HERE BE MONSTERS
A key to the map by Anika Campbell
Compiled and written by Greta Hawes
As MANTO seeks to show, ancient storytellers had few difficulties with the idea that their myths had taken place all around them.
This meant that the storyworld of myth was the distant past of the Mediterranean, and that ordinary, everyday landscapes once held monsters.
It also meant that strange natural phenomena could be explained through those ancient stories: volcanoes rumbled where giants were buried alive; dangerous straits recalled Scylla and Charybdis; trees dripping resin seemed to have weeping women trapped within them. Quite often these kinds of stories were associated with new places the Greeks encountered as they travelled further afield. This is the push-and-pull of thinking about places as being alive with myth. Myths give meaning to the landscape, and the landscape casts the stories in new lights.
Anika’s map offers a geography of ancient Greek monsters. Here is some background to why each was located where it was.
Phaethon persuaded his father, Helios, to let him drive the chariot of the sun across the sky. He careened wildly and crashed. Phaethon’s sisters were distraught at the loss; they were transformed into trees on the banks of river Eridanos, still bitterly mourning for their brother. When the Greeks became familiar with amber and learned that it came from resin that oozed from trees in the Baltic, they associated it with the story of Phaethon’s sisters.
Griffins are creatures with the body of a lion, head and wings of an eagle. They are often shown fighting against the Amazons, or the Arimaspians, a shadowy group of one-eyed horsemen in the far north-east.
The two harpies were winged women; their name is related to the Greek word for ‘snatch’. The most famous story about them involves their persecution of the blind prophet Phineus. Every day they would swoop down and carry off his food. When the Argonauts passed by they agreed to help. Two of them, also winged, chased them all over the world, including to Scythia, and they never returned.
Prometheus and the Eagle
Prometheus was one of the early gods. He gave great gifts to humans — like fire — and was punished for this by Zeus. Zeus chained him to a cliff-face in the Caucasus and every day sent an eagle to eat his liver. Each night his liver regrew and the torture began again. Finally, Heracles came across Prometheus, killed the eagle, and freed him.
The Amazons were the female warriors of antiquity. Their kingdom was usually placed around the Black Sea. They were attacked there by Heracles in one of his labours. They were said to have established the impressive sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesos and to have funded other cities up and down the coast of Asia Minor. They came as allies of Priam to defend Troy, and attacked Athens to punish Theseus.
The Sirens sang such beautiful songs that passing sailors lost all desire to continue their voyages. They were often depicted as women with the legs or wings of birds. When Homer describes Odysseus taking Circe’s advice and sailing past them tied to his mast, he locates them in a featureless ‘beyond’. But later Greek storytellers located them on the site of the Greek city of Neapolis (modern Naples) and said that one of them was buried in a tomb on the coast.
The Laistygonians were giants led by their king, Antiphates. They killed many of Odysseus’ men and destroyed most of his ships. Homer places them in the featureless ‘beyond’, but later storytellers located them in the known world. One tradition placed them at Latium, near Rome.