryon in Inferno xvii.7–17, 25–27,
hybrid monsters, more akin to the Manticore of Pliny's Natural History, provided iconic
representations of hypocrisy and fraud well into the seventeenth century, through an emblemmatic
representation in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. Classical sources
The myths of the Chimera can be found in Pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheca, Homer's Iliad; Hyginus' Fabulae
57 and 151; Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Hesiod's Theogony 319ff.
Virgil, in the Aeneid employs Chimaera for the name of Gyas' gigantic ship in the ship-race,
with possible allegorical significance in contemporary Roman politics.
Hypothesis about origin
Pliny the Elder cited Ctesias and quoted Photius identifying the Chimera with an area of permanent
gas vents which still can be found today by hikers on the Lycian Way in southwest Turkey.
Called in Turkish Yanartaş, it consists of some two dozen vents in the ground, grouped
in two patches on the hillside above the Temple of Hephaestus about 3 km north of Çıralı,
near ancient Olympos, in Lycia. The vents emit burning methane thought to be of metamorphic
origin, which in ancient times were landmarks by which sailors could navigate.
The Neo-Hittite Chimera from Carchemish, dated to 850–750 BC, which is now housed in the
Museum of Anatolian Civilizations no doubt served as a basis for the Greek legend. It
differs from the Greek version in that while there are three heads, none of them is that
of a goat, only a main human head, a lion's head facing forward and placed on the chest
of the lion's body, and a snake's head placed at the end of the tail.
Use for Chinese mythological creatures Some western scholars of Chinese art, starting
with Victor Segalen, use the word "chimera" generically to refer to winged quadrupeds,
such as bixie, tianlu, and even qilin. Popular culture
See also
Notes
References Graves, Robert, 1960. The Greek Myths, section
75.b, pp 252–56 Kerenyi, Karl, 1959. The Heroes of the Greeks.
Peck, Harry Thurston, 1898. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities: "Chimaera"