This chapter provides a discussion of the anxieties within (conventionally cisgendered) communities faced with the complex realities of transgender identities, sexual binarism and dysphoria. Ancient discourse tended to reduce this to a simple binary according to which conventional constructions of cisgendered bodies contrasted with a single representation of anomaly: the hermaphrodite. The story of Hermaphroditos, however, reveals that sexual hybridity and ethnic categorization (Karians and Greeks) operated in tandem and recursively: one group’s culture hero (as founder of marriage) become another’s intersex monstrosity. Hermaphroditos is only one example of a body undergoing sexual transformation, and other figures, such as Teiresias, Kaineus and even cross-dressing Achilles, illustrate that there existed a space for imagining alternatives to conventional categories. But an imaginative space is not a manifesto, and sexual anomaly (as it appears in ancient thinking) illustrates a trajectory of Greek culture: hybrids and anomalous bodies become partly decorative and, in literary works, interesting paradoxes, while their power to shock was largely relegated to the sphere of magic.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

Hybrids were integral to the classificatory schemes that organized knowledge in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Texts produced by Hanno, Ktesias and Megasthenes reveal the slippage whereby ethnographic description created hierarchies of territories and cultures exemplified by hybrid animals and exotic humans. In literary texts India played an especially significant role. It was a mirror image of the Mediterranean, yet far enough away to also generate anomalous wonders on its borders. It was not merely the exotic animals of distant lands, such as camels, leopards, and giraffes, that astonished the Greek subjects of Hellenistic kings, but also the descriptions of anomalous humans, such as Blemmyes, Dog-Heads and Skiapods, that confirmed an orderly Mediterranean world of properly recognizable humanity, the edges of which were populated by the monstrous, the ugly and the deformed. Ethnography and paradoxography were therefore highly conservative genres that provided hierarchies structured on normality and anomaly to reinforce order.

The sphinx is a good test case illustrating the complexities of studying Greek hybrids. The pronounced sexuality of modern sphinxes (notably those of Moreau and Ingres) sets them apart from Greek examples, which themselves are very different from the sphinxes of Egypt and the Ancient Near East. Common to all is the blurring of human/animal boundaries, a phenomenon going back to the Palaeolithic. Modern comparisons from New Guinea and Africa confirm that there is an animal dimension at the heart of being human. Hybrids, born of this mixing, are polymorphous, polysemic and polyvalent. Around the hybrid there lurks a host of questions: what bits have been mixed, how exactly are the parts combined, and is the mixture taxonomically fitting or anomalous? Each of these questions shapes our response to a hybrid, affirming the power of hybridity to challenge (or affirm) categories and taxonomies. And since taxonomies are the proof of our comprehending the world by classifying phenomena, hybridity represents a culture’s uneasiness with the limits of its epistemology. If such things exist, even if only in our stories and imagination, how certain is certainty?

This chapter addresses the need for clarity of definition and identifies the various fields in which hybridity operated in the Greek world. Recent work in monster theory emphasizes the role of monsters in policing the borders of what is normative. Monsters have repeatedly been interpreted as threats to the order created by classification. Hybrids are better understood not as threats to order, but as expressions of anomaly. As a mode of cultural production hybrids are a means of coping with that which defies neat classification. This may veer towards the monstrous, as in the case of the demonic female figure, the gorgon, but equally it can tend towards the curious and the wondrous, like Pegasos alighting at the Peirene Fountain in Corinth or the horses of Achilles grieving for the death of Patroklos. In trying to understand how and why the Greeks generated hybrids in their mythology it may seem that we are putting the Greeks on the psychiatrist’s couch, but Freud’s conception of the Uncanny sheds some light on how hybrids function. They represent the challenge of the anomalous.

The Greeks created a culture that seemed secure and well ordered, in which status, gender and identity appeared to be if not fixed, then at least clear cut. A free man knew his place and his privileges, a foreigner was aware of their disabilities, an enslaved woman had a fair idea of her lot, a worker in the mines of Laureion even more so. Yet, lived experience was precarious. The rich man could lose his fortune, the highborn girl could become shipwrecked and enslaved. These are not just the plot devices of Hellenistic novels; they are the potential experiences of men and women for whom vulnerability and impermanence were as real as wealth and good fortune. These conditions favoured expressions – stories and images in particular – that made change and anomaly part of the cultural repertoire of the Greeks. This is perhaps why the vivid, vibrant hybrids of the Greek imagination attracted so much attention from Christian writers. By imagining other ways of engaging with the world and offering alternatives to the settled convention, hybrids would always be a threat to those attempting to impose their order. Hybrids became demons to be slain.

After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

Greek hybrids cannot be read in isolation. To understand them requires an examination of the Near Eastern antecedents. The Greek imagination was powerfully influenced by a creative engagement with other cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean. These engagements were characterized by bilingualism, intermarriage and the movement of artisans, traders, poets and itinerant religious practitioners. Such a pattern of cultural exchange can be seen in the so-called International Style of the Late Bronze Age, which relied heavily on hybrid motifs to fashion a shared visual language for the elites of Egypt and the Near East. In this context, the significance of hybrids varied depending on audience or market. Taweret in Egypt was utterly transformed when taken up on Crete. Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies shared many characteristics, but Greek speakers freely adapted old motifs. Wherever we find traces of cultural exchange, ideas and objects always take on new forms in Greek settings. Each instance of a hybrid emerging in a Greek context it is testimony to the flexibility of hybrids to convey new meanings in new settings. Hybrids gave a face to the shock of the new.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.

This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.