Mythology
Campe was a dragon with a woman's head and torso and a scorpion-like tail. Nonnus (Dionysiaca 18.23–264) gives the most elaborated description of her. Joseph Eddy Fontenrose suggests that for Nonnus Campe is a Greek refiguring of Tiamat and that "she is Echidna under another name, as Nonnos indicates, calling her Echidnaean Enyo, identifying her snaky legs with Echidna's", and "a female counterpart of his Typhon".
Campe was set by Cronus to guard the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes in Tartarus after Cronus didn't release them from their imprisonment there when they were imprisoned by Uranus. She was killed by Zeus when he rescued the Cyclopes for help in the battle with the Titans.
In his lexicon Hesychius of Alexandria (K.614) noted that the poet Epicharmos had called Campe a kētos, or sea-monster.
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Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
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