Serpents in the Soul

This chapter discusses Dio Chrysostom’s ‘Libyan myth’, which tells of savage serpent-women who ate any man they found, until they were destroyed by Heracles; Dio explains that this myth is an allegory about destructive passions in the human soul. The chapter discusses the narrative technique with which Dio tells a story which mixes mythic and historical time; the chapter also traces the intellectual roots of the essay back to Plato and discusses what it can teach us about how myth was understood and used in antiquity. In addition, the chapter considers the relation between Dio’s myth and the scenes in the Libyan desert in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Lucan’s Civil War.