The Manticore, the Indian Beast That Fed on Human Flesh

Among the beasts the Greeks placed at the edges of the world, the manticore is perhaps the most disturbing. It has the face of a man, the body of a reddish-furred lion and a tail armed with spines, like that of a scorpion. Its name, in the oldest form martichóras, is commonly explained by a Persian term meaning “man-eater”. Like the unicorn, the manticore reached the West through Greek accounts of India.

Ctesias and Aristotle's Scepticism

The first description is once again due to Ctesias of Cnidus, the Greek physician who lived at the Persian court between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century BC. His work on India is lost, but we know its content thanks to a summary made in the ninth century by the Byzantine patriarch Photius. Ctesias spoke of a beast as big as a lion, with three rows of teeth, ears and eyes like a human's and a tail able to shoot stings at a distance.

Aristotle takes up the report in the History of Animals, but with a significant caution: he specifies that he relates it “if we are to believe Ctesias”. The philosopher, attentive to direct observation, considered the physician of Cnidus an unreliable witness. This scepticism, however, did not prevent the manticore from surviving: Aristotle's prestige actually helped the beast's name circulate among readers of later centuries.

Pliny, Pausanias and the Tiger

Pliny the Elder, in the eighth book of the Natural History, reports on the authority of Ctesias that the manticore is born among the Ethiopians and adds memorable details. It has grey-blue eyes and a blood-red colour, a voice that sounds like a panpipe and a trumpet together, and great speed in running. Above all, it is extremely greedy for human flesh. In this way the creature passed from India to Africa, following the uncertain geography of the ancient marvellous.

Already in antiquity someone proposed a rational explanation. The traveller Pausanias, in the second century AD, wrote that he was convinced the beast described by Ctesias was in fact the tiger, distorted by the fear of the Indians. The three rows of teeth and the sting would be exaggerations by people who had seen a large, fierce cat from afar. It is a hypothesis that many modern scholars also consider plausible.

Bestiaries, Engravings and Temptations

In the Middle Ages the manticore entered the bestiaries, where it appears with a human face, sometimes bearded or wearing a cap, and with a tail bristling with spines. Some miniatures show it devouring a human limb. Commentators interpreted it as an image of the devil or of false appearance: a human face hiding a bestial and cruel nature.

In 1607 the Englishman Edward Topsell included it in his History of Four-footed Beasts, with an engraving that enjoyed a long fortune. In the nineteenth century Gustave Flaubert gave it a voice in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, published in 1874, where the martichoras parades among the monsters tormenting the hermit, boasting of its scarlet coat, its three rows of teeth and the spines it hurls far away.

The manticore shows how the ancient world built its monsters: by combining travellers' testimony, widespread fears and parts of real animals. What makes it memorable is its human face, which brings it close to man precisely while its nature threatens him. In this contrast readers of every age have seen an ancient unease reflected: the suspicion that ferocity may hide behind familiar features.