Hippalectryon

Also Known As: Greek Ἱππαλεκτρυών, hippalektryon, “cock-horse” or “rooster-horse”, from hippos, horse, and alektryon, rooster; Latinised Hippalectryon
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It exists to be ridden and to be looked at, a bridled hybrid used as a blazon on ships and as a mount in painting and sculpture.
Role in Mythos: It has none, which is the remarkable thing about it: no birth, no parents, no adventure, no single story attaches to it anywhere in Greek literature.
Relation to Humans: Athenian painters put boys, travellers, spearmen and once even Poseidon on its back, and it carries every one of them without complaint. By the end of the fifth century BC nobody in the audience could remember what it was, and the word had become an insult for anything inflated and ridiculous.

Tip the wine out of an Attic cup and a boy appears at the bottom of it, riding a rooster. He is not clowning. He is riding properly, reins gathered in one hand, because the front half of the animal beneath him is a horse. The body is black, the mane and the long sickle feathers of the tail are picked out in dull red, the lesser sickles in white, and there are small white dots painted along the leather of the reins. Someone in Athens, in the third quarter of the sixth century BC, took the trouble to bridle it.

The Greeks called it the hippalektryon, the cock-horse. The horse ends and the bird begins at roughly the point where a rooster’s hackle should be, so that the neck and chest and forelegs are equine and everything behind them is fowl: barrel, wings, scaled legs, and that absurd fountain of a tail. The horse’s forelegs do not descend from shoulders. They come out of the breast of the cock, which is either a solution or a confession, depending on how charitable you feel toward the painter.

It has no parents. It has no birth, no lineage, no hunt, no hero sent to kill it, no god who made it and no god it belongs to. Search the Greek myths for a story about the hippalektryon and there is nothing there at all. What survives instead is pictures, and rather a lot of them.

The creature turns up in Attic vase painting in the second quarter of the sixth century BC, and it arrives as part of a whole short-lived litter of cock hybrids that the Athenian workshops seem to have been breeding for their own amusement. There is a boar-cock. There is a panther-cock. There is a girl-cock, the head and neck of a young woman set on a rooster’s body. Neighbouring Boeotia produced a goat-cock, another one turns up on a chalcedony in Paris, and a bull-cock survives on an engraved sard in the British Museum. The Greeks left no names for any of them. Within a generation the boar-cock, the panther-cock and the girl-cock are gone, and the horse-cock alone keeps going, perhaps because it was the only one of them anybody could imagine sitting on.

None of these things has an eastern prototype. This matters more than it sounds. The griffin, the sphinx and the siren all came to Greece from somewhere else, carried in on imported ivories and metalwork, and the Greeks made them their own after the fact. The cock-monsters appear to have been invented in Attica, from scratch, in about twenty years. The rooster itself was the recent import: the domestic fowl was still something of a novelty in Greek yards, and even in Aristophanes’ day the cock was known as the Persian bird, the way the turkey and the guinea hen would later carry their supposed homelands around in their names. The Athenians took the newest animal they had and welded it to the oldest one they trusted.

Sixteen black-figured vases show it with a rider, spanning the third quarter of the sixth century to the beginning of the fifth. The rider is usually a youth, sometimes naked, sometimes in a short chiton or a Thracian cloak, sometimes in a helmet or the wide-brimmed hat that horsemen and travellers wore, occasionally with a spear across his shoulder. On three vases he is bearded. On a lekythos in Berlin he is Poseidon, holding a trident and a dolphin, which is the closest the hippalektryon ever comes to divine company. Earlier and stranger is a neck-amphora in Bonn on which two of them face each other across a palmette with nobody on their backs, wilder-looking than the patient creatures the boys ride, and bridled all the same. Whatever else it was, this animal was always tack.

There was also, once, a marble one. Fragments of a statue of a rider on a hippalektryon came out of the Acropolis in 1887, from the debris the Athenians shovelled into the rock after the Persians wrecked the citadel in 480 BC. The rider has lost his head and both arms. The horse has lost its head and forelegs. The cock has lost the shanks below its hocks and most of its outspread wings and tail. A pillar with a volute capital had been carved to help hold the weight of it. Aeschylus, born in the 520s, could have walked past that statue while it was still standing.

He certainly knew the creature. In his lost tragedy the Myrmidons, a hippalektryon is painted on the ship of Protesilaos, and the fragment that survives calls it the buff cock-horse, the laborious work of outpoured paints. The line is quoted because of what is happening to the paint. The Trojans have got fire into the beached ships, the pitch is burning, and the great figurehead is running in the heat, colour sliding down the strakes in the smoke.

Seventy years later the joke had eaten the animal. In the Peace, Aristophanes gives us a staff officer in three plumes and a crimson cloak of what he insists is real Sardian purple, who will be the first man to run away, shaking his plumes like a buff hippalektryon. In the Birds, the nobody Diitrephes rises on wicker wings to become the finest gilded hippalektryon of his tribe. And in the Frogs, with Aeschylus and Euripides fighting over the corpse of tragedy, Dionysos admits he has lain awake through whole nights trying to work out what kind of bird the tawny cock-horse was supposed to be. Aeschylus snaps back that it was a device, you idiot, engraved on the ships. Euripides gets the last word: no cock-horse in my plays, by Zeus, and no goat-stag either.

The joke only works because the picture had died. By 405 BC the hippalektryon had dropped out of Greek art entirely, and the word had come loose from any image an Athenian could summon, which left it free to mean something pompous, gaudy and faintly ridiculous. Euripides sneers that such monsters belong on Persian tapestries. He was wrong about that, and comically so, since nothing remotely like the cock-horse exists in Egypt or the Near East and the thing was as Athenian as he was.

What could it do? Nobody ever says. It has wings, and it stands on a bird’s legs, and no surviving line of Greek claims that it flies. It carries riders, and it takes a bit and a bridle, and it was worth painting on the bow of a warship and on the face of a shield, where its whole function was to be seen. Its power, in other words, was to be an image, and it was good at that for about a hundred and thirty years.

Its weakness was that nobody ever gave it a story. The griffin guarded gold. The sphinx asked a question. The siren sang. The cock-horse only ever had a shape, and a shape can be knocked off its pillar and shovelled into a pit. It hung on longest abroad: Attic pots carried it to Etruria, where a people who could never resist a hybrid put it on gold rings, engraved gems, bronze handles and a gold bulla at Tarquinia. Then that stopped too, and the tawny cock-horse survived only as a word for something absurd, which is a strange fate for an animal whose sole recorded ambition was to let a boy ride it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hippalectryon?

The hippalectryon is a Greek hybrid creature with the head, neck, chest and forelegs of a horse joined to the wings, body, legs and tail of a rooster. Its name means cock-horse. It appears almost entirely in Athenian black-figure vase painting of the sixth century BC, usually bridled and carrying a rider.

Is there a myth about the hippalectryon?

No. The hippalectryon has no parents, no origin story and no adventure anywhere in Greek literature, which makes it unusual among Greek monsters. It survives as an image on vases, gems, bronzes and one broken marble statue, and as a punchline in Aristophanes.

Why did Aristophanes make fun of the hippalectryon?

Because by his lifetime nobody could picture it any more. The creature had vanished from Greek art by the late fifth century BC, so when Aeschylus used the word in his tragedies it struck Athenian audiences as grand, obscure and faintly absurd. In the Frogs, Dionysos complains that he has spent sleepless nights trying to work out what kind of bird a tawny cock-horse even is.

Is the hippalectryon the same as Pegasus?

No, though the two are sometimes confused. Pegasus is a complete horse with wings, while the hippalectryon is half horse and half rooster, with a bird’s legs and a rooster’s sickle tail. Some scholars have wondered whether the cock-horse was an early attempt at rendering a winged horse, but the Greeks kept the two entirely separate in art.

Where can you see a hippalectryon today?

Attic black-figure vases showing the creature survive in several museum collections, including a Siana cup in the Harvard Art Museums that shows a youth riding one inside the bowl, and a lip cup acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951. Etruscan gold rings, gems and bronze handles carry the hybrid as well, since Attic pots exported to Etruria took it with them.