A definitive feature of ancient Greek and Roman culture is the representation of a living being composed of parts of more than one real, present-day species, such as the part-horse, part-man centaur or part-woman, part-lion winged sphinx. Although the individual parts can be found in the natural world, the combinations do not exist in nature. The popularity of non-existent creatures within the visual and literary arts of antiquity is surprising, because ancient aesthetic theory defined representation as mimetic in the sense that it is limited to what really was, is, or could be. Various interpretations have been offered for the existence and significance or meaning of composite creatures, based on theories of narration, decor, cognition, and so forth.  In my paper, I consider as an example a number of composite creatures in Corinthian art. I argue that the representations thematize questions about the origin and nature of “species” that are analogous to questions explored in the pre-socratic theory of Empedokles and the natural history and aesthetics of Aristotle. Composite creatures are fundamentally shaped by visual representational practices, and that feature arguably found its way into philosophical writing.

Bonna D. Wescoat is the Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University, and Director of American Excavations Samothrace. Her research interests center on architecture and sacred experience in ancient Greece, investigated through excavation, 3D digital modeling, architectural reconstruction, and experimental archaeology. While her current work addresses the excavation and publication of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace, she has also worked at Assos in Turkey. A former Marshall Scholar to Great Britain, Wescoat has been a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. She has been Vice president of Research and Academic Affairs for the Archaeological Institute of America.

Guy Hedreen is Amos Lawrence Professor of Art at Williams College, where he teaches the history of art as well as the art, archaeology, literature, and culture of antiquity. He is the author of three books, Silens in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting: Myth and Performance (1992), Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art (2001), and The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece: Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity (2016).  The present paper is part of a new book project, The Making of a Monster: Art, Science, and Imagination in Greek and Roman Antiquity. He has been a regular and associate member as well as an NEH senior research fellow at the ASCSA.