The Chimera's parentage carries some ambiguity in the ancient texts. Both Apollodorus and Hyginus identify Echidna and Typhon as the Chimera's parents, while Hesiod's account leaves the mother's identity grammatically unclear.

By the standard mythological genealogy the Chimera was thus a sibling of other monsters of the brood, including the Lernaean Hydra, Orthrus, and Cerberus. Hesiod also names the Sphinx and the Nemean lion as offspring of Orthrus by an ambiguous mother who may be read as the Chimera herself; on that reading the Chimera, consort to Orthrus, produced the Nemean lion and the Sphinx.

Homer described the creature as "of divine stock, not of men, 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."

Hesiod and Apollodorus gave similar accounts, presenting a three-headed creature with a lion at the front, a fire-breathing goat in the middle, and a serpent at the rear.

In a lesser-known tale, the Cumaean Sibyl encountered the Chimera in a vision and interpreted it as an omen. She advised her followers to establish harmony within their community so as to forestall the chaos and destruction the monster might otherwise bring.

According to Homer the Chimera was "a bane to many men." The hero Bellerophon was ordered by Lycia's king to slay the creature, the king hoping the monster would kill him instead; trusting in divine signs, Bellerophon succeeded. Hesiod notes that Pegasus and Bellerophon together slew her.

Apollodorus provides further detail: King Iobates set the task because the Chimera had ravaged the country and was killing the cattle. Bellerophon mounted the winged horse Pegasus, born from Medusa, and "soaring on high shot down the Chimera from the height."

Although Homer situated the Chimera in foreign Lycia, its artistic representation was thoroughly Greek. The creature first appeared in proto-Corinthian pottery, providing some of the earliest identifiable mythological scenes in Greek art; after early variations the Corinthian type was fixed around 670 BC.

A separate Attic tradition then emerged in which the goat breathes fire and the rear is serpentine. Two vase painters used the motif so consistently that they were given the conventional names the Bellerophon Painter and the Chimaera Painter.

Fire-breathing lionesses appear in Ancient Egyptian iconography, predating the Greek representations by roughly three millennia; the war goddesses Sekhmet and Bast exemplify this tradition. In Etruscan civilization the Chimera appears in wall paintings of the fourth century BC.

The Indus Valley Civilisation depicts chimeras on seals combining animals of the Indian subcontinent, known as the Harappan Chimera. Medieval art largely forgot the classical Chimera, though chimerical figures were used to embody deceptive and satanic natural forces, notably in Dante's vision of Geryon.

Pliny the Elder, citing Ctesias as quoted by Photius, identified the Chimera with the permanent gas vents of Lycia in modern-day Turkey. Called Yanartaş ("flaming rock") in Turkish, this area holds roughly two dozen vents grouped in two patches on a hillside above the Temple of Hephaestus, about three kilometres north of Çıralı near ancient Olympos. The vents emit burning methane of metamorphic origin and served as ancient navigation landmarks.

A Neo-Hittite Chimera from Carchemish, dated to 850–750 BC and now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, differs from the Greek version in featuring a winged lioness body with a human head rising from its shoulders; it is thought by some to be a basis for the later Greek legend.

Chimera myths appear in Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca, Homer's Iliad, Hyginus's Fabulae (57 and 151), Ovid's Metamorphoses (book VI 339; IX 648), and Hesiod's Theogony (319ff).

Virgil also used "Chimaera" as the name of a gigantic ship in the Aeneid (book 5), possibly with allegorical significance.