Chimaera

The chimera is a single Greek monster with a fixed genealogy, not a general term for a hybrid. Homer describes it in the Iliad as lion in front, serpent behind and goat in the middle, breathing fire and of divine stock; Hesiod in the Theogony makes it a child of Typhon and Echidna and gives it three heads. Its one story is its death: the hero Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, kills it from the air, in some versions by dropping a lump of lead down its throat that the fire melts.

The Lycian setting is often connected to a real place, Mount Chimaera near Olympos, where natural gas vents burn perpetually on the hillside. The modern senses of the word are metaphorical descendants: a "chimera" for an impossible fancy, and in biology a chimera for an organism of genetically distinct cells, both drawn from the idea of incompatible parts joined in one body, and both far from the specific fire-breathing beast of the Greek text.

Homer's Iliad gives the earliest surviving description of the Chimaera and keeps it simple: a thing of immortal make, not human, lion in front, serpent behind, and goat in the middle, breathing out the fierce might of blazing fire. Later Greek vase painting and sculpture, and Hesiod's Theogony after Homer, settle the composite into the form that becomes standard, a lion's body and head, a second head belonging to a goat rising from the middle of its back, and a tail that ends in a live, striking serpent, so that three animal heads effectively sit on one body. She is counted among the monstrous children of Typhon and Echidna, siblings to Cerberus, the Lernaean Hydra and the Sphinx, a family of hybrid terrors that heroic myth exists largely to clear from the world one at a time.

Fire is her signature weapon as much as any of her three animal parts, breathed from at least the lion's head and sometimes described as issuing from all three, and it is specifically her fire that makes her impossible to approach safely on the ground, which is why Bellerophon's aerial attack from Pegasus's back becomes the only way ancient tellers imagine defeating her.

There is a mountain in Lycia called Chimaera. Methane seeps from its rock and burns without being lit, and it has done so for as long as anyone has written about the place. Ancient geographers connected the burning ground to the fire-breathing beast, and the connection is old enough that it may be the origin rather than a later gloss. It is a rare case where a monster has a fixed address.

The story around it is compact. Bellerophon is sent to kill the creature by a king who expects him to die trying, he does it from the air on Pegasus, and the usual telling has him drop a mass of lead down its throat to be melted by its own fire. The economy of that detail, using the monster's single distinguishing power to destroy it, is what keeps the episode in the repertoire.

The word has since outrun the animal. In biology a chimera is an organism whose cells come from more than one zygote, a usage that keeps the composite sense and drops the fire. In ordinary speech a chimera is something imagined and unattainable, which keeps neither. Both are live, and a reader who meets the word in a laboratory paper and in a poem on the same day is meeting two descendants of one Lycian mountain.

The mountain is still burning. It is called Yanartas now, it is a marked walk above the Lycian coast, and the flames are small enough to boil a kettle on. Very few creatures in this catalogue can be visited.

Ancient and modern commentators alike have noticed that a place named Chimaera exists on the Lycian coast near Olympos, a hillside where natural gas vents burn continuously from cracks in the rock, still alight today and known locally as the Yanartas, the burning stone. Ancient writers including the geographer Strabo connect the monster's name and fire breathing directly to this site, and some ancient accounts describe the surrounding terrain as lion haunted at its base, goat grazed on its slopes and snake infested near its summit, a landscape whose three distinct characters may have supplied the three animal parts of the myth rather than the other way around. Whether the place explains the monster or a monster already current in story simply attached itself to a striking natural feature is not something the ancient sources resolve, but the association is old and was already treated as significant by classical geographers.

Beyond this one site, the Chimaera's composite, impossible body established a template later Greek and Roman art returned to repeatedly for other invented hybrids, and the word chimera has since passed into English generally for any fantastical creature stitched together from mismatched parts, or for a hoped for thing that turns out to be an illusion.