See also: Manticore (homonymy)

The manticore is a fantastic Créature having the body of a Lion (sometimes with red fur), the head of a human (often with horn S, eyes gray and three lines of Dent S) and a tail of scorpion or dragon, sometimes equipped with wings, able to launch poisonous darts to immobilize its prey. Its size varies between that of a Lion and that of a Cheval.

Of Persian origin , the manticore is mangeuse men: its name comes from the Persan martya , “man”, and xvar , “to eat”. The fact that one finds it in the European Mythologie would be due to the Greek Médecin Ctésias of the court of Artaxerxès II, at the fourth century BC, which speaks about it in Indika , a work on the known India of the authors Greek but lost since.

Evoking the animals which he saw in Rome, the Roman author gréco- Pausanias writes in his Description of Greece :

“As for the animal described by Ctésias in his Indian History and that he says being called will martichoras by the Indians and “mangeuse men” by the Greeks, I am brought to think that it is about the tiger. But owing to the fact that it has three lines of teeth in each one of its jaws, and from the points at the end of its tail with which it is defended in close combat and that it shoots like the arrows from an archer at his remote enemies, I think that it is about a fable that the Indians because of their excessive fear of the animal are transmitted. ” ( Description , XXI, 5)

Pline Old the does not share the skepticism of Pausanias. Like Aristote in its Natural history , it includes the will martichoras (that it transcribes manticorus incorrectly by copying Aristote, from where the current term) among the animals which it describes in its Naturalis Historia (v. 77). The book of Pline will be regarded as a reference to the Moyen-âge, where the manticores are sometimes represented in the Bestiaire S. the manticore reappear at the 16th century in Héraldique and influence certain representations mannerists (sometimes of paintings, but generally of the frescos called Grotteschi ), where one sees the sin of fraud represented under the features of a dream having the face of a beautiful woman, features which one finds in the drawings of sphinx in France with 18th and 18th centuries.

One says nowadays that the manticore lives the Forêt S of Asia, especially of Indonesia. The manticore is supposed to kill its victim of only one blow of teeth or claws before swallowing it very whole. The local legends affirm that when a man disappears without leaving of trace, that can be only the work of a manticore.

The manticore is mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in its Dictionnaire of the fantastic zoology .

External bond

• the manticore