How many creatures in Greek mythology do you know? I’m sure most of you have heard of the Minotaur, Scylla and Charybdis, as well as the Centaurs and the Cyclops.
Possibly you know even more, but here we will meet Empousa, Phantasos, and five other terrible monsters once imagined in the Greek world.
How?
Simply by traveling to the deep chambers of the earth, where they are hidden, waiting perhaps for their chance to rise again into the world of the living.
Forgotten Monsters of Greek Mythology
Today, we will not talk about the famous fantastic creatures that have appeared in movies and books countless times. Instead, we will try to find monsters that were once mighty and terrible, but now have been forgotten.
There are many of them, so we will not find them all. But we will get a picture of a different, fantastic mythological world of the ancient Greeks that has remained largely invisible.
Greek mythology covers a huge range of fiction. In its stories, you will find witches, monsters, nymphs, demons, ghosts, giants and dwarves, winged dragons and horses, enchanted objects, and mechanical beings.
Fantastic creatures, strange to the 21st-century human mind, but for the people of antiquity they were often considered real.
Some said that they saw them, some heard them, and some were destroyed or saved by them. Many of these creatures appear in the tales of ancient Greek heroes.
For the people of antiquity, mythology was their history, their religion, and their teaching, a part of daily life.
That is why many strange mythological beings, such as the Lamies and Dragons, survived into the newest legends and folk tales of the Greek tradition.
Monsters of Greek Mythology are not dead. They are just imprisoned in deep caves from which they cannot escape, unless…someone releases them!
We just want to meet them, so we have to travel deep into the earth, using, where necessary, a lot of our imagination.
A fantastic trip in the depths of the Earth
But let’s talk no more, and let’s start the descent. We will sink into the depths of our mind, to its unknown side, where the subconscious resides.
In search of these strange mythological creatures, we will travel to the space-time of fantasy. In these deep caves, we will find everything gathered. So let’s move on!
We are already inside the cave. It is slightly illuminated by the torch we are holding. The light from its flames, in combination with the stalactites, forms strange, eerie shadows.
Ancient words are engraved on its walls, in unknown languages that once existed or have not existed yet. A smell of dirt and moisture is around; water drips from above, and whispers are heard all around.
It’s about time to start the long descent. We will find seven levels here, and we will go very deep down. What did you think? The long-lost imaginary creatures are not so easy to find.
Apate, the Spirit of Deceit
So we reached the first level. It is difficult, as the place is getting dark and narrow. It leads us to the entrance of the first chamber.
We first insert our heads and look carefully inside.
There is a woman-like creature sitting in the center. She has snakes instead of hair, bat wings come out of her back, and her hands end in lighted torches.
Other engravings around the walls depict her with fingers like vipers or whips. She looks at us with glowing eyes.
She looks like the Erinyes, goddesses of Curse and Revenge, but she is no other than Apate, the personification of deception, deceit, and falsehood.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, Apate is one of the children of Nyx (Night), born without a father and listed beside Philotes (Affection) and Geras (Old Age). Some Roman writers, such as Cicero and Hyginus, make Erebos (Darkness) her father as well. Her brothers and sisters include Momos (Blame), Oizys (Misery), Nemesis (Retribution), the Fates, and Eris (Strife). You can meet the whole family in The Children of Nyx in Greek Mythology.
The Greeks tell us almost nothing about how she looked, and no famous myth is told about her. She is an idea more than a character, which is why the creature in our cave is borrowed from our imagination.
The name Apate comes from the Greek word apate, meaning “deception,” and the verb apatao, meaning “I cheat” or “I deceive.”
Sources: Hesiod, Theogony; Roman lists of the children of Night in Cicero and Hyginus.
With her hand, she shows us a recess in the rock. From there we have to go if we want to continue even lower.
Argos Panoptes, the Hundred-Eyed Watchman
We follow her advice and reach the second chamber. A huge creature is waiting for us. A shepherd monster with a hundred eyes, trained to guard people and animals.
His name is Argos (which means “bright”) and his title is Panoptes (“the one who sees everything”). Just remember the words optics and panoptic.
It makes sense if you consider that he had eyes everywhere, in front of and behind his head and all over his body. They say that when he slept, he closed only half of them, while the rest kept watch.
Sources disagree about his parents: some make him earthborn, others a son of Arestor. He was one of the most formidable guardians in Greek mythology.
The historian Pherecydes records that he had only four eyes, two in front and two behind. Others claim that they were countless.
Aeschylus calls him “Myriopon voutan”, meaning “the million-eyed herdsman.”
The only time Argos fell asleep was when, while guarding Io after her transformation into a cow, Hermes, sent by Zeus, put him to sleep with his flute and killed him with his sword.
Argos served the goddess Hera and guarded her secret places when she was away.
It is worth mentioning that Io was a beautiful woman and the mistress of Zeus. The jealous Hera transformed her into a cow and set Argos to guard her. After his death, Io ran across the earth in madness, pursued by Oistros, a large horsefly sent by Hera.
Here, the ancients sought to explain the presence of horseflies around cows and horses… a very artistic conception indeed.
After his death, Hera decided to honor Argos by placing his eyes on the peacock’s tail, one of her sacred birds.
You see, reading Greek Mythology, we discover so many peculiar things, even horseflies as punishers!
Sources: Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Apollodorus.
The Hecatoncheires (Men with a Hundred Hands)
The further we go, the heavier we get. At the same time, we feel that we are slowly disappearing into space.
We are in the third chamber now. It is incredibly big. It does not seem to have a roof over it, only deep darkness.
Three huge giants are standing in front of us.
(Greek: Εκατόγχειρες, Hekatoncheires, also known as the Hundred-Handed Ones) There were three giants of incredible strength and ferocity, mentioned in the earliest account of the gods, Hesiod’s Theogony.
They were the offspring of Gaea (Earth) and Uranus (Heaven), and their names were Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes.
All three had fifty heads and one hundred arms, making them incredibly powerful. They were hated by their father, Uranus, who hid them away in Tartara (Tartarus), a region deep below the earth.
They are often read as forces of nature, such as storms and earthquakes.
Little is known about them beyond their enormous strength and destructive power. Their role in mythology is often overshadowed by their brothers, the Cyclopes.
On the advice of Gaea, Zeus freed them so they could fight alongside him in the great war of the gods against the Titans. After the victory, they became the guards of the defeated Titans in Tartarus. So here they still stand, down below, on watch.
Sources: Hesiod, Theogony.
Phantasos: The Dream That Could Take Any Form
We move even lower, into the fourth chamber. It looks empty, but it’s not.
On the walls are carved all the dreams that man has ever seen or will see. At its center, there is a strange creature without a clear form.
Its name is Phantasos, a dream spirit who appears to sleepers as lifeless things: earth, rocks, water and trees.
In the Roman poet Ovid, he is one of the three sons of Hypnos (Sleep). A later detail makes their mother Pasithea, one of the Charites (Graces), whom Homer already promises to Hypnos as a wife.
His brothers were Morpheus (who could take the form and imitate the voice of every human being), and Phobetor, also called Icelos (who could become any animal, bird or serpent).
His name gives us the word fantasy. In Hesiod, these spirits are only a tribe of Dreams, born of Night, and the three names come from Ovid. You can read more about the family in The Children of Nyx in Greek Mythology.
But we are awake, and Phantasos visits only sleepers, so he passes us by.
Sources: Ovid, Metamorphoses 11; Hesiod, Theogony.
Empousa: The One Who Penetrates
From a small hole, we keep going down lower and lower.
We reach the fifth chamber. Whispers and murmurs surround us.
At the edge of the night stands a thing that once pretended to be a woman.
Empousa is a vampiric demon, said to be a daughter of Hecate, the queen of witchcraft and the Underworld. In Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, she is a shapeshifter who appears as a cow, a mule, a beautiful woman or a dog, and who has one leg of bronze and the other of a donkey. Later, in Philostratus, she lures a young man with beauty in order to feed on him.
The ancient texts end there. The rest is our torch-lit imagination.
She slips from the shadows where the dead whisper and walks among the living when the moon is thin. Her face is twisted in the way nightmares bend a human smile. Her eyes roll white, her mouth stretches too wide, and when she laughs it sounds like metal tearing.
Sometimes she burns from within, her skin glowing like embers. Sometimes she wears another face, a fawn, a wolf, or the perfect mask of beauty, until the moment you’re too close to turn away.
She hunts the lonely, the lost, the ones who think no one is watching. When she feeds, the air itself curdles; dogs refuse to bark, and oil lamps die without smoke.
What happens next is better left unspoken.
The old ones said there was one way to drive her off:
curse her name, and mean it.
Sources: Aristophanes, The Frogs; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
The Daktyloi (Fingers) or Idaioi
We are moving forward; now we are moving almost intangibly. We have to hurry because the lower we go, the more we get lost.
We are in the sixth chamber. Some creatures in the form of low rocks are here.
In the stories they are small beings of magical skill, and they are also great metallurgists, said to have discovered the working of iron.
People say that they jumped from the ground when the Titaness Rhea put her fingers in the ground of Mount Ida on Crete as she was giving birth to Zeus. In some accounts, five women came out of her left hand and five men from the right, standing beside her as assistants in childbirth. However, there is no clear evidence as to the origin of these mysterious figures, and much of their mythology has been lost through time.
They are called Daktyloi or Idaioi, the Idaean Dactyls. The name comes from the Greek daktylos, meaning “finger,” and Ida, the mountain where they lived.
They got their name either because they jumped out of holes in the ground made by the goddess’s fingers or because they were small, like fingers, but they were great craftsmen.
Ancient writers disagree about how many there were, from a handful to as many as a hundred. Some of them connected the Dactyls with the Curetes, the warriors who guarded the infant Zeus, and with the Cabeiri, the gods of the mystery rites of Samothrace.
But we have said a lot, and it is time to continue.
Sources: Strabo, Geography 10; Diodorus Siculus 5; Pausanias 5.
The Mighty Typhon, the Father of All Monsters
And here we are in the last chamber, the seventh.
Our torch is about to go out. We have descended so deep that we are now beneath Mount Etna, deep into the volcanic darkness where, according to the ancient stories, something enormous lies buried.
And there he is.
It is the strongest and largest imaginary creature that has ever walked the earth. The son of Tartarus and Gaia, the mighty Typhon, father of all monsters of Greek mythology. Read more about Typhon and his terrifying offspring.
He was a gigantic, terrifying creature, with serpentine forms, enormous wings and a hundred dragon heads. Fire came from his many mouths, and his voice was said to be many voices at once: the speech of gods, the bellow of a bull, the roar of a lion, the barking of dogs and a hiss that echoed in the mountains.
Typhon came to represent the final resistance of the savage and uncontrollable forces of nature against the order imposed by the gods.
Maybe that’s why we had to go so deep to find him.
Sources: Hesiod, Theogony; Pindar; Aeschylus.
Time to return, before we get completely lost and forgotten in the dark caves and labyrinthine basements we have dived into. Take a deep breath, and time counts backward.
We return today. In our place and present time.
Monstrous Conclusion
We got only a little taste of those awful creatures that are hidden in the sanctuaries of the collective subconscious.
There are many caves, underground labyrinths, and galleries down there that, in a unique way, connect the various mythologies all over the world.
But we will talk about more creatures and even more deadly monsters of Greek mythology on another fantastic trip. For now, I hope you do not panic the next time you enter a cave…
For the famous ones, from Medusa to the Hydra, see our guide to the monsters of Greek mythology, and for the whole world of gods, heroes, and myths, the main Greek Mythology guide.
But are you ready for another descent to the Underworld?
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