Fantastic Beasts in Antiquity. Looking for the Monster, Discovering the Human

Tomassini, Paolo [UCL] Béthume, Sarah [UCL] et al.

Not satisfied with what nature offered to them, Human beings tried – since the beginning – to overtake reality by inventing a parallel and fantastic world, inhabited by mysterious and intriguing creatures. Griffins, sirens, centaurs and satyrs, monsters and other hybrid creatures, fantastic beasts abound the imagination of many civilizations in all of Antiquity, both in Art and Literature. As the incarnation of men’s deepest fears, symbols or merely decorative motives, fantastic creatures are the reflection of the manner the Ancients perceived and conceived the world. In this optic, what made “fantastic” the animals was not their peculiarity but the manner they are perceived or represented. This book contains the proceedings of the conference organized in 2018 by the “Synoikismos” inter-university Seminar, whose aim is to explore the mysterious world of animals through human representations. By its transdisciplinary approach, at the intersection of Archaeology, History, Art History and Philology, applied to the whole Ancient World, this book will allow to identify some lines of thought, for example concerning the mutual influences between different cultures at different times, the relations between text and images or, more simply, the view of the man on the world around him.