Manticore

The manticore comes into Greek from a Persian word meaning "man-eater" (martya-khvara), and it reaches Europe through essentially one channel: Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BCE, who described in his Indica an Indian beast with the body of a lion, a human face, three rows of teeth, blue eyes and a scorpion-like tail that shoots venomous spines, which devours men whole and leaves nothing. Aristotle repeats the account with reservations, citing Ctesias by name; Pliny the Elder passes it on; and through Pliny and the later bestiary tradition, where it is often called the mantichora, the creature entered medieval Europe as an emblem of ferocity and, sometimes, of the devil. Because it descends from a single ultimately Persian report filtered through one Greek writer whom later antiquity already thought prone to marvels, the manticore is a clear example of how one exotic traveller's description, repeated respectfully for two thousand years, hardens into a fixed creature; its details barely change from Ctesias to the modern fantasy bestiary.

Ctesias of Cnidus was a physician at the Persian court in the late fifth century before the common era, and he wrote an account of India based on what he was told there rather than on travel. In it is the martichora: the body of a lion, a human face, three rows of teeth, and a tail that fires spines. He says he saw one at court. Nothing in the account is independently confirmed and Ctesias had a reputation for credulity in antiquity itself.

The transmission is unusually clean. Aristotle repeats the description and names Ctesias as his source, which is an early example of a naturalist marking a claim as second hand. Pliny takes it up and gives it a Latin audience, Aelian passes it on, and from there it enters the medieval bestiaries, where it acquires colour and a moral. Every later manticore in European art descends from one man's report of a conversation.

The name is the most interesting survival. It is generally derived from Old Persian elements meaning man and eater, which suggests that what Ctesias heard was a description of the tiger, an animal Greek writers did not know well and Persian informants did. If that is right, the manticore is a real animal that lost its identity in transmission and grew a human face on the way, which is the opposite of the usual direction of travel for a monster.