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of his job. 9

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Monsters Are Nature’s Playthings
     
Creations at which to marvel
.
PLINY THE ELDER
    I N ALEXANDER’S ADMITTEDLY SEXIST PEP TALK to his troops, we have an expression of a perennial attitude toward exotic creatures, peoples, and lands. Imperialist campaigns like Alexander’s are not for traipsing through strange lands to collect aesthetic oddities and make friends with strangers. They are for coming to subdue, exploit, and civilize the savage world.
     
    Monsters seem to represent the most extreme personified point of unfamiliarity; they push our sense of abnormality beyond the usual anthropological xenophobia. People with customs different from ours are weird, but perhaps different skin colors are weirder still, and people with a dog’s head and headless people with a mouth in their chest, well… Animals are similarly conceptualized on a continuum of strangeness: first, nonnative species, then familiar beasts with unfamiliar sizes or modified body parts, then hybrids of surprising combination, and finally, at the furthest margins, shape-shifters and indescribable creatures.
    In Homer’s
Odyssey
, Odysseus and twelve of his men became trapped in a cave with a giant Cyclops named Polyphemus. “He was a horrid creature,” Odysseus informs us, “not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain.” 1 Odysseus at first tries to do some fast talking, but the Cyclops is not moved to mercy and breaks off discussion abruptly. Odysseus reports, “With a sudden clutch he gripped up two of my menat once and dashed them down upon the ground as though they had been puppies. Their brains were splashed upon the ground, and the earth was wet with their blood. Then he tore them limb from limb and dined upon them. He gobbled them up like a lion in the wilderness, flesh, bones, marrow, and entrails, without leaving anything uneaten. As for us, we wept and lifted up our hands to heaven on seeing such a horrid sight, for we did not know what else to do.” 2
    Monsters and fabulous beasts like the Cyclopes generally originate in the myths and legends of poetry and allegory. 3 Homer and Hesiod are probably the earliest fountains of Western monster archetypes (e.g., chimeras, Cerberus, Hydra, Minotaur). But these literary creatures evolve and new species are added to the list in the popular tales of travelers. As explorers, soldiers, and traders penetrated strange lands, they absorbed local legends and encountered unfamiliar creatures, bringing all this back to urban Greece and Rome. Additionally, around the time of Herodotus, travel stories and myths were taken up by emerging writers of
natural history
, a budding science of description. These three literatures of monsters and beasts—poetry, travel tales, and natural history—continued to feed each other all the way down to the seventeenth century.
GRIFFINS
     
    The griffins are an interesting case study. They are common characters in Greek literature; Aeschylus refers to them in his tragedy
Prometheus Bound
(460 BCE ) as “sharp beaked.” In later texts, such as Pliny’s
Natural History
(77 CE ), the gryps or griffins are bigger and winged. In the fourteenth century, in
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
, Mandeville expands the legend further by claiming that “one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than a hundred eagles such as we have amongst us.” 4 This monstrous griffin helps us understand how an unexplainable observation can snowball into an elaborate cultural narrative, a narrative that grows so huge as to conceal its original source altogether.
    Most scholars since the seventeenth century have uniformly considered the ancient griffins to be purely fanciful combinations of lion and eagle bodies, a product of the overactive Greek imagination. But one researcher, Adrienne Mayor, has