There were some small variations-for example, the Chimera could be represented with or without a mane, with the forelegs of a goat (in addition to a goat’s head), or even without any serpent tail. In the visual arts, the Chimera was commonly represented with the head of a lion in front, the head of a goat in the middle, and a serpent tail. The Chimera also breathed fire, though Hesiod and later writers specified that it was only the goat’s head (the middle one) that held this power. ![]() The earliest description of the creature comes from Homer’s Iliad, where it is said that the Chimera was “in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire.” 4 Hesiod gives the same description, 5 as do all major subsequent literary sources. The Chimera was a hybrid monster, comprising parts of a lion, a goat, and a snake. 2 In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Chimera came to live at the gates of the Underworld (in the company of many other mythical monsters) after it was defeated by Bellerophon. The geographer Strabo traced the Chimera to an even more specific location: Mount Cragus on the coast of Lycia. The Chimera was said to have lived in the mountains of Lycia, an ancient kingdom on the southwest coast of modern Turkey. The name “Chimera” may also be related to the Greek cheimōn/ cheima and the Indo-European ǵʰ-ei-m-, meaning “winter.” 1 #Pronunciation The Chimera’s name comes from the Greek word chimaira, meaning “one-year-old animal” or, more specifically, “she-goat.” It is related to other Indo-European words for baby livestock, such as the Old Norse gymbr (“young sheep”). Riding the winged horse Pegasus, Bellerophon tracked down the Chimera, fought it, and killed it. For years, the Chimera terrorized the inhabitants of the foothills where it had made its home-a reign that only ended with the arrival of the hero Bellerophon, a son of Poseidon. Many sources claimed that it also breathed fire. The Chimera, one of the terrifying offspring of Typhoeus and Echidna, was a hybrid monster made up of the body parts of a lion, a goat, and a snake. select brush.According to most sources, the Chimera lived somewhere in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).
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