Monsters & spirits
The Chimera
ky-MEER-uh
Lion in front, goat in the middle, serpent behind, and fire out of all three — the creature whose name became a word.
Homer describes the Chimera in the Iliad in a single compressed line: a lion in front, a serpent behind, a goat in the middle, breathing fire. It is one of the oldest monster descriptions in Greek literature and one of the strangest — not a hybrid built for menace so much as one built for impossibility.
Like the Hydra and Cerberus, it was a child of Typhon and Echidna. It ravaged Lycia in Asia Minor until a king who wanted a young man dead sent him to deal with it, which is how most Greek monster-slaying commissions begin.
The young man was Bellerophon, and he had two advantages. Athena had given him a golden bridle, which let him tame the winged horse Pegasus, and from the air the Chimera's fire could not reach him. In the best-known version he fixed a block of lead to the point of his spear and drove it into the creature's throat; its own fire melted the lead, and it choked.
The word outlived the animal. A 'chimera' now means any impossible hybrid or a hope with no substance — and in biology, an organism carrying two distinct sets of DNA. Few monsters end up as vocabulary.
Ancient writers reached for a geological explanation almost immediately. There is a place in Lycia, on the Chimera's own territory, where natural gas vents burn continuously out of the rock and have done for millennia. The site is still alight today, and the argument that the monster is a memory of a burning mountain is at least as old as Pliny.
Gods involved
The Chimera: common questions
What animals make up the Chimera?
A lion at the front, a goat rising from the middle of the back, and a serpent for a tail. Homer's version breathes fire, and later art keeps all three heads.
Who killed the Chimera?
Bellerophon, riding Pegasus. He attacked from the air where the fire could not reach, and killed it by driving a lead-tipped spear into its throat, where the creature's own flame melted the metal.
Which god is your parent?
Twelve questions and the campfire decides.