Campe


This article is about a mythological monster. To read about the lexicographer, please see Joachim Heinrich Campe.

A chthonic female monster in Greek mythology, Kampê ("crooked") was set by Kronos to guard the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes in Tartarus after Kronos imprisoned them there; she was killed by Zeus when he rescued the Cyclopes for help in the battle with the Titans[1] Campe was a she-dragon with a woman's head and torso and a scorpion-like tail. Nonnus, in Dionysiaca (18.23-264) gives the most elaborated description of her.[2] Joseph Eddy Fontenrose suggests that for Nonnus Campe is a Greek refiguring of Tiamat and that "she is Echidna under another name, as Nonnos indicates, calling her Echidnaean Enyo, identifying her snaky legs with echidna's," and "a female counterpart of his Typhon".[3] In his lexicon Hesychius of Alexandria (K.614) noted that the poet Epicharmos had called Campe a kētos, or sea-monster.[4]

In popular culture

In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & The Olympians the Kampê guards Briares on Alcatraz. She also bears Ariadne's String in the Labyrinth. Its description is a giant black dragon with a waist of different beasts that form and recede into her waist, a hair of snakes, wing of a bat and snakes at her feet.

Notes

  1. ^ pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke 1.2.1.
  2. ^ Theoi.com: Kampe, including translated section from Dionysiaca
  3. ^ Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins 1974:243.
  4. ^ Max Mayer Die Giganten und Titanen 1887:232-34.
 This article relating to Greek mythology is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.






stock | retire | vm
Why are we here?
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
This page is cache of Wikipedia. History