Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 3

What a Greek Dragon Actually Was

Before showing that other cultures borrowed the Greek dragon, it is worth being clear about what they would have been borrowing, because it is not quite the animal most people picture.

3.1 The word means "the one who watches"

The Greek is δράκων, drakon. The standard Greek dictionary derives it from the verb δέρκομαι, derkomai, which means to look at something hard. Not to glance. To fix your eyes on a thing and keep them there. Homer uses it of a cornered boar turning its stare on the hunters.

So the Greeks named this animal after its eyes.

The dictionary marks the derivation "probably", and that word should be kept. Working out where an ancient word came from is detective work, not observation, and detectives are sometimes wrong. What is more certain is that the ancients themselves believed it. Porphyry says so in the third century CE, in a passage about how well animals perceive things (Porph. Abst. 3.8).

One thing this does not mean. Naming an animal after its eyes tells you what the namers noticed. It tells you nothing about what else the animal did. A creature called the watcher can also burn, fly and hoard, and the Greek one does all three.

There is even a case that the watching and the burning are the same thing. Hesiod's Typhoeus has fire coming out of his eyes, not his mouth. Whether the Greek dragon watches the world burn or burns it by looking, the sources do not say.

3.2 The Greeks did not separate dragons from snakes

The same dictionary entry notes something that surprises most readers. The Greeks used drakon and ophis, their ordinary word for snake, interchangeably. In the Iliad the same creature in the same scene is called by both words six lines apart (Il. 12.202, 12.208).

Greek had no separate word for a dragon as opposed to a snake. A dragon was a snake that had got out of hand.

This matters for everything that follows, because it means that when we go looking in other languages we should not expect to find a word that means dragon. We should expect to find their word for snake, used of something impossible.

3.3 What Greek dragons do

Four famous ones, and they are all doing the same job.

*Ladon* lies coiled around the tree of golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides and guards it (Hes. Th. 333–336). He has no adventures. He is introduced by the fact that he is guarding, and his story is about being got past.

*The serpent of Colchis* lies across the Golden Fleece and does not sleep. Medea drugs it so that Jason can take the fleece (Ap. Rhod. 4; Pi. P. 4). Notice what the heroes have to do. They do not kill it. They only need to make it close its eyes.

*Python* holds the ground at Delphi until Apollo shoots her, and the place is named after what happens to her body afterward (h.Ap. 300–374). She is not guarding treasure. She is guarding the place where the future is told.

*The serpent of Ares* holds the spring at Thebes until Cadmus kills it and sows its teeth, and armed men come up out of the ground (Apollod. 3.4.1). It is guarding water, which in Greece is what you must have before you can build a city.

Four dragons, four things guarded: apples, a fleece, an oracle, a spring. Not one of them attacks anybody who has not come to take what it is holding.

3.4 The flying ones

Two Greek dragons fly, and they are worth separating out because they break the pattern in an interesting way.

When Medea has killed Glauce, Creon and her own two sons, she escapes to Athens in a chariot sent by the Sun, drawn by winged dragons (Apollod. 1.9.28; Ov. Met. 7). Euripides staged the escape in Athens in the fifth century BCE, though he gives only a winged chariot from Helios and leaves the dragons to the later sources (Eur. Med. 1317–1322).

These creatures fly, which disposes of the idea that wings are a medieval addition. They are also in harness, pulling something for somebody.

And they do not breathe fire. None of the three sources says they do.

3.5 The other kind of Greek dragon

Everything above concerns dragons with a job. There is a second kind, and it is the kind that burns.

*Typhoeus* has a hundred snake heads. Hesiod calls him a fearful dragon, and says that from under the brows of his eyes fire flashed, and fire burned from his heads as he glared (Th. 820ff). He is not guarding anything. He is attacking Zeus for control of the world, and when Zeus puts him down the sea boils.

*The Chimera* is introduced by Hesiod as a fierce dragon, lion in front, dragon behind, goat in the middle, breathing a fearful blast of blazing fire (Th. 319–324). Homer describes it the same way (Il. 6.179–182). It lays waste to Lycia until Bellerophon kills it from the air.

These two are the only living fire-breathers in Greek myth. The bronze bulls of Colchis breathe fire as well, but they were manufactured by Hephaestus and are machinery rather than animals.

Two things are worth noticing.

First, Hesiod calls both of these creatures dragons. So it is not true that Greek dragons do not breathe fire. Two of them do, and they are the two oldest described.

Second, neither of them works for anybody. Typhoeus makes a bid for the throne of heaven. The Chimera destroys a country for no stated reason. Both are killed rather than got past.

3.6 Two kinds, and never both

Line the Greek dragons up and they fall into classes with no overlap.

*The guards* are cold, stationary, sleepless, and employed. Ladon for the Hesperides, the Colchian serpent for Aeetes, Python at Delphi, the serpent of Ares at Thebes.

*The burners* are cosmic, mobile, hostile and answerable to nobody. Typhoeus and the Chimera.

*The fliers* pull a chariot and do nothing else. Medea's team.

No Greek dragon is in two of those classes. The one that would be, flying and burning and lying on gold, is the one a modern reader pictures, and Greek myth does not contain it.

This is the sharpest difference between the Greek material and the Viking material. Fáfnir works for nobody, breathes fire, and lies on gold, which is all three at once. Greece has the parts sorted into separate animals. Scandinavia has them combined.

That looks, at first glance, like an argument against a Greek origin. Chapter 4 is about why it is not.

3.7 They can also be held to a promise

One more feature, easy to miss because it consists of things these creatures do not do.

Greek monsters play by rules. Ladon stays at his post. The Colchian serpent has to be drugged rather than bribed or talked out of the way. The Sphinx, who is not a dragon but belongs to the same class of guardians, kills herself when someone answers her riddle, because those were the terms she set.

The rules run all the way up. Hesiod says the gods themselves swear by the river Styx, and a god who swears falsely by it lies unable to breathe for a year and is shut out of the company of the other gods for nine (Th. 775–806).

A Greek dragon is not outside the law. It is a party to it, with obligations. That will matter in Chapter 4, where one of them swears an oath and breaks it.