Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Chimera.
The gallery
Chimera of Arezzo
Unknown (Etruscan), c. 400 BC
This Etruscan bronze, unearthed at Arezzo in 1553 and now in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence, is the most celebrated surviving image of the Chimera and a masterpiece of Etruscan metalwork. It renders the monster exactly as the ancient poets describe her: the powerful body and head of a lion in front, a second head of a goat rising from the spine in the middle, and a serpent for a tail. The beast is shown wounded and snarling, ribs taut and head thrown back, frozen in the moment of Bellerophon's attack. An inscription on the right foreleg dedicates the figure to the god Tinia, the Etruscan Zeus.
The Chimera on a red-figure Apulian plate
The Lampas Group, c. 350–340 BC
On this red-figure Apulian dish in the Louvre (inv. K 362), a South Italian painter of the Lampas Group gives the Chimera her full Hesiodic three-form: a striding lion whose back sprouts a goat's head and whose tail terminates in a rearing serpent. The composition isolates the monster against the curve of the plate, emphasizing the uncanny fusion of three creatures into a single body that the Iliad calls 'of divine stock, not of men.' The vessel, from the Campana Collection acquired in 1861, belongs to the rich Apulian tradition of mythological pottery that flourished in Magna Graecia in the fourth century BC.
Bellerophon killing the Chimaera (pebble mosaic from Rhodes)
Unknown (Hellenistic Greek), c. 300–270 BC
This Hellenistic pebble mosaic, now in the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, depicts the canonical kill: Bellerophon, mounted on the winged horse Pegasus, swoops down upon the Chimera. The hero drives his spear at the composite monster — lion before, goat at the center, serpent behind — exactly the aerial assault described by Apollodorus, in which Bellerophon 'soaring on high shot down the Chimera from the height.' Built from naturally colored river pebbles, the work is an early and refined example of Greek floor mosaic, capturing the dynamic diagonal of the airborne attack.
Bellerophon and Pegasus fighting the Chimaera (mosaic from Nîmes)
Unknown (Gallo-Roman), 2nd–3rd century AD
Discovered in 1950 on the boulevard Gambetta in Nîmes and now held at the Musée de la Romanité, this Gallo-Roman floor mosaic forms one panel of a larger Bellerophon cycle. It shows the hero astride Pegasus as the pair confront the fire-breathing Chimera, the winged horse and rider above, the hybrid beast lunging below. The subject was a favorite of Roman provincial patrons, who saw in Bellerophon's victory over the monster an emblem of order triumphing over chaos — a theme repeated across the empire from Roman Britain to North Africa during the second and third centuries AD.
In play
Chimera (genetics)
Biology borrowed the monster's name for an organism with two sets of DNA — lion, goat and serpent rewritten as a lab metaphor for mixed lineages.
Chimeric
English chimeric still means wildly improbable or pieced from mismatched parts — Bellerophon's foe as the everyday word for an impossible hybrid.