[6] Homer described the Chimera in the Iliad, saying that "she was of divine stock not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire.

[9] According to Homer, the Chimera, who was reared by Araisodarus (the father of Atymnius and Maris, Trojan warriors killed by Nestor's sons Antilochus and Trasymedes), was "a bane to many men".

The Chimera first appeared early in the repertory of the proto-Corinthian pottery painters, providing some of the earliest identifiable mythological scenes that may be recognized in Greek art.

After some early hesitation, the Corinthian type was fixed in the 670s BC; the variations in the pictorial representations suggest multiple origins to Marilyn Low Schmitt.

A separate Attic tradition, where the goats breathe fire and the animal's rear is serpentine, begins with the confidence that Marilyn Low Schmitt is convinced that there must be unrecognized or undiscovered local precursors.

[citation needed] Although the Chimera of antiquity was forgotten in Medieval art, chimerical figures appear as embodiments of the deceptive, even satanic, forces of raw nature.

Virgil, in the Aeneid (book 5) employs Chimaera for the name of a gigantic ship of Gyas in the ship-race, with possible allegorical significance in contemporary Roman politics.

[22] Pliny the Elder cited Ctesias and quoted Photius identifying the Chimera with an area of permanent gas vents that still may be found by hikers on the Lycian Way in southwest Turkey.

Called in Turkish, Yanartaş (flaming rock), the area contains some two dozen vents in the ground, grouped in two patches on the hillside above the Temple of Hephaestus approximately 3 km north of Çıralı, near ancient Olympos, in Lycia.

Some western scholars of Chinese art, starting with Victor Segalen, use the word "chimera" generically to refer to winged leonine or mixed species quadrupeds, such as bixie, tianlu, and even qilin.