The Oxford handbook of monsters in classical myth

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

This titanic volume is a treasure trove of information about monsters of almost every variety found in Greek and Roman mythology. It comprises forty chapters organized into four thematic sections, which provide case studies of the history and representation of monstrous creatures in classical antiquity, introductions to theoretical approaches to their interpretation in modern scholarship, and explorations of their reception history in world literature. In her introduction, Debbie Felton nods to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s famous 1996 article “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” which heralded a new industry of the study of medieval monsters as cultural constructs, but few of her authors return to it as a touchstone for their interpretation of fantastic beasts in the ancient world.[1] In a chapter on the Cyclopes, which distills the essence of their excellent monograph on these famous one-eyed giants, Mercedes Aguirre and Richard Buxton provide a helpful summary of the categories of monstrosity applied by ancient authors, including anatomical anomalies like cross-species hybridity, an excess or deficiency of physical features, and colossal size, as well as transgressive behavior, especially in matters of diet.[2] While there is occasional repetition among the contributions, as several authors felt the need to provide definitions of monstrosity or the etymology of the word monstrum, Felton has done an impressive job of curating the language of her contributors with the result that most of these essays are accessible to non-specialists, including undergraduates. This is no small task for the editor of a volume this large.

The scope of the book is breathtaking. The first and longest section (“Part 1: Monsters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East”) is an encyclopedic bestiary comprising eighteen essays on monsters found in a diverse range of textual and visual sources from classical antiquity. Some of the contributors have organized their inquiries around specific kinds of texts, like Hesiod’s Theogony and other creation narratives (§ 1) or Ovid’s Metamorphoses (§ 18). Others have approached the topic by way of geographical locations, treating monsters indigenous to the ancient Near East (§ 2) and Egypt (§ 3). Most of the essays, however, examine the origins, representations, and reception histories of specific, named mythic creatures, including Typhoeus (§ 4), Medusa (§ 8), the Chimaera (§ 9), Cerberus (§ 10), the Lernaean Hydra (§ 11), the Cyclopes (§ 12), Scylla and Charybdis (§ 13), the Sphinx (§ 15), and the Minotaur (§ 16) or generic types of monsters, like giants (§ 5), dragons (§ 6), sea monsters and sea serpents (§ 7), sirens and harpies (§ 14), and centaurs (§ 17). The coverage is impressive, but I was slightly surprised to find that griffins did not receive their own entry, although they make cameo appearances throughout the volume.

A much shorter section (“Part 2: Monsters in Ancient Folklore and Ethnography”) comprises four chapters on different kinds of preternatural creatures that fit uneasily into the category of “monster,” including daimones like the lamia, mormo, empousa, and gello (§ 19, which collects them under the rubric “Ancient Bogeys”); the restless spirits of those who have died by violence, have been left unburied, or who died prematurely (§ 20); animals of extraordinary size (§ 21); and monstrous peoples (§ 22), that is, descriptions of anyone “who deviated from Western cultural norms” (p. 278). This latter chapter focuses on the races of Africa and India described in Pliny’s Natural History, who attributed anomalies of physical shape and size, diet, speech, habitation, clothing, sexual practices, and religion to alien climates and geography.

The eight chapters in Part 3 (Interpreting the Monsters) fall into two distinct camps. The first three chapters deal with the depiction of monsters in ancient visual media, including monumental art (§ 23), vase painting (§ 24), and Greek art more generally (§ 25), where they played many roles “as part of the development of Greek poleis and the confrontation with the unknown peripheries of the world, as a visualization of enemies, or as an externalization of human misbehaviour” (p. 341). The next five chapters highlight different approaches to interpreting monsters, starting with the ancient period. In an exemplary contribution, Greta Hawkes reminds us that many ancient thinkers did not believe in the existence of mythological creatures at all (§ 26). These so-called “rationalists” argued “against monstrosity as a fact of life” (p. 346) by cataloguing and comparing accounts of fantastic creatures with known species and by recognizing and explaining the ways in which story-tellers exaggerated the truth.  The final four chapters of the section provide tool-boxes for scholars interested in exploring the interpretation of ancient monsters through the lenses of modern theoretical approaches, including feminist theory (§ 27), cognitive theory (§ 28), psychoanalytical thought (§ 29), and disability studies (§ 30). The latter seems especially applicable, as it casts light on the process by which “monstering relies on ableism to construct the non-normative body as monstrous” (p. 399).

The final section of the book (Part 4: The Reception of Classical Monsters) focuses primarily on literary reception and presents a rich catalogue of interpretations of monsters from Greek and Roman antiquity in world literature. Five chapters focus on premodern reception. Adorned with beautiful color reproductions of illuminated manuscript folios from sixteenth-century copies of the Shāhnāmeh, Peter Adrian Behravesh’s survey of monstrous creatures in the Persian mythological tradition demonstrates admirably that ancient Mediterranean cultures did not have a monopoly on fantastic beasts (§ 31). Shifting the focus to the far north, Plinian monsters mediated by the writings of Augustine and Isidore of Seville had significant purchase in the Old Norse encyclopedic literature produced in late medieval Iceland (§ 32). Likewise, the European Middle Ages in general owed a huge debt to the classical tradition as a source for visual and textual representations of centaurs, sirens, minotaurs, and cenocephali (§ 33), as did artists during the Italian Renaissance (§ 34). In the early modern Atlantic world, European explorers populated new territories in Latin America with monstrous races familiar from Greek and Roman antiquity, including cannibals, giants, Amazons, lycanthropes, and sirens (§ 35).

The final tranche of five chapters treats the reception of classical monsters in the modern period. The Homeric Cyclops Polyphemus had an enduring legacy as a textual and visual motif in postcolonial literature and art, including Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), Romare Bearden’s painting The Cyclops (1977), and Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Poseidon Hears His Baby Boy Crying” (2017). Each of these works encouraged the reader and viewer to rethink “monster” as a category (§ 36). As Justine McConnell states, “[b]reaking away from binary oppositions, postcolonial engagements do not simply invert roles; instead, in their rejection of simple oppositions, they present a more complex picture in which there are no ontological monsters” (p. 523). Classical monsters have occupied many new literary habitats in the twentieth century, from children’s and young adult literature (§ 37) to fantasy and science fiction (§ 38) as well as “fan fiction” generated online by aficionados of ancient literature, whose stories offer creative inversions of classical norms, including sympathetic or erotic stories about monsters like the Minotaur or the Medusa (§ 39). As a result, “fanfic’s openness to sexually explicit content allows classical monsters to join contemporary expressions of LGBT+ identity in a much more active away than they do in mainstream media” (p. 568). Debbie Felton’s article charting the application of the names of classical monsters in modern science literature, especially natural and applied sciences like biology and computer science, concludes the volume (§ 40).

The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classic Myth is an exceptional resource for those interested in ancient monsters and their reception history in visual and literary media, both premodern and modern. Felton has done an extraordinary job of shepherding more than three dozen authors working across diverse fields and disciplines to produce a reference work that is expansive in scope and rich in insight. Most importantly, the accessibility of the volume’s contents assures that these essays will appeal not only to scholars, but also to their students, whose interest in ancient monsters, first encountered through popular culture, remains a significant recruitment tool for classical studies in North America.

Authors and titles

Introduction: Monster Theory and Classical Myth

Part I: Monsters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

1. Monsters in Creation Narratives of Ancient Greece and Rome (Fiona Mitchell)
2. Monsters in Ancient Near Eastern Myth and Religion (Madadh Richey)
3. Spawned from the Nile: Egyptian Monsters in Graeco-Roman Culture (Leanna Boychenko)
4. Typhoeus, Agent of Disorder (William Brockliss)
5. The Giants: Children of Gaea (Christina A. Salowey)
6. Dragons (Daniel Ogden)
7. The ‘Monster-Harbouring Sea’: Sea Monsters and Sea Serpents in Ancient Myth (Dominic Ingemark and Camilla Asplund Ingemark)
8. Art Horror: Medusa and Her Sister Gorgons (Dunstan Lowe)
9. The Chimaera (R. Scott Smith)
10. Cerberus, Hound of Hades (Derrek Joyce)
11. Down the Sinkhole: The Lernaean Hydra (Susan Deacy)
12. Cyclopes (Mercedes Aguirre and Richard Buxton)
13. Scylla and Charybdis (Marianne Govers Hopman)
14. Sirens and Harpies: The Enchanting and Repulsive Avian Monsters of Classical Antiquity (Ryan Denson)
15. The Sphinx (Carolina López-Ruiz)
16. The Minotaur (Stephen M. Trzaskoma)
17. Human-Animal Hybrids (Emma Aston)
18. Monstrous Metamorphoses: Ovid and the Art of Making and Unmaking Monsters (Genevieve Liveley)

Part II: Monsters in Ancient Folklore and Ethnography

19. Ancient Bogeys: Lamia, Mormo, Empousa, Gello, and Others (Janek Kucharski)
20. Ghosts: The Restless and Unpleasant Dead (Julia Doroszewska)
21. The Monstrous Animals and Animal Monsters of Ancient Greece (Kenneth F. Kitchell)
22. Reading Monstrous Peoples in Ancient Greece and Rome (John B. Friedman)

Part III: Interpreting the Monsters

23. Monumental Monsters (Simon Oswald)
24. Cryptids in Greek Art (Andrea Murace)
25. Image and Monster in Ancient Greek Art (Lorenz Winkler-Horaček)
26. Rationalizing Mythic Monsters in Antiquity (Greta Hawes)
27. Beyond ‘Othering’: Classical Monstrosity and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (Vanda Zajko)
28. Gods and Monsters: Cognitive Approaches to the Monstrous (Jennifer Larson)
29. Monsters of the Inner World: Psychoanalytic Approaches (Eirini Apanomeritaki)
30. Monsters and Disability: The Violence of Interpreting Bodies in Aristotle and Homer (Hannah Silverblank and Marchella Ward)

Part IV: The Reception of Classical Monsters

31. Pearls from a Dark Cloud: Monsters in Persian Myth (Peter Adrian Behravesh)
32. Plinian Monsters in Old Norse Encyclopaedic Literature (Arngrímur Vídalín)
33. Classical Monsters in Medieval Literature and Art (Antonella Sciancalepore)
34. The Revival of Classical Monsters in the Italian Renaissance (Luba Freedman)
35. Classical Monsters in Latin American Cultures (Persephone Braham)
36. Recasting Monsters in Postcolonial Art and Literature (Justine McConnell)
37. Classical Monsters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Katarzyna Marciniak)
38. Ancient Monsters in Modern Speculative Fiction (Benjamin Eldon Stevens and others)
39. Classical Monsters in Modern Popular Culture: A Case Study in Fan Fiction (Liz Gloyn)
40. Ancient Monsters in Modern Science (Debbie Felton)

Notes

[1] J. J. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. J. J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3-25.

[2] Mercedes Aguirre and Richard Buxton, Cyclops: The Myth and its Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), reviewed by me in BMCR 2021.07.10.