Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Zoobiography of the Ancient Sea Monster

A Zoobiography of the Ancient Sea Monster

Denson, Ryan
Collar, Anna
Eidinow, Esther

Hardcover

Series: Ancient Environments

Literary CriticismMythology & FolkloreFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 1350451878
ISBN13: 9781350451872
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Sep 3 2026
Pages: 232
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Examining a vast corpus of literary references and artistic representations, this volume offers the first comprehensive study of the ketos - the sea monster imagined by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The chapters examine the three central traditions of thought that existed about this imaginary animal in Graeco-Roman culture. The first tradition concerns the ketos as a divinely associated monster: a force aligned with marine gods (chiefly Poseidon) and one which was fought by Heracles and Perseus. The second tradition features the ketos in more naturalised contexts, as depicted among ancient geographers and historians, as a type of monster roaming the distant waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The third tradition concerns the fusion of the ketos with Leviathan and the other Old Testament sea monsters in the minds of early Christians. Accordingly, this classical sea monster became the image of the creature that swallowed Jonah, and, alternatively, a monster associated with the Devil and cosmological evil.

While other monsters of Graeco-Roman mythology, such as the Minotaur and Medusa, are household names in modern popular culture, the ketos has effectively been lost in the modern imagination. Yet it was no small part of the Graeco-Roman imagination. This sea monster formed a key aspect as to how the sea-adjacent societies of ancient Greece and Rome perceived ancient marine environments. It was this fantastic sea beast that so haunted ancient mariners, and in turn, which contributed to ancient perceptions of the marine world as a profoundly alien and hostile environment.

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