Using the Monsters of Classical Myth

Although many monstrous beings appeared in ancient Near Eastern art and literature, it was in ancient Greek culture that monsters reached a notable apogee, with pictorial and literary depictions of monsters flourishing to a degree not previously seen. For the Archaic and Classical Greeks (ca. 700–323 BCE), monsters embodied many fears: the potential of chaos to overwhelm order, of irrationality to overcome reason, of the female to overpower the male, of nature to destroy culture (Felton 2012). Monsters, in short, often arise from the desire to domesticate and thereby to disempower what a society finds threatening (Cohen 1996). The Greek imagination thus created a large number of savage, uncivilized creatures— such as the chaos monster Typhoeus and the anthropophagus Cyclops (Aguirre and Buxton 2020)—inevitably conquered by heroes who represented the civilizing forces of rational Greek society. More ubiquitous were female monstrosities notable for their dangerous, warped sexual features (Miller 2012), such as Medusa (with her headful of phallic snakes), Scylla (an early vagina dentata variant), and the Harpies (with their shrieks, talons, and reeking bellies). To borrow Lévi-Strauss’s overused but still relevant phrase (1962), such creatures are “good to think with” in the classroom, providing an entry for discussion about the principles that defined ancient Greek society (order, reason, civilization, patriarchy). Moreover, the edges of the known world—such as Africa and India—were believed to be populated by monstrous peoples such as headless men and Cynocephaloi (‘dog-headed’ men). Although the Greeks described such populations as wonders to marvel at rather than as monsters to dread, their beliefs in such physiologically unlikely beings reflected an ethnocentric tendency to see outsiders as ‘less than’: the farther from Greece, the less recognizably human. These ethnographic considerations, too, provide useful prompts for classroom discussions about cultural relativism and xenophobic attitudes.