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In Greek mythology, the Chimera (Greek Χίμαιρα (Chímaira); Latin Chimaera) is a monstrous creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, which was made of the parts of multiple animals. Chimera was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna and sister of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra.

Contents 1 Description 2 The Chimera motif 3 Classical sources 4 Theory about origin 5 In Mathematics 6 Notes 7 See also 8 References

Homer's brief description in the Iliad^[1] is the earliest literary reference: "a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle,^[2] and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire".^[3] Hesiod's Theogony follows the Homeric description: he makes the Chimera the issue of Echidna: "She was the mother of Chimaera who breathed raging fire, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth a fearful blast of blazing fire. Although some myths tell us that it was the serphant or either the third head which in some descriptions is a dragon would breath a most dreadful blaze of fire. Here did Pegasus and noble Bellerophon slay."^[4] The author of Bibliotheke concurs:^[5] descriptions agree that it breathed fire. The Chimera is generally considered to have been female (see the quotation from Hesiod above) despite the mane adorning its lion's head. Sighting the chimera^{[citation needed]} was an omen of storms, shipwrecks, and natural disasters (particularly volcanoes).

While there are different genealogies, in one version it mated with its brother Orthrus and mothered the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion.

The Chimera was finally defeated by Bellerophon, with the help of Pegasus, at the command of King Iobates of Lycia. Since Pegasus could fly, Bellerophon shot the Chimera from the air, safe from her heads and breath.^[6] A scholiast to Homer adds that he finished her off by equipping his spear with a lump of lead that melted when exposed to Chimera's fiery breath and consequently killed her, an image drawn from metalworking.^[7]

The Chimera was placed in foreign Lycia,^[8] but its representations in the arts was wholly Greek.^[9] An autonomous tradition, one that did not rely on the written word, was represented in the visual repertory of the Greek vase-painters. The Chimera first appears at an early stage in the proto-Corinthian pottery-painters' repertory, providing some of the earliest identifiable mythological scenes that can be recognized in Greek art. The Corinthian type is fixed, after some early hesitation, in the 670s BCE; the variations in the pictorial representations suggest to Marilyn Low Schmitt^[10]a multiple origin. The fascination with the monstrous devolved by the end of the seventh century into a decorative Chimera-motif in Corinth,^[11] while the motif of Bellerophon on Pegasus took on a separate existence alone. A separate Attic tradition, where the goats breathe fire and the animal's rear is serpent-like, begins with such confidence that Marilyn Low Schmitt is convinced there must be unrecognized earlier local prototypes. Two vase-painters employed the motif so consistently they are given the pseudonyms the Bellerophon Painter and the Chimaera Painter.

In Etruscan civilization, the Chimera appears in the "Orientalizing" period that precedes Etruscan Archaic art; that is to say, very early indeed. The Chimera appears in Etruscan wall-paintings of the fourth century BCE.

Robert Graves suggests^[12] that "the Chimaera was, apparently, a calendar-symbol of the tripartite year, of which the seasonal emblems were lion, goat and serpent."

In Medieval art, though the chimera of Antiquity was forgotten, chimerical figures appear as embodiments of the deceptive, even Satanic forces of raw nature. Provided with a human face and a scaly tail, as in Dante's vision of Geryon in Inferno xvii.7-17, 25-27, hybrid monsters, actually more akin to the Manticore of Pliny's Natural History (viii.90), provided iconic representations of hypocrisy and fraud well into the seventeenth century, through an emblemmatic representation in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia.^[13]

In more recent times, the term "chimera" has been used to describe real-life entities created as amalgams of previously separate entities in fields such as botany (see chimera (plant)), genetics (see chimera (genetics)), and molecular biology (see chimera (protein)). Chimeras also surface in the Harry Potter books.

The myths of the Chimera can be found in Apollodorous' Library (book 1), Homer's Iliad (book 6); Hyginus Fabulae 57; Ovid's Metamorphoses (book VI 339; IX 648) and Hesiod's Theogony 319ff.

Virgil, in the Aeneid (book 5) employs Chimaera for the name of Gyas' gigantic ship in the ship-race, with possible allegorical significance in contemporary Roman politics.^[14]

See main article: Chimaera (geography)

"Even in antiquity the Chimaera was regarded as a symbol of the volcanic character of the Lycian soil," Harry Thurston Peck noted. (Peck 1898). Ctesias (as cited by Pliny the Elder and quoted by Photius) identified the Chimaera with an area of permanent gas vents which can still be found today by hikers on the Lycian Way in southwest Turkey. Called in Turkish Yanartaş (flaming rock), it consists of some two dozen vents in the ground, grouped in two patches on the hillside above the Temple of Hephaestus about 3 km north of Çıralı, near ancient Olympos, in Lycia. The vents emit burning methane thought to be of metamorphic origin, which in ancient times sailors could navigate by, and which today the custodian uses to brew tea. (Strabo held the Chimaera to be a ravine on a different mountain in Lycia.) [1]

Canadian mathematician George Elliott likens the classification of C*-algebras to the Chimera [2]. His famous lecture spoke of the serpent tail of the Chimera passing through to the lion head of the Chimera as a metaphor for inner automorphisms of C*-algebras passing through homomorphisms of C*-algebras.

• Azhi Dahaka, a three-headed Persian dragon associated with deceit and mendacity.
• Nue, a creature from Japanese folklore that is similar in appearance to the Chimera.
• Manticore, another mythological beast that had the head of either a man or a lion (or a mix of the two), the body of a lion and usually the tail of a dragon/snake or a scorpion.
• Qilin, a Chinese mythical creature, thought to bring good luck
• Yali, a Hindu mythological beast.

• Graves, Robert, (1955) 1960. The Greek Myths (Baltimore: Penguin), section 75.b, pp 252-56
• Kerenyi, Karl, 1959. The Heroes of the Greeks. (London and New York:Thames and Hudson)
• Peck, Harry Thurston, 1898. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities: "Chimaera" (On-line text)