Monsters are big these days. The Department of English, Philosophy, and World Languages at Arkansas State University is issuing a call for papers for a symposium titled “Monsters, Cryptids, and the Monstrous.” The topic of the second Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State University is “Communities and their Monsters.” The theme of the next volume of the Journal of Folklore and Education will be “Teaching with Monsters: From Whimsy to Shadow.” There is now a periodical titled The Journal of Gods and Monsters, and an article in the current issue of The New Yorker (November 3) addresses the question: “Why Monsters Stopped Being Scary.”
Moreover, books on the subject abound. Recent publications include A.S. Mittman and P. J. Dendle, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (2003), S. T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears (2009), and Jeffrey Allen Weinstock, ed., The Monster Theory Reader (2020). Folklorists have contributed to the discussion with David J. Puglia, ed., North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook (2022) and Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (2024); and classicists have weighed in with, inter alia, Fiona Mitchell, Monsters in Greek Literature: Aberrant Bodies in Ancient Cosmogony, Ethnography, and Biology (2021), Lyz Gloyn, Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (2020), and Katarzyna Marciniak, Chasing Mythical Beasts: The Reception of Ancient Monsters in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture (2020). In short, monsters are everywhere.
Joining these works now is the book under review, a new collection of essays titled The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. Its editor, Debbie Felton, is a classical scholar with an interest in folklore studies. Her handbook brings together forty essays grouped into four parts, each with its own mission.
The first and also largest part, Monsters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, introduces the major monsters found in the classical tradition (for Felton, “classical” includes ancient Greece and Rome as well as the ancient Near East and Egypt). Among the standout essays in this part are Daniel Ogden’s chapter on dragons, Dominic and Camilla Ingemark’s on sea monsters real and fabulous, R. Scott Smith’s on the complicated tradition of the Chimaera, Marianne Govers Hopman’s on Scylla and Charybdis, and Stephen M. Trzaskoma’s on the Minotaur. Ogden, for example, catalogues the numerous dragons found in Greek mythology, some named (Ladon, Python, etc.) and others not. He calls attention inter alia to the moral ambiguity of some dragons. That is, though they can be frightening, they may not deserve to be called evil, since they may only be doing the job assigned them by the gods, as when the snake Ladon guards the Golden Fleece or, in Mesopotamian myth, the monstrous being Humbaba watches over the Cedar Forest.
Part II, Monsters in Ancient Folklore and Ethnography, continues the survey of monstrous beings, here with chapters devoted to bogies, ghosts, and the bizarre beings that inhabit the distant edges of the earth, such as the Dog-Heads. In her chapter on spirits of the dead, Julia Doroszewska illustrates how in ancient tradition, as also today, ghosts can be either disembodied or embodied, and the two kinds were not terminologically distinguished. Characteristically, they were tireless in their attempts to contact the living, being restless for having died before their time or because they were unburied or at least had not received the final rites that were their due. Biaiothanatoi, persons who had suffered a violent death, constituted a category all their own.
Part III, Interpreting the Monsters, brings together essays on ancient and modern efforts to make sense of the monstrous. Among the outstanding reads here are Simon Oswald on the use of monsters in ancient monumental architecture such as temples and tombs, Andrea Murace on cryptids (beings of uncertain identification), Lorenz Winkler-Horaček on image and monster in Greek art, Greta Hawes on the rationalization of the fabulous elements of myths and legends, and Jennifer Larson on cognitive approaches.
In his piece, Oswald summarizes the scholarly debate concerning the common depiction of monsters on Greek temples. Why are they there? After all, a temple did not need sculptures or paintings to be a temple. Were they apotropaic? decorative? allegorical? something else? Oswald does not mention the possibility of drawing upon the comparative evidence of present-day practice such as Hindu temples. At least Hindus, unlike ancient Greeks, can be interviewed.
In her contribution, Larson draws upon the cognitive science of religion to explain why particular aspects of the monstrous succeed in becoming traditional. One of the seminal ideas of this approach is the “minimally counterintuitive concept,” or MCI, according to which something that is counter to our intuitive expectations yet is easy to understand, has a greater chance of being remembered. Cognitive scientists of religion have applied this concept to the gods, and Larson here applies it to monsters. For example, a defining factor in monstrosity is “category violation.” Composite beings such as centaurs, which have the upper body of a man and the lower body of a horse, violate essential physical norms in that they do not fit the plan either of a man or a horse, and so are counterintuitive, but their hybridity is also memorable because of its simplicity.
The last cluster of articles, The Reception of Classical Monsters, looks at the career of Greek and Roman monsters in later art and literature. Among the standout essays for this reviewer are Persephone Braham’s piece on classical monsters in Latin American cultures, Katarzyna Marciniak’s on the literature of children and young adults, and Liz Gloyn’s on classical monsters in modern popular culture, for which she takes the example of fan fiction.
Inevitably, not all the chapters of the handbook are equally successful or, for that matter, equally pertinent. A few essayists devote so much space to presenting the theory and basic concepts of their approach that they leave little room for monsters. Indeed, the handbook may not cover all the territory that some readers expect. I am thinking here of the two great approaches to myth and legend found in ancient thinkers and authors, which were rationalism and allegorism, that is, the taking of accounts of monstrous beings literally and explaining them as misunderstandings or the taking of such accounts figuratively and understanding them symbolically. Whereas the former approach is well handled by Greta Hawes (ch. 26, "Rationalizing Mythic Monsters in Antiquity"), allegory lacks a dedicated discussion of its own. Finally, from the viewpoint of folkloristics, if the collection has a weakness overall, it is perhaps the occasional lack of a sense of story, especially traditional story.
Overall, Debbie Felton’s handbook brings together for general and scholarly readers an immense amount of information on and speculation about the nature and function of monsters in classical mythology as well as their later reception, and so makes a welcome and worthy contribution to the current quest to better understand monsters and the monstrous.
[Review Length: 1168 words • Review posted on November 7, 2025]