ABSTRACT
Among the images which Plato chose to describe the human soul was a monster, a “many-headed beast, with a ring of tame and savage animal heads.”1 Imagine the soul, he asks, as a Chimera, a Scylla, a Cerberus, all creatures with mismatched body parts and sharp-toothed mouths.2 Imprudence and acts of injustice feed this internal monster, as the “human” element of the soul grows weak and eventually starves. Plato broadly diagnosed the desires of this “appetitive” element of the soul: “food, drink, sex, and all the things that go along with them.”3 Early-Christian authorities, too, cautioned that indulging in carnal pleasures could generate monstrosities. In the late fourth century BCE, John Chrysostom warned that the wealthy crave such extravagance that, “if a person wishes to dream up one of their desires, nothing would materialise for that prodigy-neither Scylla nor Chimaera nor hippocentaur, but you will find that (their desire) contains all beasts at once.”4
