Centaurs and Snake-Kings
Hybrids and the Greek Imagination

Why does the Greek imagination teem with centaurs and gorgons? This stimulating book engagingly reveals the power of ancient hybridity.

Jeremy McInerney (Author)

9781009459105, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 July 2024

368 pages, 75 colour illus.
25 x 17.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.86 kg

'A brilliant study, which left this reader both deeply informed and pleasurably disorientated.' Emma Greensmith, Times Literary Supplement

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]