Both are described as unambiguously female. Earlier, in Homer’s Odyssey, composed around the seventh or eighth century B.C., the Greek hero Odysseus must choose between fighting Scylla, a six-headed, twelve-legged barking creature, and Charybdis, a sea monster of doom. epic Metamorphoses, for example, the Roman poet Ovid wrote about Medusa, a terrifying Gorgon whose serpentine tresses turned anyone who met her gaze into stone.

The myths then, to a certain extent, fulfill a male fantasy of conquering and controlling the female.”Īncient male authors inscribed their fear of-and desire for-women into tales about monstrous females: In his first-century A.D. These villains, wrote classicist Debbie Felton in a 2013 essay, “all spoke to men’s fear of women’s destructive potential. In the classical Greek and Roman myths that pervade Western lore today, a perhaps surprising number of these creatures are coded as women.

As figments of the imagination, the alien, creepy-crawly, fanged, winged and otherwise-terrifying creatures that populate myths have long helped societies define cultural boundaries and answer an age-old question: What counts as human, and what counts as monstrous? Monsters reveal more about humans than one might think.