Did Greek Dragons Breathe Fire?
Two of them did. Hesiod gives fire to Typhoeus and to the Chimera, and calls both of them drakōn. The famous guardian dragons, Ladon and the serpent of Colchis, do not breathe fire at all.
Typhoeus has a hundred snake heads and fire burns from them as he glares (Theogony 820ff). The Chimera is introduced with a dragon for its hind part and breathes a blast of blazing fire (Th. 319–324; Iliad 6.179–182). Those are the only two organic fire-breathers in Greek myth, and Hesiod uses the dragon word for both.
The guardians are a different class. Ladon lies coiled on the golden apples (Th. 333–336). The serpent of Colchis never sleeps on the Fleece. Python holds Delphi. None of them burns, and none of them flies.
And a third class only flies. Medea escapes in a chariot drawn by winged dragons (Apollodorus 1.9.28; Ovid, Met. 7), and no source gives those fire.
So Greek myth has all three features, distributed across three kinds of creature that never overlap. Which is the reason Greece is usually passed over as the origin of the dragon.
In the Codex. The Codex describes one animal that burns, flies and guards gold at once, which no other ancient source does.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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