Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 9

Every Objection, Answered

A theory is worth what it can survive. These are the seven strongest objections that have been put to the argument of this paper.

9.1 "The Hebrew is older than the Codex"

The objection. Parts of the Hebrew Bible were written down before 440 BCE. A source cannot come after its copies.

The answer. The date of the Codex is the date of the manuscript, not the date of the story. Spartan culture did not write things down; every ancient writer who discusses Sparta says so. A story told aloud for generations before anybody writes it is older than the page it ends up on, and there is no way to measure by how much.

So the Hebrew evidence does not argue against a Greek origin. It tells us the Greek story was already circulating early enough to reach Israel before the seventh century, which is useful information we did not have.

The objection moves the story earlier. It does not detach it from Greece.

9.2 "There is no record of the story travelling"

The objection. No ancient author mentions Greek dragon stories being carried to India, or China, or Scandinavia.

The answer. That is correct, and it is what this theory predicts. The tradition was oral. The absence of paperwork for an oral transmission is not a puzzle, it is the definition of one.

If such a record had been found, it would raise the awkward question of why a culture famous for not writing had written this down.

9.3 "The Quran has no dragon at all"

The objection. Chapter 6 showed that the Quran contains nothing of the kind. A worldwide inheritance should not have a hole in it.

The answer. The Quran is the strongest evidence in this paper.

Look again at what Chapter 6 established. Arabic has a word for a large serpent. The Quran uses it, twice, in the two most public verses. Then, telling the identical story two more times, it picks an ordinary snake and then a small fast one.

You cannot turn down something you were never offered. A text that tells one story three times and makes the creature smaller each time is a text working to keep something out, and the care taken over it shows how firmly the thing had established itself in that region beforehand.

An absence of this quality is worth more than a presence. Presences can be coincidences. Refusals cannot.

9.4 "The Chinese dragon is friendly"

The objection. The Chinese long brings rain, represents legitimate authority, and is no one's enemy, whereas every Greek dragon is hostile. You cannot get one from the other.

The answer. The objection assumes the friendly dragon has to be produced by reversing a hostile one, and that would indeed be difficult.

The Codex removes the difficulty. Prometheus's account of what became of the dracones does not describe two outcomes. It describes three. Some became guardians. Some turned to hoarding. And the vision shows dragons across history in their various roles, some of them patrons of temples, all of them holding the same capacity for good and evil.

A patron of temples is not a hostile creature turned inside out. It is a branch of the family, present from the beginning, and it is precisely the Chinese dragon.

Nothing has to be reversed. China kept a branch that the west lost, and the Codex is the only surviving source that records the branch existed.

9.5 "The resemblances are thin"

The objection. What Chinese and Indian dragons have in common with Greek ones amounts to little more than being a large snake, which is not much to build on.

The answer. Thinness at a distance is what the theory predicts, and section 8.5 sets out the gradient. A story carried five thousand miles by word of mouth across three language families arrives worn down. A story that arrived at that distance undamaged would be the thing requiring explanation.

9.6 "The resemblances are too close"

The objection, made from the other direction. Greek myth and the Codex agree so closely that they are better explained as two branches of one Greek tradition than as source and copy.

The answer. Closeness is what happens near the source. The Greek material is next door to Laconia and resembles the Codex accordingly. This is the same gradient observed from the other end.

Sections 9.5 and 9.6 are frequently advanced in the same paper by the same critic, and it is not clear that both can be held at once.

9.7 "There was no contact with Scandinavia"

The objection. Nothing connects archaic Laconia to the Baltic.

The answer. The Dorians came into the Peloponnese from the north, so a road existed and people used it. Section 8.4 sets this out. The Norse dragon kept the fire and the gold and lost everything that needed explaining, which is the condition of a story that has travelled a long way and been out of touch with home for a long time.

9.8 "The Greek dragons had fire all along"

This one comes from a reader sympathetic to the argument, and it is included because the answer is instructive about what this paper can and cannot claim.

The objection. Section 1.3 makes much of the fact that Medea's dragons are never described as breathing fire. But the chariot they pull was given by Helios, the Sun. The Sun's own team, in Ovid, consists of winged horses that are ambrosia-fed and snorting flames, whose flame-like neighing shakes the air, and two of whom are named Pyrois and Phlegon, which are simply the Greek words for fiery and blazing (Ov. Met. 2.150ff). If the Sun's draught animals breathe fire, and Medea's dragons are drawing a vehicle of the Sun, the fire is there by implication and section 1.3 has understated the Greek evidence.

The answer, in two parts.

The first part is a concession, and it should be made plainly. This does not rise to attestation. Helios' own team is horses, and the flame in Ovid belongs to the horses. No surviving source transfers it to the dragons he lent to his granddaughter. A reader who wants a Greek text that says Medea's dragons breathed fire will not find one, and this paper will not manufacture it.

The second part is that the objection is nonetheless correct in substance, and the concession costs nothing.

The Sun gave Medea the vehicle. The Sun's draught animals are winged and fiery, and two of them are named for fire outright. Medea's draught animals are winged, drawing the same god's gift, supplied by the same god, for the same purpose. Two teams, one donor, one function, and the wings on both. To hold that the fire attaches to one team and not to the other requires believing that Helios kept a separate and colder stable for loans.

There is a second and independent argument to the same end, and it is the older of the two, being the form the Greeks themselves called reasoning from the greater.

The Sun's horses breathe fire. A horse is a horse. It is not, in any tradition, the most fearsome creature in the world, and nobody has ever written a story about the terror of meeting one in a cave.

A dragon is. Every tradition in this study agrees that the dragon stands at the top of whatever scale of danger that culture recognises. It is larger, older, stronger and more destructive than anything it is placed beside.

If the lesser creature, harnessed to the same chariot and given by the same god, snorts flame, then the greater creature does not snort less of it. The proposition that Helios equipped his own horses with fire and then lent his granddaughter a team of dragons that could not manage it is not a serious reading of the material. It requires the dragon to be the only animal in the Sun's stables that had to be handed the reins cold.

So the position of this paper is as follows. Section 1.3 states what the texts say, which is that the fire is unattested for Medea's dragons. This section states what the texts imply, by two separate routes, which is that it was there. The distinction is maintained because the difference between evidence and inference is worth maintaining, and the reader is free to weigh the inference as they see fit.

It does not change the conclusion. If the fire is absent from Medea's team, the Codex is the only ancient text combining flight and flame, and the argument of Chapter 4 stands. If the fire is present by implication, then the Greek material has both features after all, and the argument of Chapter 4 is stronger still.

9.9 Where that leaves the argument

Seven objections, including the two that looked fatal.

The chronological objection moves the Greek tradition earlier. The paperwork objection is predicted by the theory. The Quranic zero turns into evidence of deliberate refusal. The Chinese objection supplies a branch the theory had not claimed and gets it for nothing. The two objections about resemblance are the same objection seen from opposite ends and cannot both stand.

Nothing so far raised tells against a Greek origin.

The first objection, however, has a consequence that has not yet been faced, and Chapter 10 faces it.