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Chapter One

Marauding, Menacing

Monsters

Of the various kinds of villains in Greek mythology, monsters are
the most obvious and the most alien. This is because the mon-
sters are the only bad characters in those stories that lack human
form. Unlike the mythological giants, which may be monstrous
but are essentially oversized people, the monsters are not at all
human. They typically display such distorted and scary traits as
multiple heads and reptilian skin and tails.
In the eyes of the classical Greeks, inherently beautiful hu-
manity lay at the center of the cosmos, and rightfully so. After all,
the gods, according to certain key myths, had fashioned people
in their own image—with one head, two arms, and two legs. In-
deed, that was seen as the natural order of things. Monsters ex-
isted outside that order, and when they invaded it, there was an
urgent need for a human hero to step in and set things right.
In Edith Hamilton’s words, that hero “fought the monsters and
freed the earth from the monstrous idea of the unhuman being
supreme over the human.” 6
Yet monsters appear in the Greek myths not merely to serve
the dramatic role of nonhuman opponents for the admirable hu-
man heroes. On a much deeper level, those creepy creatures
exist in the age-old tales because of the inherent human fear
of the unknown. Like people everywhere in ancient times, the
Greeks were, on the whole, superstitious and ignorant of how

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