The 12th-century bestiary in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 764, sets the griffin and the manticore on facing pages. One guards gold. The other hunts human flesh. The comparison was already old when that manuscript was bound.
A manticore (from Persian martikhoras, “man-eater”) has a human face, a lion’s body, and a tail that shoots venomous spines. A griffin (from Greek gryps, “hooked”) has a lion’s body and an eagle’s head and wings. They share the lion’s torso but diverge on every point of meaning: the griffin is a guardian of the divine, the manticore a predator of the human.
Two lion-bodied hybrids from antiquity. One is a guardian of the divine; the other is a predator of the human. This comparison traces their origins, meanings and the medieval bestiary tradition that set them in opposition.
Where Did the Manticore First Appear?
The manticore enters European record through Ctesias, a Greek physician who served at the Persian court of Artaxerxes II around 400 BCE. His book Indica described a beast of India with a human face, three rows of teeth, and a tail that could shoot spines. Ctesias never visited India. He relied on Persian travelers. But his account stuck.
Pliny the Elder copied the manticore into his Natural History (77 CE), adding that its eyes were blue and its voice sounded like a flute mixed with a hiss. For the Romans, the manticore became a marvel of the East, a creature that proved how strange the world beyond the empire could be.
Medieval bestiaries inherited the manticore through a chain of Latin translations. The 12th-century bestiary in Cambridge, MS Mm.5.31, calls it mantichora and repeats Ctesias’ detail about the three rows of teeth. What changed was the tone. Where Pliny was merely curious, the bestiarists were suspicious. A creature with a human face that eats people and hides its nature was, to them, clearly the devil.
Where Did the Griffin Come From?
The griffin is older in the archaeological record by at least two centuries. The earliest known griffin appears on a 7th-century BCE Greek bronze cauldron from Crete, now in the Olympia Museum. By the 6th century BCE, griffin motifs were standard on Greek armor and vases.
Herodotus, writing around 430 BCE, placed griffins in Scythia, the steppe north of the Black Sea. They guarded gold. The Arimaspi, one-eyed men on horseback, stole that gold in a perpetual war that the Greek poet Aristeas described in a lost epic, the Arimaspea. Aelian, in his On the Nature of Animals (roughly 200 CE), added that griffins were enemies of horses and would tear them apart.
Modern paleontologists have proposed a source for the griffin: fossilized Protoceratops skeletons exposed by erosion in the Gobi Desert and the Altai Mountains. Scythian gold miners would have found these beaked, four-legged skulls and interpreted them as the remains of a hybrid beast. The theory was first argued by folklorist Adrienne Mayor in The First Fossil Hunters (2000). It is not universally accepted, but it explains the griffin’s consistent association with gold-rich Scythian territory.
How Did the Two Beasts Mean Different Things?
The griffin carried a positive charge from the start. Its dual nature, lion and eagle, made it a creature of both earth and sky, and therefore a natural guardian of what lay between: treasure, temples, the sacred. In medieval Christian bestiaries, the griffin became a type of Christ: the lion ruled earth, the eagle ruled the heavens, and the griffin united both natures in one body.
The manticore, by contrast, was a creature of deception. Its human face looked friendly. Its appetite was not. For the bestiarists, that was the devil’s signature. The manticore represented the false prophet, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, or Antichrist himself. A 13th-century French bestiary notes that the manticore’s tail spines are like the devil’s temptations: they strike from a distance and rot the soul before the victim knows he is hit.
That is the fundamental difference. The griffin is hybrid as divine synthesis. The manticore is hybrid as corrupt mimicry. One elevates its parts. The other warps them.
What Did People Actually Do With These Beasts?
They were not worshipped. They were not summoned. But they were used.
The griffin appears in the Key of Solomon, a grimoire compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries, as one of the spirit forms that a demon might take when constrained by the magician’s circle. The text warns that a griffin-shaped spirit is dangerous but not malicious. It can be commanded.
The manticore appears in later demonological texts, notably the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (1583) by Johann Weyer, where it is listed as a form taken by the demon Purson. The connection was natural: if the manticore was a demonic symbol, then actual demons might wear its shape.
In heraldry, the two creatures diverged completely. The griffin became a common charge on English and German coats of arms, symbolizing strength and vigilance. The manticore appears in heraldry only rarely, and almost always as a crest for families who wanted to project ferocity or exotic origin. The de Grey family of England used a manticore as a supporter in the 14th century, but the practice never spread.
What Do People Get Wrong About Them?
Three misconceptions persist.
First, that the manticore shoots quills from its back. No classical source says this. The original accounts describe the tail itself as the weapon: a scorpion-like stinger that could be fired like a javelin. The quill image comes from late medieval illustrations where artists confused the manticore with the porcupine-like ludus serpentis of some bestiary traditions.
Second, that the griffin is always benevolent. Griffins were dangerous. They killed horses. They tore apart humans who approached their gold. The medieval griffin was a guardian, and guardians do not distinguish between thief and innocent. The griffin was good in the abstract and lethal in practice.
Third, that the two creatures are regional variants of the same idea. They are not. The griffin comes from the Scythian-Greek steppe. The manticore comes from Persian accounts of India. Their parallel lion bodies are coincidence, not lineage. The bestiary compilers who set them on facing pages were making a moral contrast, not a taxonomic one.
How Do They Compare on the Page?
In the illuminated bestiaries, the visual difference is stark. The griffin is drawn with eagle feathers, often gold-tipped, and its front legs are talons. Its beak is hooked and its eyes are round. The manticore has a human head, sometimes bearded, with human ears and a shock of hair. Its tail ends in a scorpion’s curve or a spray of spines. It is often painted in red or brown, while the griffin is gold, white, and blue.
A reader of MS Bodley 764 who turned from the griffin to the manticore would have experienced a drop in temperature. The griffin page was light. The manticore page was dark. The moral was visual before it was written.
FAQ
Can manticores and griffins be found in the same text?
Yes. Medieval bestiaries routinely include both, often within a few leaves of each other. The Aberdeen Bestiary (circa 1200) contains entries for both creatures.
Which is older, the manticore or the griffin?
The griffin is older in the material record, appearing in 7th-century BCE Greek art. The manticore appears in Greek writing of the 5th century BCE, but its Persian oral source is likely older.
Did manticores and griffins ever fight each other in any classical myth?
No. They originate from different geographic and cultural zones and were never pitted against each other in any surviving classical or medieval narrative.
Why do people confuse them so often?
Both are lion-bodied hybrids from antiquity, but a glance at the head resolves the confusion. The griffin has a bird’s head. The manticore has a human face.
The two beasts are not opposites. They are parallel lines that never meet. One watches from above. The other waits below. That is the comparison the bestiarists understood and the one that still holds.
For further reading, explore our full mythical creatures hub, consult the bestiary entry in our glossary, or continue with our guide to mythical hybrids and their medieval sources.