Chimera
The Fire-Breather
ky-MEER-uh
Lion in front, goat in the middle, serpent behind, and fire out of all of it, the creature whose name became the word for impossible.
The Story
Homer describes it in three words that later writers never improved on: lion, goat, serpent, breathing fire. It ravaged Lycia until Bellerophon was sent to kill it, a posting everyone involved understood as a death sentence.
He did it from the air on Pegasus, out of reach of the flame, and finished it by putting a lead-tipped spear into its mouth to melt down its throat. Then he tried to ride Pegasus up to Olympus, and Zeus put a stop to that with a single gadfly.
Did You Know?
- The word became a technical term twice over, for a fanciful impossibility, and in biology for a single organism carrying two distinct sets of DNA.
- The flames of Yanartaş still burn out of the rock on the Lycian coast where the myth places her, fed by seeping methane. They have been alight for at least two and a half thousand years.
- The Chimera of Arezzo, an Etruscan bronze dug up in 1553, is one of the finest surviving pieces of pre-Roman Italian sculpture, and Cosimo de' Medici had it in his study.