A Persian Man-Eater, Transmitted by One Greek

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.