BETWEEN ANCIENT ANIMAL STUDIES AND MYTHOLOGY: THE CASE OF THE HIPPOCAMPS AND OTHER MIXOKĒTĒ

The place of hippocamps in the Graeco-Roman cultural imagination was highly uneven, as they appeared prominently in visual media, but were exceedingly rare in ancient literary sources. Hippocamps can be demonstrated to be a mythological creature wholly derived from art, but which never prominently made a transition into narrative storytelling. These half-horse, half-marine animals were, then, accompanied, from the Hellenistic period onwards, by a series of other marine Mischwesen (‘mixed beings’), a grouping that I demonstrate to be related to the sea monster of the ancient world, the κῆτος (pl. κήτη). This article further examines this grouping of imaginary animals as a case study to consider the imaginative construction of such figures as a result of cultural assumptions about nature, rather than mere misapprehensions of real animals alone. In this case, it is the notion that the undersea world was essentially reflective of the terrestrial world, containing such ‘sea versions’ of land mammals.