Centaurs and Snake-Kings : Hybrids and the Greek Imagination

by: McInerney, J.

Centaurs and Snake-Kings
Hybrids and the Greek Imagination

Author: Jeremy McInerney, University of Pennsylvania

Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids – McInerney suggests – finally suggest other ways of being human.

Will fascinate and delight anyone interested in the rich creaturely mythologies of ancient Greece
Situates familiar hybrid figures (such as Pegasos, Cheiron and Medusa) in a much broader framework, going back to the Neolithic, and taking into account Greece's place in the wider eastern Mediterranean
Additionally, places the specific study of Greek culture in areas of broad and fashionable current interest such as animal studies, transgender studies and post-humanism

Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of figures
1. Introduction: encountering the sphinx
2. 'Welcome to Athens'. Theories of hybridity
3. Hybrids around the corrupting sea
4. Hybrids, contact zones and margins
5. Heads or tails: Gorgons, satyrs and other composites
6. Centaurs and other horses
7. Snakes and the perils of autochthony
8. Hermaphrodites and other bodies
9. Adynata, ethnography and paradox
10. Conclusions
Bibliography.

Centaurs and Snake-Kings : Hybrids and the Greek Imagination

by: McInerney, J.

• ISBN-13: 9781009459105 / 978-1-00-945910-5
• ISBN-03: 1009459104 / 1-00-945910-4
• Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2024