Fantastic Beasts in Antiquity

Not satisfied with what nature offered, human beings wanted to go beyond
reality and invented mysterious and intriguing creatures populating their
world. During Antiquity, every culture had its own strange creatures, that
mixed the forms of one or more animal, plant and human species in an infinite
number of more-or-less fanciful combinations. Griffins, sphinxes, mermaids,
centaurs, satyrs, pygmies, werewolves, winged monsters and unspeakable
hybrids, fantastic beasts abound in the imagination of many populations
throughout Antiquity. Most of them continue to live, sometimes transformed,
through fairy tales, literature, movies and videogames.
Faced with the abundance and variety of the ancient fantastic bestiary, the
questions that come to mind are: Where do fantastic beasts come from? How do
they appear in different cultures? What is their history, how did they survive
until now? And above all, what are fantastic beasts? This book will explore
these questions through the lens of archaeology, art history, philology and
philosophy. The result is a hybrid book, precisely like the fantastic animals
that constitute its object, a book which offers different approaches of
analysis while being aware that our means are often vain to capture these
elusive figures, which ultimately are more like us than they seem. Man, like
Oedipus, will often prove to be more monstrous than the Sphinx...