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Tonight's 'Creatures from Mythology' thread is all about the Chimaera! The Chimaera is what we may term a composite creature, combining elements of different animals into a fearsome combination, although the name Chimaera actually means 'She-Goat'. #Chimaera 
The earliest mention of the Chimaera comes from Hesiod (Theogony 319-324): 'who breathes fire not to be resisted,
a dreadful, great thing, swift of foot and powerful. She has three heads. One is that of a fierce lion, another of a goat, and the last of a mighty serpent snake.'
a dreadful, great thing, swift of foot and powerful. She has three heads. One is that of a fierce lion, another of a goat, and the last of a mighty serpent snake.'
Hesiod also tells us that the hero Bellerophon slew the Chimaera, while riding the winged horse Pegasus. This is the most common scene depicted in vase paintings of the Chimaera such as the one below (Athenian black-figure vase, c.550 BC. J. Paul Getty Museum)
Although this is a particularly fine example, by the 'Painter of Darius' c.330 BC, found at Canosa (Naples Archaeological Museum).
Other textual mentions of thee Chimaera are fleeting. Homer (Iliad 16.328-9) claims that a Lycian called Amisodarus reared the Chimaera to be 'an evil for many men', but we are left to be tantalised by this detail, as the poet offers nothing else.
Although the myth does seem to centre the Chimaera in Lycia, where Apollodorus (2.3.1-2) helpfully tells us that it 'devastated the land' and destroyed livestock, most early depictions are Greek. This is a fine Proto-Corinthian aryballos c.650 BC (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
However, there is the phenomenal 'Chimaera of Arezzo' (Etruscan, c.400 BC) - a bronze that was originally part of a much larger statue group. The snake-tail is a later restoration, but the craftsmanship speaks volumes about the visual power of the creature.
This may go some way to explaining why the Chimaera is a frequent artistic focus, far beyond its features in the textual sources. This is a potent reminder of the need to interlink texts and archaeology, not see one as superior to the other. (Image: Mosaic from Rhodes, c.280 BC)
The popularity of the Chimaera as an artistic motif is also evidenced by the discovery in 2017 of a Bellerophon-Chimaera mosaic in the UK, dating to c. AD 380. google.com/amp/s/amp.theg…
The term 'Chimaera', as well as being used as the taxonomic term for 'Ghost Sharks', has become something of a catch-all for things that are made up of composite elements. Typically it's used pejoratively, designed to suggest that said object/creature/idea is 'cobbled together'.
However, it's also used to describe words that are made up of elements taken from different languages. 'Television' is a good example of a chimeric word: 'tele-' being the Greek for 'far' or 'distant'; '-vision' deriving from the Latin 'video' - 'to see'.
So, most of us have a little Chimaera sitting right in the corner of our rooms!
I'm now all Chimaera-ed out, but I hope this little thread has been enjoyable. There'll be a few more 'Creatures of Mythology' threads coming soon. The first of these will be on the Phoenix!
