Chimera

Homer's Iliad gives the oldest surviving account of the Chimera, describing her as "in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire." Glaucus tells the story to Diomedes as part of his own family history: his grandfather Bellerophon, exiled from Argos on false charges, was sent to the king of Lycia carrying sealed tablets that, unknown to him, asked for his own death. The Lycian king set him three deadly tasks instead of killing him outright, and killing the Chimera was the first and most famous of them. Homer credits the victory to nothing more specific than Bellerophon's trust in the gods' guidance - no flying horse, no special weapon, just the outcome.

Hesiod's Theogony, composed in the same period, gives the Chimera her family instead of her fight: she is a daughter of Typhon and Echidna, born alongside Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra in the same brief catalogue of monsters, described as fearful, great, swift-footed, and strong, with unapproachable fire pouring from her. Hesiod also names her killers, Pegasus and noble Bellerophon together. Later tradition filled in how the kill was made. Apollodorus has Bellerophon mount the winged horse Pegasus, born from Medusa's blood, and shoot the Chimera down from the air, while Pindar's Olympian Ode 13 credits Athena with the golden bridle that let Bellerophon tame Pegasus for the flight in the first place. The full arc, from exile to fall, is told in Bellerophon and Pegasus.

The word chimera entered English and other languages as a general term for any wildly implausible, patched-together idea or fear, a legacy of how unnatural her three-part body seemed even within a mythology already full of hybrid monsters. In modern biology the same word names an organism made of genetically distinct tissues, borrowing the myth's central image of one body holding parts that do not belong together, with no further connection to the plot of the myth itself.