The Chimera: the Monster of Lycia and the Etruscan Bronze of Arezzo

Today the word chimera means an unattainable dream, an illusion. For the Greeks, however, it was a very concrete monster that ravaged Lycia, in what is now south-western Turkey. Its name, chímaira, simply meant “she-goat”, and the goat was indeed one of the three parts of its body. The story of the Chimera is bound up with that of the hero Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus, and it has come down to us through poets, painted vases and one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity.

Homer, Hesiod and the Monster's Lineage

In the sixth book of the Iliad, the Lycian warrior Glaucus tells the story of his ancestor Bellerophon and describes the Chimera as a creature of divine, not human, stock: a lion in front, a serpent behind and a goat in the middle, able to breathe a terrible fire. The king of Lycia, who wanted to be rid of the hero without killing him with his own hands, sent him to face her, hoping he would never return.

Hesiod, in the Theogony, places her in the genealogy of monsters: according to the most common interpretation she is the daughter of Echidna, the serpent-woman, and has three heads, one of a lion, one of a goat and one of a serpent. She thus belongs to the same family as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. The three-headed version became the most widespread in art: the goat's head rises from the back, while the tail ends in a serpent.

Bellerophon and Pegasus

To defeat the Chimera Bellerophon needed Pegasus. According to Pindar, the goddess Athena gave him in a dream a golden bridle with which to tame the winged horse at the spring of Peirene, in Corinth. Flying above the monster, the hero could strike it from above while staying out of reach of its flames. A later version says that he thrust a lead point into its throat, which the monster's fire melted, killing it from within.

Victory brought the hero no happiness. Proud of his successes, Bellerophon tried to ride Pegasus up to Olympus, but according to the myth Zeus sent a gadfly to sting the horse, which threw its rider. Bellerophon spent the rest of his life wandering alone, while Pegasus was welcomed among the gods. The tale thus joined the triumph over the monster to a stern lesson on human limits.

The Arezzo Bronze and the Burning Mountain

The most famous depiction of the Chimera is an Etruscan bronze found at Arezzo in 1553, during works near the city walls. Made around 400 BC, it shows the wounded beast, its goat's head already struck, snarling at an invisible enemy. On one foreleg there is a votive inscription in Etruscan. The work entered the collections of Cosimo I de' Medici and is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence.

The ancients also knew a place called Mount Chimaera, in Lycia, where perpetual flames came out of the rock, and Pliny mentions it in the Natural History. These are probably the flames of Yanartaş, near ancient Olympos, fed by natural gas that still burns among the stones today. This phenomenon may well have helped to root in Lycia the legend of a monster that breathed fire.

From a real monster for the Greeks to an illusion for the moderns, the word chimera has made a curious journey. Biology too has adopted it, to describe an organism made up of cells of different origin. In all these uses there remains the idea of a composite being, which puts together incompatible parts, and which for that very reason appears impossible, threatening or extraordinary depending on who is looking.