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Chimera |
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The people of Lycia ( an Asian kingdom ), having apperently outraged some god or other, wake up one day to find themselves pestered by a fearsome creature called the "Chimera," from the Greek for "little she -goat." Far from being cuddly as her name would imply, the Chimera was a fire- breathing and irritable beast with head of a lion, the midsection of a goat, and the hind quarters of a dragon. Some say she sported the heads of all three, and others that the goat's head grew out of her back. Any way you cut it, this pest was mightly ugly. In addition to being nasty in herself, the Chimera also mothered two other terrors: the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion. To make matters worse, the Lycian King, Iobates, has another problem on his hands, namely the hero Bellerophon. There's bad blood between Bellerophon Iobates' brother-in-law, King Proteus of Argos, and though the hero doesn't know it Proteus has ordered Iobates to kill him. Bellerophon's reluctant host figures he can dispose of both problems by sending his guest to slay the Chimera, expecting the two to make mutual mincemeat. But the gods are with Bellerophon, at least for the moment, so Athena supplies him with a charmed bridle and a winged horse named Pegasus. With Pegasus's help, Bellerophon polishes off the Chimerea and retrurns triumphant to the chargrined Iobates. It won't be long, however, before the hero's vanity brings down Nemesis and the wrath of a few other gods: two of his children are killed, and he's deposited on an Asian plain to eat his heart out. English references to the Chimerea pop up by the fourteenth century, as for example in John Wyclif's prologue to his edition of the Bible. ( He dismisses the beast as a heathien fantasy.) By the sixteenth century, the Chimera had become a metaphor for any wild and fearsome illusion, especially if patched together from incongruous sources ( just as the original was compounded from three beasts). This metaphor gave rise to the phrase "to chase a chimera," meaning "to prusue a foolish fantasy." The beast herself, however, was not entirely a fantasy. She seems to have personified Lycian volcano - a fire-breathing mountain - which in its upper reaches was home to lions, in its middle region to goats, and at its base to snakes. The volcano was also called "Chimerea," but whether it explains the myth or the myth explains its name and description is now impossible to say. |