The Chimera is one of the oldest monsters of Greek myth, and one of the easiest to recognise. She was a single creature with the body of a goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a serpent. In most accounts she breathed fire. The earliest surviving description is a single line in the Iliad (VI.181), where Homer calls her “of immortal origin, not human, a lion in front, a serpent behind, a goat in the middle, breathing the terrible breath of blazing fire.” That description has been essentially fixed for nearly three thousand years. The word chimera has since passed into English and into modern biology as a name for any composite or impossible thing, and the bronze Chimaera of Arezzo, recovered from a Roman cistern in 1553, is one of the most-copied works of ancient sculpture in the world.
The Parentage of the Chimera
Hesiod’s Theogony (319 ff.) makes the Chimera the daughter of Typhon and Echidna, and therefore the sister of Cerberus, the Lernaean Hydra, and the Nemean Lion. The genealogy was a scholarly convenience: it brought all the great monsters of Greek myth into a single family tree, descended from Gaia and Tartarus, and set against the Olympians. The geographical place of the Chimera was Lycia, in the southwest corner of Asia Minor, and she is usually said to have been raised by a Lycian king — Amisodarus, in the Iliad, who had allowed the monster to escape from his territory.
The Lycian connection is important and old. Lycia, in the late Bronze Age, was a confederation of city-states in what is now southwestern Turkey, with its capital at Xanthos, and it kept its distinct identity well into the classical period. The Greeks may have identified the region with the Chimera because the volcanic geography of Lycia (the Chimaera or Yanartaş, a naturally burning gas vent near the modern town of Çıralı, has been burning for millennia and was identified with the myth by Pliny the Elder in the first century CE) made the place feel literally fire-breathing.
The Chimera in the Iliad
The Chimera is the reason Bellerophon appears in the Iliad. In Book VI, Glaucus, the Lycian ally of the Trojans, tells Diomedes the story of his grandfather Bellerophon in a long set-piece (lines 144–211) that is one of the earliest and best-preserved hero-tales in the epic. Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus (a different Glaucus, the king of Corinth), had been accused of impropriety by the wife of King Proetus of Tiryns. Proetus, unwilling to kill a guest directly, sent him to the king of Lycia with a folded tablet instructing the king to kill the bearer. The Lycian king did not dare to kill a guest either, but he sent Bellerophon on a series of impossible tasks, of which the first was the killing of the Chimera.
Bellerophon, helped by the gods, succeeded. He had the help of the winged horse Pegasus, given to him by Athena, and from the air he was able to shoot the Chimera in the only part of her that was not invulnerable — in the later writers, this is usually said to be the lion’s mouth, though Homer does not specify. With the Chimera dead, Bellerophon went on to defeat the Solymi, the Amazons, and the best of the Lycian warriors, and the king of Lycia, recognising the divine favour shown to him, gave him his daughter and half his kingdom.
The Chimera in the Visual Arts
The Chimera is one of the most common monsters in archaic Greek art. The earliest depictions, on Corinthian vases of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, are stylised: the lion head, the goat’s body protruding from the middle of the back, and the serpent tail are all there, but the image is decorative rather than frightening. The bronze Chimaera of Arezzo (probably second or first century BCE, found near the Tuscan town of Arezzo) is a sophisticated Hellenistic or Roman work: the lion head is anatomically credible, the goat’s head and udder emerge naturally from the back, the serpent writhes behind, and the whole animal is shown with a kind of muscular power that the archaic vases lack. The statue is the centrepiece of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence. The early-fifth-century BCE bronze Piraeus Athena shows the goddess with a shield device of a Chimera.
In Etruscan art, the Chimera is one of the standard motifs of late-archaic bronze work, and several surviving pieces (the Chimaera of Arezzo included) are Etruscan in origin or style. The Roman taste for the grotesque took the image in a more decorative direction; the medieval bestiaries made it an emblem of sin; and the early modern era rediscovered the ancient statue and made it the model for the chimera in European heraldry and emblem books.
The Chimera as a Word
The word chimera (Greek χίμαιρα, khimaira) was used by Plato in the Republic and the Phaedrus to mean a “monstrous” combination, and the word in this sense is older than the modern English usage. By the sixteenth century, the Italian chimera and the French chimère had taken on the meaning “fanciful idea” or “impossible project,” and the English word, borrowed from French, has carried both meanings ever since.
In modern genetics, the chimera (named by the German botanist Hans Winkler in 1907) is an organism whose cells derive from two or more distinct zygote lines. In English usage, chimerical has come to mean “fantastically improbable.” Neither of these modern uses preserves the original mythological sense of a single composite body, but the underlying sense of a hybrid, an impossible combination, is continuous with the myth.
The Chimera in Modern Fiction
The Chimera is one of the standard monsters of fantasy and of science fiction. She appears in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) as a particularly nasty fight scene; in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) as one of the dangers of Camazotz; in countless video games (the God of War series, Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter), where the combination of fire-breathing, lion, goat, and serpent is preserved. The phrase “chasing chimeras” has become a stock expression for any doomed pursuit of the impossible, and the image of the fire-breathing three-part beast remains one of the most recognisable in Western iconography.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Chimera is one of those rare Greek myths that is not really a story at all — there is no narrative conflict, no moral choice, no hero’s journey. There is a hero, Bellerophon, and a monster, and a combat that takes place out of sight. The myth is in the lineage (Typhon and Echidna, parents of monsters), in the geography (Lycia, with its real fire-breathing rock), and in the image (the composite animal). When you read about the Chimera, you are reading about a kind of creature, the way a zoologist might describe a species, rather than a story in the modern sense. This is one of the things the Greek myths do that modern fiction generally does not, and the difference is worth marking.
For more, see our profile of Pegasus, the Bellerophon page, and our guide to the Hydra, the Chimera’s sister-monster. For the geographic reality behind the myth, see our guide to the Greek monsters and creatures.