The Chimera was a creature that should not have been possible — three different beasts fused into one fire-breathing impossibility: a lion in front, a goat rising from its back, and a serpent for a tail. So unnatural was it that its very name became the word, in many languages, for a wild fantasy or an impossible hybrid dream.
The Impossible Beast
A child of Typhon and Echidna, the Chimera terrorised the land of Lycia in Asia Minor. Homer describes it as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.” Three predators in one body, breathing fire — it was a walking violation of the natural order, and a sign of doom wherever it appeared.
The Hero on the Winged Horse
It fell to the hero Bellerophon to destroy it — and he could only do so with the help of the winged horse Pegasus. Unable to approach the fire-breathing beast on foot, Bellerophon flew above it on Pegasus, raining down arrows from the air. To finish it, he fixed a lump of lead to the tip of his spear and thrust it into the Chimera's flaming mouth; the creature's own fiery breath melted the lead, which poured down its throat and killed it. Heroism by altitude and ingenuity, against a foe that could not be fought head-on.
The Word for the Impossible
The Chimera endures less as a story than as an idea. A “chimera” is now anything monstrously hybrid or impossibly fanciful — in biology, an organism of mixed genetic tissue; in dreams, a hope too strange to come true. The Greeks gave the world its enduring symbol for the unnatural fusion of things that were never meant to be one.
Whenever something is too strangely combined to be real, we still call it by her name.