Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

This chapter focuses on an important work of Angelo Poliziano, called Lamia. In it, Poliziano does two things relevant to the humanities today: he offers a new way of thinking about the enterprise of philosophy as it was understood since antiquity – the search for human wisdom and a wise style of life. In doing so, he suggests that academic philosophy as practiced in universities is not enough in the project of gaining wisdom and living wisely. Second, he suggests that philology – the deep, borderless reading of texts – represents a master discipline and one that is in fact more in line with philosophy’s authentic mission. Poliziano makes his most trenchant points by using narratives and fables, rather than syllogistic argumentation. In so doing, he makes a case for philology as an overarching discipline of disciplines and sets forth a new way of looking at philosophy