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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Chimera is a fire-breathing monster of Lycia, joining lion, goat and serpent in one body before Bellerophon attacks her from the winged horse Pegasus.
Also recorded as Chimaera, Χίμαιρα
Bellerophon carries a letter to a foreign king. Its message orders his death. The king sends him against the Chimera, a fire-breathing creature already devastating the country: a task that is meant to make an executioner unnecessary. [3]
Read the manuscriptChimera, also spelled Chimaera, is the Lycian monster whose lion, goat and serpent parts share one body. The ancient handbook of Greek mythology called the Library gives the middle goat head the power to breathe fire. Its creature ravages the country and attacks cattle, combining the strength of three beasts. [3]
The Library begins with a death Bellerophon did not intend. Having accidentally killed his brother, he goes to King Proetus for purification. Proetus’s wife, Stheneboea, desires him and proposes a meeting. He refuses. She tells her husband that Bellerophon made the improper proposal instead. Proetus believes her and entrusts the visitor with a letter to the Lycian king Iobates ordering him to kill its bearer. Bellerophon carries the instrument of his own destruction to the next court. [3]
Iobates chooses the Chimera as the means. Bellerophon mounts Pegasus, the winged horse born from Medusa and Poseidon, and rises above the monster. From that height he shoots down at her and kills her. The encounter is brief in the Library. Its decisive movement is upward: horse and rider reach a position from which they can strike without meeting the threefold body on the ground. [3]
The king’s intention survives the monster. He sends Bellerophon against the Solymi, then against the Amazons. When neither assignment kills him, Iobates orders his bravest Lycian fighters to ambush him. Bellerophon kills them all. At last the king admires his prowess, shows him the letter and asks him to stay. He gives him his daughter Philonoe in marriage and, on his own death, leaves him the kingdom. The man sent to be disposed of becomes the ruler’s heir. [3]
Pindar’s Olympian 13 opens a different part of the adventure: how Bellerophon gained the horse. He has struggled repeatedly to harness Pegasus at Peirene’s spring. Following a seer’s advice, he sleeps at Athena’s altar. The goddess appears with a golden bridle and tells him to offer a white bull to Poseidon. On waking, he finds that the gift has not disappeared with the dream. The bridle is lying beside him. [4]
He takes it to the seer and describes the night’s events. The seer tells him to fulfill the dream’s command and set up an altar to Athena as goddess of horsemanship. With the divine bridle, Bellerophon captures the winged horse and mounts in full bronze armor. Pindar then names the opponents horse and rider defeat from the air: the Amazons, the Chimera and the Solymi. What had defeated the hero’s repeated efforts becomes possible through a gift he could not have made for himself.
Homer places the story inside a meeting between enemies at Troy. Diomedes challenges Glaucus to identify himself before they fight. Glaucus answers first with an image of generations coming and going like leaves, then traces his family to Bellerophon. The monster’s defeat is an episode in the ancestry he offers a stranger. The surrounding encounter matters because this family history changes what the two armed men do next. [1]
Hesiod’s Theogony places the creature among a succession of monsters, describing her three heads and naming Pegasus beside Bellerophon as her killer. Pindar’s victory poem gives the horse’s capture a story of its own. The Library later gathers the accusation, mission and aerial combat into a compact prose account. A brief victory in one work becomes an extended preparation in another. [2][4][3]
The Iliad brings Bellerophon to the river Xanthus in Lycia under divine protection. His welcome is generous: the king feasts him for nine days before looking at the letter he carries. Hospitality precedes the attempt to destroy him. The same royal household can supply food, an audience and a lethal assignment; the change begins when the guest’s introduction is read. [1]
In the Iliad, Proetus’s wife is called Antea. She accuses Bellerophon of trying to force her after he refuses her desire. Proetus shrinks from killing him himself and sends the folded tablet to his father-in-law in Lycia. After the long welcome, the king reads it and orders the Chimera’s destruction. Homer describes the creature’s fire and composite body, then says Bellerophon kills her under guidance from heaven. Pegasus is not named in this passage. [1]
The Solymi, Amazons and ambush follow. When no ambusher returns, the king concludes that Bellerophon must descend from a god. He gives him a daughter and a share of royal honor; the Lycians grant land with vineyards and fields. The marriage produces three children. Yet the family history does not stop at that reward. Bellerophon later becomes hated by the gods and wanders alone on the Alean plain, avoiding other people and consuming himself with grief. Glaucus gives no explanation for that change in divine favor. [1]
His son Isander dies fighting the Solymi; his daughter Laodameia is killed by Artemis. The surviving son, Hippolochus, is Glaucus’s father. He sends his own son to Troy with instructions to excel and bring no shame upon the family. The Chimera’s conqueror has become a troubled ancestor whose descendants inherit both his distinction and the demand to live up to it. [1]
Diomedes responds to Glaucus’s history by planting his spear in the ground. His grandfather Oeneus had entertained Bellerophon for twenty days, and the men had exchanged gifts: a purple belt and a double cup. The cup remains at Diomedes’ home. That older welcome gives the descendants an obligation stronger than their immediate challenge. They agree to avoid each other’s spears and to receive each other as guests if either visits the other’s country. [1]
They shake hands and exchange armor so that everyone can see the bond. Homer closes with a sharp imbalance: Glaucus gives gold armor worth a hundred cattle for bronze worth nine. The poet attributes the unequal bargain to Zeus taking away his judgement. The reconciliation is real, but it does not make the exchange prudent. The family story has spared a life while costing its teller a fortune. [1]
Hospitality has now worked in opposite directions. Proetus’s letter turned a guest into an intended victim; the remembered gifts stop two descendants from killing each other. Bellerophon’s encounter with the Chimera sits within both histories. The monster is dead long before Glaucus speaks, but the relationships surrounding its defeat still decide where a spear is pointed. [1][3]
The animal parts remain recognizable in the Greek descriptions. In Butler’s translation of Homer, the creature has a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. Hesiod explicitly gives her three heads, while the Library calls the rear a dragon’s tail and places the fiery goat head between the other parts. The goat’s raised head carries the fire above the lion’s body. [1][2][3]
Small carved gems vary that anatomy. The Getty checklist describes one with a goat-headed wing and another combining human and goat heads with a lioness’s body. These are particular surviving designs, rather than a single fixed silhouette. [5]
The Library’s Chimera threatens livelihoods before she faces a hero. Cattle are harried and the country laid waste. Iobates, the Lycian king, expects a creature too strong for several people to kill one man without difficulty. Bellerophon’s survival therefore answers two dangers at once: the visible force ruining the land and the hidden purpose of the ruler who sent him toward it. [3]
Peirene belongs to Corinth’s remembered distinction in Pindar’s ode. The spring is a place of repeated effort before it becomes a place associated with success. The poet praises the city for inventions, including ways of guiding horses, before reaching the divine bridle. An object small enough to lie beside a sleeping man brings the airborne animal within reach. The approach to the Chimera begins with learning how to ride. [4]
The Etruscan bronze found at Arezzo, dated by the Getty to about 400 BCE, bears a dedication to Tinia on its foreleg. The checklist interprets it as part of a group with Bellerophon and Pegasus. Its present appearance also includes later work: Francesco Carradori restored the tail in 1785. An earlier engraving by Theodore Verkruys records the statue before that intervention. [5]
Pindar’s ode already makes the old victory serve a later public occasion. It celebrates Xenophon of Corinth, winner of the footrace and pentathlon at Olympia. Praise moves between the athlete’s family, the city’s inventions and Bellerophon’s achievement. Yet the closing prayer asks Zeus to let the winners pass safely through life and enjoy their honors. Victory has been won; continued good fortune still has to be sought. [4]
The restored tail and the proposed missing figures answer different questions about the Arezzo bronze. The recorded repair concerns its surviving form; the group interpretation concerns companions no longer present beside it. Neither supplies a complete original encounter by itself. [5]
The written accounts leave another conspicuous space. Pindar refuses to tell Bellerophon’s end; the Iliad shows him grieving without explaining why the gods have turned against him. Defeating the Chimera settles a particular ordeal, but cannot secure the rest of his life. The rider who rose above the fire is finally remembered walking alone, keeping away from the paths of other people. [4][1]
The Library supplies the complete accusation, aerial attack and royal reversal. Homer’s sixth Iliad book follows Bellerophon’s family history into Glaucus and Diomedes’ exchange. Hesiod describes the body in a monster genealogy. Pindar’s thirteenth Olympian ode gives the dream and bridle within praise of Corinth. The Getty checklist identifies the discussed objects and restoration. [3][1][2][4][5]
Homer · MIT Internet Classics Archive · English translation of Greek · Translated by Samuel Butler
Book VI, Diomedes and Glaucus, approximately lines 119–236: challenge, Bellerophon ancestry and armor exchange.
Checked 2026-10-11
Hesiod · Theoi Classical Texts Library · English translation of Greek · Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Lines 295–332
Checked 2026-10-11
Pseudo-Apollodorus · Theoi Classical Texts Library · English translation of Greek · Translated by James George Frazer
II.3.1–2
Checked 2026-10-11
Pindar · Wikisource · English translation of Greek · Translated by F. A. Paley
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The ode draws back before telling his final fate. Pegasus, it says, finds a home in the stalls of Zeus on Olympus. The poet then returns to the athletic family he is praising. Horse and rider do not receive a shared ending: the animal’s future is given, while its master’s is deliberately left unspoken. [4]
Olympian 13, especially conventional verses 63–92; displayed ode and accompanying introduction
Checked 2026-10-11
J. Paul Getty Museum · J. Paul Getty Museum · 2009 · English
PDF pp. 1–2 and 8; catalogue 1 (Arezzo), 5 (81.AN.76.120), 7 (81.AN.76.183), and 28 (Verkruys engraving; 1785 tail restoration).
Checked 2026-10-11