Chimera

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A single beast fused from lion, goat, and serpent that breathed living fire.
Role in Mythos: The monster that ravaged Lycia until the hero Bellerophon killed it from the back of the winged horse Pegasus.
Relation to Humans: It treated the people of Lycia as prey, burning their fields and flocks and driving them from the land. No mortal could face it on the ground and survive, which is why its death required a horse that could fly.

The hillside above old Olympos has been burning for longer than anyone can remember. Flames rise straight out of bare stone, faint blue at the root and yellow at the tip, and they do not consume any fuel a person can see. The Lycians who herded goats across that country smelled the thin sulphur on the wind and kept their animals moving. The fire belonged to something. The Greeks gave that something a body, and the body was a nightmare of mismatched parts: a lion in front, a goat’s head straining up from the middle of its back, and a snake where the tail should be.

Its name means almost nothing fearsome. Chimaira is a Greek word for a young she-goat, an animal in its first year, and it is a strange label to hang on a creature that emptied a kingdom. The goat survives in the beast’s anatomy, bleating somewhere between the roar at the front and the hiss at the rear, but the goat is the least of it. What made the Chimera a thing to flee was the furnace in its throat. Homer, who gives the earliest account, called it a thing of immortal make, lion in front and serpent behind, a goat in the middle, snorting out the terrible flame of bright fire. Hesiod went further and counted three heads, each breathing its own blast of flame.

It came from a monstrous line. Hesiod names its parents as Typhon, the storm-giant who once challenged the rule of heaven, and Echidna, the half-woman half-snake who bore him a brood of horrors. That made the Chimera sister to Cerberus, the hound at the gate of the dead, and to the Hydra of the swamp at Lerna. In some tellings it went on to mate with its own brother Orthrus and produce the Sphinx and the lion of Nemea. This was a family that existed to be the obstacle in someone else’s story, the thing a hero had to get past, and the Chimera was bred true to that purpose.

For a while it simply ranged. It moved fast for its bulk, swift-footed in Hesiod’s word, and it crossed the dry uplands of Lycia scorching whatever stood in its path. Crops went to ash. Livestock cooked in the open. Villages emptied ahead of the smell of it, that hot reek of singed hair and burning grass that arrived before the beast itself did. The land could not raise an army against a creature that answered every charge with fire. So the people did what people do. They appealed to their king, Iobates, and waited for someone braver or more expendable than themselves.

That someone arrived carrying his own death sentence. Bellerophon had come to Lycia from Argos bearing a sealed letter from King Proetus, a letter that asked Iobates to kill the man who delivered it. Iobates would not break the sacred law of hospitality by murdering a guest outright, so he found a cleaner solution. He sent Bellerophon against the Chimera, certain the monster would do the killing for him. It very nearly did. The hero could not get near the thing on foot, could not strike past the heat without his weapons softening and his skin blistering. Fire was the whole of its argument, and on the ground the argument was unanswerable.

What saved him was already in his keeping. With the goddess Athena’s help he had bridled Pegasus, the winged horse sprung from the blood of the slain Medusa, and from Pegasus’s back the fire lost its monopoly. Bellerophon could circle above the beast, out of reach, loosing arrows that did little against its hide. Then he reasoned out the cleverer kill. He fixed a lump of lead to the point of his spear and drove it down into the open, flaming mouth. The Chimera’s own breath turned against it. The metal melted, ran molten into its throat, and choked the fire at its source. The monster that nothing could approach died gasping on its own heat.

Its strengths and its single weakness came from the same place. The fire made it untouchable and let it ravage a region unopposed, and its hybrid body lent it the lion’s strength, the serpent’s strike, and a speed its size had no right to. But a furnace needs an open mouth, and an open mouth can be fed something other than air. That is the whole irony of its ending. The weapon was its own gift turned inward, the lead going liquid in the exact heat the creature used to make itself invincible.

The flames on the Lycian hillside still burn. The site is called Yanartaş now, the flaming rock, and the fires are natural seeps of gas rising through cracks in the mountain. The ancients raised a temple to Hephaestus there, the smith-god of fire, and told themselves the buried Chimera was the reason the ground would not stop burning. The explanation outlived the monster. People needed a name for a fire with no fuel, and a dead beast under the stone served as well as anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Chimera in Greek mythology?

The Chimera is a fire-breathing monster from Greek mythology, a single creature combining a lion’s foreparts, a goat’s head rising from its back, and a serpent’s tail. It terrorized the region of Lycia in Asia Minor, scorching the land with its breath until the hero Bellerophon killed it.

Who killed the Chimera and how?

Bellerophon killed the Chimera with the help of the winged horse Pegasus. Unable to approach the fire-breathing beast on the ground, he attacked from the air and thrust a lead-tipped spear into its flaming mouth. The Chimera’s own breath melted the lead, which ran down its throat and suffocated it.

Who were the Chimera’s parents?

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the Chimera was the offspring of Typhon, the monstrous storm-giant, and Echidna, the half-woman, half-serpent. This made it a sibling of other famous Greek monsters, including Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra.

What does the name Chimera mean?

The name comes from the Greek word chimaira, meaning a young she-goat or a one-year-old animal. The goat element survives in the creature’s anatomy as the second head rising from its back, even though the lion and serpent dominate its fearsome reputation.

Is the Chimera connected to a real place?

Yes. The myth was linked to a hillside in ancient Lycia, modern Yanartaş in Turkey, where natural gas seeping from the rock keeps small flames burning continuously. Ancient people built a temple to Hephaestus there and explained the eternal fire as the buried Chimera still smoldering beneath the ground.