On November 15, 1553, workers digging near the city gate of Arezzo suddenly struck gold—or in this case, bronze. Out of the ground came a life-sized lion, buried for more than 1,000 years. The statue was a technical marvel, and yet its savage ferocity seemed alien to the serene expression of the classical Greeks and Romans. The mystery deepened a year later when someone pointed out that the bronze "lion" was in fact a chimera. Having two heads—a lion’s and a goat’s—and a serpent’s tail (this one, though, had lost its tail), chimeras are distinctive beasts.

The "Chimera of Arezzo" was acquired by the Medici duke, Cosimo, and through the centuries has always been one of the foremost archaeological treasures in Florence, Italy. It now boasts an elegant tail that, the story goes, was created by the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. Its body is coiled to spring, a frightening prospect even when viewed in a museum. A goat’s head, its neck bleeding, projects from its back. Snarling, with razor-sharp fangs and claws, the Chimera never fails to command respect.
 
After a long time of scholarly perplexity regarding its origins, the riddle of the Chimera was finally resolved in 1912 when a cryptic inscription on its leg was identified as an offering to Tin, the principal god of the Etruscans. Arezzo was one of the towns inhabited by this great vanished people who ruled Tuscany for 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, from circa 900 B.C. to 27 B.C. As their terminal date shows, the civilization of the Etruscans came to a screeching halt when the Romans wiped them out.

As far as we can tell, judging from their opulent tombs, the Etruscans were altogether more jovial than the Romans. Women were welcome at their banquets, and they enjoyed lavishing money on expensive fabrics and gold jewelry. The Etruscans traded constantly with the Greeks, importing their very finest painted pots, not to mention their epics and mythology. The Etruscan penchant for savage customs like piracy perhaps explains their fondness for this wild chimera that survived the Roman takeover by a fluke.

The great heroes of mythology are measured by their monsters: Perseus cut off the horrible head of Medusa, Oedipus outwitted the Sphinx, Odysseus resisted the Sirens’ call. The chimera, Homer tells us in the Iliad, was an awful fire-breathing creature who prowled and laid waste to the country of Lycia. The hero Bellerophon was summoned to slay the beast, shooting arrows while safely astride Pegasus, his winged mount. The chimera is a rare example of a monster more popular than its conqueror. Nowadays, poor Bellerophon is less famous than his horse; the villainous chimera more memorable than both.

Whether the Etruscans believed the story is hard to tell. The ancients tended to read mythology with a grain of salt. By the end of the Middle Ages in Italy, when Christian culture had replaced classical, dragons replaced chimeras as symbols of polymorphous hideousness and destruction. But the chimera was not yet done: In 1382, its name popped up in John Wyclif’s new English Bible as an example of something quite imaginary: ‘beestis [called] chymeres, that han a part of ech beest, and suche ben not, no but oonly in opynyoun" (hint: say the words out loud). By 1626, when John Donne complains, "a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer," his readers knew he meant a false delusion.
 
And so it was, for a long, long time, until the discovery of DNA. Today, typing in "chimera" on the Internet yields almost seven million hits, a high percentage of them in the pages of the Journal of Cell Biology. It turns out that a surprising number of people have more than one blood type in their veins. Some live happily with genetically different cells: the medical term for them is, well, "chimera." The hope of finding ways to overcome problems of the immune system, like organ rejection, has excited medical research you see them, now you don’t.

John T. Spike is nearing completion of his Michelangelo biography.