Manticore

Also Known As: Greek Martichoras, Mantichoras; Latin Mantichora; glossed by the Greeks themselves as Anthropophagos, “man-eater,” from a Persian word for the same; called mantyger or manticora in later European sources
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Persian Mythology, Greek Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It shoots the venomous stings of its scorpion tail like arrows, to a distance of about a hundred feet, and grows new ones where the old ones have gone.
Role in Mythos: It is the man-eater of the far east of the Greek imagination, a beast reported from India by a Greek doctor at the Persian court and copied out of his book for the next two thousand years.
Relation to Humans: It hunts human beings by preference, lying in wait for two or three men at once and killing all of them, and its name in both Persian and Greek says exactly that. Indian hunters ride out against it on elephants with spears and arrows, and take its cubs to crush their tails with a stone before the stings can grow.

The sound comes first, and it is the wrong sound entirely. A pipe and a war trumpet played at once, thin and brassy together, carrying through hot scrub in a country no Greek had ever walked. Then the colour: cinnabar red, moving low through the brush at the mass of a full-grown lion. It has a lion’s forefeet and a lion’s claws and a lion’s shaggy weight, and above them a man’s face, with a man’s ears grown too large and too hairy, and blue-grey eyes that are also a man’s. The mouth opens on three rows of teeth in the upper jaw and three in the lower, sharp, interlocking like the teeth of a comb.

Then the tail comes up over its back, and the tail is a scorpion’s.

Every word of that comes from one man. Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who spent years at the court of Artaxerxes II around 400 BC, treating the royal family and collecting what he could from travellers who had come to Persia from further east than any Greek had gone. He never saw India. What he wrote in his Indica was what he had been told at court, and the Indica itself is lost. It survives only in fragments, because later writers found it too good to leave out.

The fullest fragment is a set of notes taken by Photius, a Byzantine scholar of the ninth century, working his way through a copy of the book that no longer exists. The martichora, he wrote, has a face like a man’s, a skin red as cinnabar, and is as large as a lion. Three rows of teeth. Human ears and light-blue eyes. Its tail is a land scorpion’s, with a sting more than a cubit long at the end, other stings ranged down each side of it, and one on the crown of its head. Attacked from in front, it curls the tail forward over its body and discharges the stings as if from a bow. Attacked from behind, it straightens the tail and shoots them in a line to a hundred feet. The wound kills any animal that takes it, except the elephant. The stings are about a foot long and no thicker than a rush, and where they have been fired, new ones grow.

The Greeks did not have to guess what the name meant, because they were told. Martichora is the Persian for man-eater, and they translated it directly into their own word, anthropophagos. It kills other animals, Photius noted, but it kills and eats more human beings. Aelian, writing his book on the natures of animals five or six centuries later and copying the same source, adds the detail that makes the thing feel real. It does not wait for a lone traveller. It will lie in cover and let two men pass, or three, and take all of them together, and it wins. Against a lion it can do nothing.

And the Indians hunt it. They ride out on elephants with spears and arrows, because the elephant is the one creature the venom does not kill, and they go after the cubs while the tails are still soft and stingless, and crush those tails with a stone so the stings never come. That is a strangely practical piece of husbandry to invent. It is the kind of detail that makes a story sound like a report.

Ctesias said he had seen one. It had been sent from India as a gift to the Persian king, and he claimed to have looked at it with his own eyes. Aelian repeats the claim and then, in the same breath, puts a knife into it: if Ctesias is to be regarded as a sufficient authority on such matters. That was roughly how antiquity handled him. Aristotle recorded the beast in his History of Animals, in the middle of a sober passage about which animals have double rows of teeth, and prefaced it with six words that have kept their edge for two and a half thousand years. If we are to believe Ctesias.

Pausanias went further, and got there first. Travelling in Greece in the second century AD, he wrote that the animal Ctesias called the mantichoras and the Greeks called the man-eater was, he suspected, simply the tiger, and that the three rows of teeth and the arrow-shooting tail were what happens when frightened men describe a big striped cat to each other for long enough. Philostratus staged the demolition as a scene. His Apollonius of Tyana, standing in India among the Brahman sages, asks the sage Iarchas about the martichora and recites the tall stories he has heard, the man’s head, the lion’s size, the cubit-long thorns shot at hunters. Iarchas answers that he has never in this country heard of an animal that shoots arrows. Eusebius, retelling it, is blunter still. The sages said the beasts had never existed at all.

None of which slowed it down in the slightest. Pliny copied the description into his Natural History, moved the animal to Ethiopia, which for him meant every hot country south and east of anywhere, and added on the authority of King Juba that it can also imitate human speech. Solinus copied Pliny. The medieval encyclopaedists copied Solinus. Jacques de Vitry gave it a hiss like a snake and the speed of a bird in flight. Thomas of Cantimpre, working from garbled manuscripts, managed to file it twice under two different names. Bartholomaeus Anglicus put it among the wolves of India. By the fourteenth century it was being painted into illuminated bestiaries, a red lion with a bearded human face and a spiked tail, and it later crossed out of the books entirely and into heraldry, where it still sits on coats of arms with its human face perfectly composed.

Its powers all belong to the tail and the teeth. The sting at the tip kills on contact, and death is immediate. The stings along the sides are ammunition, fired forwards or backwards or sideways at a range no bow of that period could match, and they regenerate, so it does not run out. It is as fast as a stag over ground. It has the claws and the strength of a lion and the mouth of nothing on earth, and its voice, which is the first thing anyone meets, functions as a lure as much as a warning, a piece of music arriving out of the scrub.

The limits are just as specific. The elephant shrugs off its venom, and so the hunters come on elephants. The lion beats it. Its young can be disarmed with a stone. And there is one further weakness, the largest of them, which no ancient author noticed because none of them was looking for it: the manticore has no myth. No hero is sent against it. No god makes it or curses it or sets it to guard anything. It appears in no Persian text and no Indian one. There is not a single story in which anything happens to it. It exists only as an entry in a natural history, an animal that was reported rather than met, and it has survived on the strength of the reporting alone. Strip the arrows out of the tail and the man out of the face, and what remains is a very large red cat that eats people, which is a fair description of a tiger.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a manticore?

A manticore is a man-eating beast first described by the Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus around 400 BC, with the body and claws of a lion, a human face and ears, three rows of teeth in each jaw, cinnabar-red fur, and the tail of a scorpion. Its name comes from a Persian word meaning “man-eater,” which the Greeks translated directly as anthropophagos. Ctesias placed it in India and claimed to have seen one at the Persian court.

What does a manticore’s tail do?

The manticore’s tail ends in a scorpion sting more than a cubit long, with further stings ranged along both sides of it. It fires these stings like arrows, curling the tail forward when attacked from the front and straightening it to shoot in a line up to about a hundred feet when attacked from behind. The wound is fatal to every animal except the elephant, and the spent stings grow back.

Is the manticore Persian or Greek?

Both, and the distinction matters. The name is Persian and means “man-eater,” and the story reached Ctesias while he was living at the Persian court of Artaxerxes II, but every surviving description of the manticore is written in Greek or Latin and every one of them traces back to Ctesias himself. No Persian or Indian text preserves it.

How do you kill a manticore?

Ancient accounts say Indian hunters attacked it from elephant-back with spears and arrows, since the elephant is the only animal its venom does not kill. They also hunted the cubs while the tails were still soft and crushed those tails with a stone so the stings could never grow. Aelian adds that a manticore cannot bring down a lion.

Was the manticore a real animal?

Almost certainly a tiger, seen at a distance or described at second hand. Pausanias said as much in the second century AD, arguing that the three rows of teeth and the arrow-shooting tail were the work of frightened men exaggerating, and modern scholars of Ctesias generally agree. When Apollonius of Tyana asked Indian sages about the creature, they told him no such animal existed.