Sea Monsters and Other Ancient Beasts

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A strange, grim, menacing creature lurks on one of the ancient Greek vases in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The scene painted on this vase—a Corinthian black-figure krater dating to between 560 and 540 B.C.—is known to art historians as the oldest illustration of the ancient legend of the Monster of Troy.

In Greek myth, a terrible monster suddenly appears on the Trojan coast, where it causes great destruction. To appease the beast, the king of Troy, Laomedon, sends his daughter Hesione as a sacrifice, but Hercules arrives just in time 046to slay the monster and rescue the princess.¹

The vase shows Hesione and Hercules fighting the monster. Hesione defends herself by hurling rocks from a pile at her feet. Two black rocks have hit the monster, one piercing its muzzle just below its left eye, and the other lodging itself in the creature’s jaws. Hercules shoots a volley of arrows, one of which has hit the monster’s chin.

When art historian Cornelius Vermeule introduced the new acquisition in the museum’s 1963 Bulletin, he stated that the vase depicted a sea monster, or ketos, “in his cave under the sea.”² But the confrontation is obviously not an underwater scene. Other art historians have noticed that there is something very odd about the creature. It looks like a Venus flytrap, one archaeologist told me. The image on the Hesione vase, rendered as a monstrous, misshapen head without a body, certainly fails to conform to the traditional iconography of a ketos (see the sidebar to this article). In Greek art, a typical ketos has a scaly, serpentine body, a crest along its back, and an upturned snout like that of a dog or boar (see photo of hydria from Caere).

In what is often considered the classic discussion of sea monsters in Greek art, Sir John Boardman singled out the poor artistic quality of the Monster of Troy’s “shapeless, unworthy head” gaping “balefully from a rocky cave.”³ The well-known Swiss vase scholar Karl Schefold has referred to the head as “a hideous white thing “artificially stuck to the cliff like a gargoyle.” He suggests that a naïve artist may have been aiming for a comic effect.⁴

But there’s a problem with explaining away the hideousness of our monster as simply badly done or comic. All of the other figures on the vase—Hercules, Hesione, geese, horses, leopards and griffins—are gracefully rendered and well composed. Clearly this is an artist of some skill. And if there is comedy here, it is not a comedy of the grotesque; rather, with the exception of the monster, the proportions of the figures on the vase are all quite proper.

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Here’s another possibility: What if the artist used a natural object to illustrate the ancient myth?

Our vase was painted in Corinth in the mid-sixth century B.C. Around 560 B.C. the Spartans had announced their discovery of the gigantic bones of the mythical hero Orestes. Numerous ancient narratives tell of encounters with bones of extraordinary shapes and sizes all around the Mediterranean. The remains came to light after earthquakes, storms and floods, or as people dug building foundations or plowed their fields.

Such strange, oversized bones matched no living creatures known to the ancient Greeks, so they were interpreted as relics of heroes and monsters from the mythical past. Ancient sources tell us that bone relics were displayed in temples, and throngs of curious people would travel good distances to view unusual bones emerging from the earth. The giant shoulder blade of the hero Pelops, for example, was kept in a shrine at Olympia; the huge bones of the Athenian hero Theseus were unearthed on Skyros and buried with honors in Athens’s Agora; the remains of the monster Geryon were claimed by several cities; the bones of legendary monsters called Neades were exhibited on the Aegean island of Samos; and colossal bones identified as the mythical heroes Ajax and 048Achilles caused a sensation when they suddenly appeared on the Trojan coast, wrenched from the earth by the sea.

Several of these practices have been confirmed by archaeological finds. For example, Heinrich Schliemann discovered a Miocene animal fossil preserved in one of the Bronze Age levels at Troy. Another large fossil bone was recently recovered by archaeologists in the Temple of Hera on Samos, an island just off the coast of Turkey whose rich Miocene bone beds were famous in antiquity. The fossil was dedicated to the temple in the seventh century B.C.

The ancient site of Troy, in fact, is often associated with stories of oversized bones. According to the Greek travel writer Pausanias, who lived in the mid-second century A.D., the city of Thebes sent a delegation to Troy to recover the giant bones of Hector. Pausanias also relates that a gigantic skeleton—the kneecap alone was 5 inches in diameter—appeared on the beach near Sigeum, on the Trojan coast; these bones were identified as those of Ajax, the great champion of the Greeks in the Iliad.⁵ The second-century A.D. writer Philostratus, too, tells of a giant skeleton that was visible in the collapsing cliffs near Sigeum for about 60 days, before it crashed into the sea—a spectacle, we are told, that many people viewed by boat. Philostratus also recounts that on Imroz, a nearby island, an immense skeleton was revealed when a chunk of land broke off and fell into the sea.⁶

These immense remains actually belonged to extinct creatures of the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (23,000,000–10,000 years ago). Long before humans appeared in the Mediterranean basin, mastodons, mammoths, rhinoceroses, chalicotheres, giant giraffes, ostriches and other immense beasts flourished and went extinct. The petrified bones of these creatures continually erode out of the coastal bluffs: As the sea beats against the shore, large fossil assemblages are revealed in the crumbling cliffs. Not surprisingly, rich deposits of such fossils occur where the Greco-Roman accounts located the mythical destruction of giants and monsters and recorded the discoveries of enormous bones.

Now the mysterious Monster of Troy comes into focus. Instead of a clumsily drawn sea monster peeking out of a cave, the image seems to be a reasonably accurate depiction of a monstrous skull poking out of a cliff.

To check this theory, I showed photographs of the vase painting to several paleontologists familiar with fossils of the Mediterranean and asked for their impressions of the monster. They were struck by the realistic anatomical details—details missed by classical art specialists whose expectations led them to look for traditional ketos iconography. The fossil experts noted the articulated jawbone, the hollow eye socket, the extended occiput and nuchal bumps (on the back of the skull) and the procumbent (forward-leaning) teeth. The broken-off premaxilla (the upper jaw and nasal structures) is another naturalistic detail. The scientists agreed that the large white head projecting out of the dark background appeared to be a realistic depiction of a bleached animal skull eroding out of an outcrop. Fossil skulls are often detached from the rest of the skeleton, which explains the monster’s missing body.

One possible candidate for the artist’s model might be the Samotherium, an extinct giraffe with a 2-foot-long skull that 049roamed the Mediterranean basin about 8 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. Samotherium remains are common in fossil beds of the Aegean and along the coast of Asia Minor.

The ancient artist, by modeling his depiction of the Monster of Troy on an immense fossil skull partially embedded in the earth, associated fossil remains of unusual size and form with legendary monsters and heroes—as was common in the Greco-Roman world. But the difference is that our vase artist produced a painting of the fossil.

As Richard Fortey, a paleontologist with the Museum of Natural History in London, has recently written, “It’s hard to imagine why the artist should have portrayed [the monster] in this fashion unless he had a model … that had been eroded from rock.”⁷ The painter may well have seen such an object (rich fossil beds exist in Attica and the Peloponnesus) or he may have heard travelers’ descriptions of such discoveries elsewhere. An interesting possibility was suggested to me by University of Virginia classical archaeologist Tyler Jo Smith: Perhaps the artist worked from a sketch of a fossil skull exposure provided by the customer who commissioned the vase.

So far, the Monster of Troy vase is unique in its representation of a mythical monster as a giant fossil skull. Skeletons and bones are rare in ancient Greek vase paintings and sculpture, except for small animal knucklebones used in gaming and bucrania (skulls of horned bulls decorating temples). This helps explain why the art scholars failed to recognize the creature as a skull, even though they sensed something odd about the monster.

The paleontologists also noticed something strange about the skull. The overall aspect is mammalian, but there are some striking features from various nonmammalian species. As one paleontologist noted, “The figure is a chimera, produced by combining real components from unrelated animals.” For example, the eye socket is ringed by sclerotic plates, bony structures found only in bird, reptile and dinosaur skulls. Dinosaur fossils are not found in Asia Minor, but Miocene ostrich fossils do occur across Greece and Turkey, and ostriches have the largest eye socket of any land vertebrate. Did the artist include the distinctive eye socket of an ostrich or a living bird or lizard to make the skull more frightening?

The jagged teeth remind some paleontologists of toothed whales, sharks, 050crocodiles or other reptiles. Or perhaps the artist exaggerated the squarish, forward-leaning teeth of some large Miocene mammal, such as the Samotherium, which would seem more pronounced if the premaxilla were absent.⁸

If the skull is indeed composite, then the rendering conforms at least in one aspect to the iconographic tradition. The ancient Greeks often created hybrid monsters from parts of various creatures. You could, for instance, take a human, an eagle, a snake and a lion, mix them together, and come up with a variety of monsters: griffins, sphinxes and dragons, for example. The painter of the Hesione vase, instead of combining features of various living creatures, modeled his (or her) monster on a large fossil skull of a prehistoric mammal and then added elements from other creatures.

To bring the composite fossil monster to life, the artist added a long tongue. A lolling tongue is a hallmark of monsters in traditional ancient art. For example, a typical sixth-century B.C. Corinthian vase shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the Monster of Joppa (see photo of vase showing Perseus rescuing Andromeda). That monster is fleshed out as a large, threatening disembodied head with a similar tongue. Adding a tongue seems to be a timeless artistic device to make a lifeless skull come alive: Consider the 20th-century gargoyle on the Cathedral in 051Washington, D.C., made by a stone mason presumably unaware of the Monster of Troy vase. This modern gargoyle is named “Animated Bones,” and the tongue is the animating feature (see photo of gargoyle from Washington’s National Cathedral).

The Monster of Joppa vase was painted in Corinth about the same time as the Monster of Troy vase. Perseus and Andromeda are throwing stones at the monster’s head (note the pile at his feet). Hovering above a dark background, the Monster of Joppa’s head is about the same size as the Monster of Troy. The image raises an intriguing question. Could the Monster of Joppa represent another ancient attempt to reconstruct a mysterious creature’s appearance based on observations of a fossil skull—perhaps a Samotherium skull?

The original model for the Monster of Joppa, if there was one, remains in question. But the monster on the Boston Hesione vase almost certainly should be interpreted paleontologically: It appears to be modeled on the skull of an extinct creature. This amazing artifact, painted some 2,500 years ago, is the earliest representation of a fossil to survive from antiquity.

Although the case of the identity of the Monster of Troy appears to be resolved, mystery still surrounds the Hesione vase. Why did the painter do what he did? Was the artist hoping to offer graphic proof that 053monsters once existed? Did the artist simply find the large fossil enigmatic and mysterious, thus appropriate to the wonders of Greek myth? Was the artist in fact striving for a comic effect, as Karl Schefold suggests? Certainly the painter’s bold, idiosyncratic rendering offers evidence that fossil discoveries could influence mythological interpretations in classical antiquity. Ancient monsters will never look the same.

A strange, grim, menacing creature lurks on one of the ancient Greek vases in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The scene painted on this vase—a Corinthian black-figure krater dating to between 560 and 540 B.C.—is known to art historians as the oldest illustration of the ancient legend of the Monster of Troy. In Greek myth, a terrible monster suddenly appears on the Trojan coast, where it causes great destruction. To appease the beast, the king of Troy, Laomedon, sends his daughter Hesione as a sacrifice, but Hercules arrives just in time 046to slay the monster and […]