Three are the realms shared by every ancient civilization: that of the living, that of the dead, and that, higher and more sublime, of the gods. They are three sharply distinct realms, hard to communicate with one another, even though the fates of their members are interrelated. The living, in particular, feel that they owe much of their destiny and their lived experience to the gods. From them, they believe, they receive protection or hardship, struggling to win their favour or to make their own reasons known to them.
With the realm of the underworld the relationship is even more fraught. The dead are generally regarded as repositories of a higher wisdom, yet they are unable to share it with the living, precisely because between the two realms there are barriers that can hardly be surmounted. Between the three realms, in fact, there are monstrous beings, hybrid creatures that mark out their borders. They are beings that combine animal and human traits. The Sirens, for instance, are bird-women, the sphinxes lionesses with a woman's head, and a considerable role is played instead by the griffin, a cross between lion and eagle, a monster that stands between the gods and men.
The griffin is a combination fairly easy to conceive in a mythopoeic world such as the ancient one: if one wishes to create a hybrid endowed with superhuman power, one combines the most powerful land animal, the lion, with the most powerful of the birds, the eagle itself[1].
The lion is the most aggressive predator (the females in particular), but it is also the animal best suited to the defence of its group. It is the very byword for defending its pride and for sharply marking out the territory over which it rules, and for this reason in many Eastern societies and cultures it represented royal power. The eagle, on the other hand, is the most powerful bird, not only thanks to its sight and its talons, but above all for its ability to fly high, to reach the most extreme heights. Both have on various occasions been chosen as a symbol of royalty, and the eagle in particular, in the Greek world, was an attribute of Zeus, the king of men and of gods.
The combination of certain features of particular animals (strength, the ability to fly, cunning, for example) can only create a being superior to humans and at the same time supply the image of the monster, precisely because of its aberrant qualities. Unlike metamorphoses, the hybrid consists in the grafting of one nature onto another, though it leaves both visible and recognizable: for this reason it is common as a decorative motif, as well as an element and a protagonist of myths. It has, in fact, a great symbolic charge, because it can evoke ancestral fears and dreads, bringing out the unequalled power that derives from the sum of forms of power and excellence. It is a symbol easy to decode.
For these reasons, in almost all ancient cultures, the griffin is widespread and familiar and holds sway over iconography and over myth alike, so much so that people still try today to determine what its point of origin and of diffusion may have been. Moreover, the differences that occur among the griffins of the various periods and the various civilizations have suggested a Darwinian evolution of this monster, an evolution that would also trace a linear path, from the East, all the way to the griffins that feature on the coats of arms of many medieval cities in Italy, even though along this evolutionary line one finds numerous stumbles, steps backward, recoveries, and leaps, which sketch out a complex picture.

Tracing a coherent evolutionary line has the advantage of creating a continuity between periods and peoples, and above all it makes reassuring the idea that this image, moving out of the East, would have found a new and original reworking among the Mediterranean peoples, arriving at an entirely new conceptualization in Greece and then in Rome. It has been thought that the griffin, born in Mesopotamia around the 4th millennium BC, reached Anatolia and then moved on to Egypt and Crete, and from there migrated to Greece and finally to Rome. The first example, in fact, seems to come from Susa, and would be a seal with the wings, head and forelegs of a bird, and the mane and body of a lion.
If instead one starts from the observation that the eagle and the lion constitute the symbols of animal excellence in the two realms of air and earth, their combination must have been intuited and imagined among various peoples without any need to assume a dependence between them or a borrowing. It is an archetypal intuition, one that recurs independently on various occasions and in various civilizations. Moreover, what we identify with the griffin across different cultures and different periods shows different features, names and functions: at times it associates the falcon, not the eagle; in some cases it appears without wings, with or without locks falling from its head, with or without equine ears. For that matter, following the line of inheritance and evolution, one could even, as a paradox, look for a common thread linking the griffin to the Aztec god Quetzalcoaltl, the feathered serpent, which holds within it the duality of the bird (sky) and the serpent (earth), or imagine that there is a continuity between the angels, winged bearers of announcements, and Nike, herself a winged figure, as well as Eros, in Greek mythology. It is obvious that the hybrid springs from man's desire to create powerful images that symbolically contain certain features and functional gifts. The wings are the necessary attribute of one who announces or serves as an intermediary between men and divinities; the legs represent the ability to seize the prey and to defend oneself.
In ancient societies, even those such as the Greek and the Roman, which had no direct contact with lions but made abundant use of them as a symbol of strength and power, people arrived naturally at the creation of a similar image that would constitute the archetype of undisputed dominion and of monstrous force.
It is therefore possible to reconstruct not a continuous evolutionary line but an articulated series of geneses, taking into account also the fact that these feline/bird hybrids are very frequent and very varied, even though, by convention, one speaks in every case of "griffins". The usual name seems to be Greek and linked to grypòs, which means "hooked", "curved", perhaps to be connected to the beak and the talons that made it in some ways aggressive and invulnerable[2], although the name the griffin took in the various cultures and religious spheres was quite different. In Egypt, for example, the hybrid is made up of a falcon (which symbolizes royalty), and the root sfr/srf is perhaps to be connected to a serpent form, like the Hebrew seraph[3].
The Assyrian world, around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, produces a rich series of griffins, distinguishing however the demon-griffin (with a long serrated crest and a human body) that guards the tree of life from the griffin with a leonine body, which challenges men in combat and with which it is not easy to be reconciled. The griffin, at this stage, represents the hostile forces of nature, the storms, the malevolent demons that embody the ancestral fears of men.
Almost at the same time in Crete, in the throne room of Knossos (1450 BC), the griffin appears in a new and by no means aggressive form. It has the head of an eagle and a mane of curls hanging from it, a feline body but, above all, it lacks wings. The series of griffins that must have run along the entire base of the room does not seem to emerge from a world of nightmares, nor to strike terror into the visitor.
The griffin of Megiddo (Israel), dating to the 13th c. BC, shares with the one at Knossos the position of the eagle's head turned upward, but it is winged. Of a later period is the griffin known as the Phoenician style, coming from the palace of Nimrud. It is often in a rampant position as it tries to feed from the tree of life: it has the head of a falcon and two lateral curls.

In Egypt the griffin appears as a beneficent demon: it has the head of a falcon and is furnished with a knife, and it is depicted in the act of cutting off the head of the serpent of evil.
To return to Greece, an unusual specimen is a pyxis of the 12th c. BC, Mycenaean, kept at the Museum of Eretria, on which two griffins are depicted beak-feeding their young in a nest: it is clear how in this case their belonging to the realm of birds was felt more strongly.
In archaic and classical Greece the griffin appears with features more similar to the Hittite ones: it has equine ears, an open mouth and a protuberance on its head. It is very common as the protome of cauldrons.
From Ascoli Satriano, in the province of Foggia, comes a table support (trapezophóros), datable to the second half of the 4th c. BC, on which two griffins are depicted tearing a fawn apart: they have large polychrome wings and the head of an eagle, which rests, however, on a serpentine neck.
These images constitute a tiny portion among the very numerous iconographic sources that archaeology has handed down to us. Complex and diverse are the types, and varied and articulated the uses of this symbol. The fact remains, however, that the Greek world is richer in literary testimonies, which provide us with important data on the condition and the history of these monsters.
The Greek sources reconstruct the appearance of the monster as well, but above all they try to locate it and to recount the relations it maintains with that part of humanity with which it deals. One of the oldest testimonies in this regard is Aeschylus, who in Prometheus Bound has the protagonist say, as he speaks with Ino (802-17): «Beware the silent hounds of Zeus, the sharp-beaked Griffins, and the one-eyed host of the Arimaspians on horseback, who dwell beside the gold-steeped stream of the river Pluto». The ancient commentaries tell us that this river flows in Ethiopia, and so Aeschylus seems to place the griffins at the southern margins of the world. The griffins, with their sharp beaks, are always in conflict with the Arimaspians, that mythical one-eyed people of horsemen who dwell beside a river rich in gold. This testimony of the 5th c. BC connects the griffins with gold and with the Arimaspians, and it is not the only one.
According to tradition, the first to speak of the griffins to the Greeks was a certain Aristeas, who is said to have travelled among the Scythians and then returned home laden with experience, new knowledge and a shaman's fame[4].
The Greek historian Herodotus (4. 13) states that Aristeas of Proconnesus had recounted in one of his poems that he had reached the Issedones, possessed by Phoebus, and that beyond the Issedones dwelt the Arimaspians, men said to have but a single eye; and that beyond the Arimaspians were the griffins that guard the gold; beyond the griffins the Hyperboreans, as far as the sea.
In another passage, Herodotus (3. 116), with greater precision, places them toward the north of Europe, where there is said to have been gold in great quantity. He recounts that the Arimaspians, men with a single eye, tried to snatch it from the griffins. Aware that he is reporting an indirect testimony, Herodotus doubts that this version of the griffins and the Arimaspians has any foundation: in his view it would derive from the entirely human tendency to project onto the extremities of the world, which surround the other lands and enclose them, «the things that we consider most beautiful and most rare».
One of the earliest testimonies in Greek figurative art of a griffin attacked by an Arimaspian, dressed in the Scythian manner, dates to the middle of the 6th c. BC, and it is an Attic black-figure cup (Angers, Musée Pincé 1006). And it is precisely from the north-east, that is from southern Russia, that there comes a bronze mirror (now kept in St Petersburg) on which two men are depicted struggling with a griffin[5]. It is clear how the association of the griffin with the gold of Apollo and with the East originated from the accounts of the journey of Aristeas, who had travelled precisely among the Scythians, in the Caucasus, and how the Cretan griffin has no evident links with the one represented in archaic and classical Greece. It is possible that the memory of the Cretan griffin had been lost and that another type was therefore taken up.
Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician who lived at the Persian court in the 5th to 4th c. BC, in his Indikà (fr. 45, 26) speaks of the gold to be found in the many great mountains of India, where the griffins are said to dwell, four-legged birds as large as wolves, with legs and claws resembling those of a lion; their breast feathers are said to be red, while those of the rest of the body would be black. They would be the guardians of the gold in the mountains.
In the Roman world, on the other hand, Pliny places in one case (Natural History 7. 10) the griffins and the one-eyed Arimaspians in the land of the Scythians, to the north, not far from where the north wind rises, a place at the margins not by chance called «the bolt of the earth», while in another he imagines them in Ethiopia (Natural History 10. 136) as monsters furnished with a hooked beak and with ears[6].
Aelian (2nd to 3rd c. AD), in the work On Animals (4. 28), provides a more detailed picture. First of all he places the griffin in India and describes it as a quadruped furnished with claws similar to those of the lion, provided with white wings and with black feathers on its back, while those of the front part of the body would be red; the head of an eagle and blazing eyes. Aelian too connects the griffins with gold and places them in a desert region, where it is possible to carry off, by digging, great quantities of the precious metal only on moonless nights, after having deceived the griffins. His contemporary, Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 3. 48), reaffirms that the griffins dig up the gold, drawing it from the rocks in which it is set, and extract it with their beaks. They are said to live in India, venerated because consecrated to the Sun, and for this reason the Indian artists depict the chariot of the Sun yoked to four griffins, resembling winged lions. Philostratus adds that the griffins, of all birds, are the slowest, and can make only short flights.
Beyond these opposing placements, the tradition agrees on the link with gold and with the solar divinities (above all Apollo) and on their arrangement at the margins of the civilized and inhabited world, according to a scheme that outlines a perfect geography. The ancient historians, in fact, describe a world that has at its centre the civilized peoples facing the Mediterranean, among them the Greeks. Immediately at the edges of this developed nucleus there are other, inferior forms of civilization, the so-called barbarians, who gradually move away from civilized man and take on monstrous features: for the Greeks, this is the case of the Cyclopes and the Arimaspians, unanimously described as one-eyed. Their cultural inferiority is expressed, then, in outward and visible signs of physical deformity. These peoples, who live at the borders of the world, are paradoxically in contact with the gods, and for this reason before them there exists a margin of protection represented by the monstrous beings that defend the impassable boundary.
The griffins, in this sense, are the guardians of the gold of Apollo, just as the Sirens defend the knowledge of the future that the dead possess, and they also stand guard over the impassable boundary between the realm of the dead and that of the living. And it is precisely because they were imagined as peripheral monsters, at the limit that man can reach, that the Greeks often placed griffin protomes on the rims of cauldrons, to show how they were the protection of the outer margins and the safeguard of what was contained within.
In a later period, the griffin would be associated with Nemesis. Nonnus of Panopolis (48. 382 ff.) says that «around Nemesis, beside the throne, there flies an avenging bird (alastor), a winged griffin, which springs forward on its four legs and is the messenger of the goddess, announcing her arrival in advance». Once again, the griffin has to do with solarity. Nemesis, in fact, as Macrobius maintains (Saturnalia, 1. 22. 1), invoked against arrogance, is nothing other than the power of the sun, which «has the property of darkening and withdrawing from view the objects that shine, and of illuminating and offering to view what is dark».
In the medieval period the griffin would return, thanks to the ready intelligibility of the mingling of two different natures, as a symbol of Christ. Isidore of Seville[7], in fact, states that Christ is a lion because he is king and mighty, but is an eagle because he returns to heaven. The mingling of the two natures is a sign of the superiority of the being. No longer a monster, the griffin is the ally of man, his benefactor. Thus Dante Alighieri, in the Purgatorio (29. 106-114), would describe a triumphal chariot, perhaps a symbol of the Church, drawn by a griffin whose bird parts were of gold, while the remaining ones were white: the former represented the divine nature, the latter the human nature of Christ, and they were moreover flecked with red to symbolize his passion. Once again the link with the divine and with solarity returns; once again the griffin is connected with gold and with the eternity that it represents; once again the griffin declares its exceptional, superhuman, divine powers.

In the medieval world, moreover, it would feature on several civic coats of arms, but the griffin of Perugia has little to do with that of the Etruscans. It has wrongly been held that the griffin of the coat of arms derives from the statue that, together with the lion, stood on the fountain of Arnolfo di Cambio[8]. The types of the two griffins are, in fact, different: in the case of the bronze statue it has the body of a lion, the head of an eagle and equine ears, while in the case of the coat of arms it is three-quarters eagle and for the rest (the hind legs and the tail) it is lion. The front claws, in fact, are those of a bird, they are not a lion's legs. This is a substantial difference, one that could hardly be explained as a free inspiration drawn from the statue to which the people of Perugia were much attached. The ancient griffins were in most cases depicted with four feline legs; in the medieval period a griffin with the front part of a bird became widespread. This is clear precisely from widely diffused images, such as that of a Perugian codex of 1279, or from the coat of arms of Narni, of Genoa or of Alessandria, which present a griffin very similar to the one of Perugia.

Notes

[1] A. Brelich, Gli eroi greci. Un problema storico-religioso, Milano 2010², pp. 191-193, sees for example in the theriomorphism of heroes a sign of their superiority.

[2] There are, however, other hypotheses: from the root grabh, found also in German, meaning "to seize", or from the Hebrew kerub, winged sphinxes themselves derived from the motif of the griffins guarding the tree of life, common on Syrian and Mitannian seals of the second millennium BC.

[3] N. Wyatt, "Grasping the Griffin: Identifying and Characterizing the Griffin in Egyptian and West Semitic Tradition", Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 1, 2009, pp. 29–39.

[4] Aristeas of Proconnesus is thought to have lived around the 7th c. BC, cf. J.D.P. Bolton, Aristeas of Proconnesus, Oxford 1962, p. 7.

[5] J. Boardman, Archeologia della nostalgia. Come i greci reinventarono il loro passato, Milano 2004, pp. 131-137.

[6] Pegasos equino capite volucres et grypas aurita aduncitate rostri fabulos reor, illos in Scythia, hos in Aethiopia».

[7] Etym. 12. 2: «Christus est leo pro regno et fortitudine… aquila propter quoid post resurrectionem ad astra remeavit».

[8] G. Caputo, "La tradizione etrusca del grifo e l'emblema di Perugia", Studi Etruschi 29, 1961, p. 421.

Donato Loscalzo, who teaches Greek Language and Literature at the University of Perugia, has worked on Greek lyric and in particular on Pindar (La Nemea settima di Pindaro, Viterbo 2000; La parola inestinguibile. Studi sull'epinicio pindarico, Roma-Pisa 2003), on Greek theatre (Il pubblico a teatro nella Grecia antica, Roma 2008) and on the comedy of Aristophanes (Aristofane e la coscienza felice, Alessandria 2010). He is preparing a collection of literary sources on the Athenian democracy of the 5th and 4th c. BC for the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla (Mondadori).