With the demons and angels out of the way, we move onto our next section: Hellenistic creatures! I decided to specify Hellenistic because some of our creatures do not live within the confines of the Mediterranean. And others had their identities fleshed out by the Romans. Hellenistic was my way of resolving this method, as Hellenistic culture found its way from France to India without being tied down to Greece or Rome geographically. Our creatures will be further split into those from mythology and natural philosophy. Mythical creatures come from poetry and oral history; they have stories that they come from and star in. Those from natural philosophy can't say the same. They mostly come from traveler's tales and are exaggerations of real creatures. No myths feature these creatures as protagonists or antagonists. What we know about them is recounted by the earliest scientists of the Hellenistic and Roman eras.
Our first Greek creature is the Laestrygonian giant. One of many, they’re a whole race who inhabit a single island where they try to kill and eat outsiders. Though cannibalism is usually their most notable aspect in other texts, in the Odyssey they’re more associated with cattle-farming. Their name even translates to “gatherers of raw hide”. They pasture their herds 24/7, without the separations between night and day. If one could keep themselves from sleeping they could earn twice the wages of a herder, one at one time for drawing cattle, the next for shepherding sheep. Even Homer admits their home is lofty (for the standards of the Greek dark ages). While they’re referred to as “mountain-high”, a poetic exaggeration, their children are as tall as grown men, which gives us a slight clue as to their true height. If we assume the child is around 5-6, the equivalent height would be 100 cm tall, which is ballooned to the average height for a male in Greece, 175 cm. That would mean Laestrygonians are 1.75 times taller than people, so an adult would be 306 cm or 10 ft tall. Plenty tall enough to spear men like fish as they do in the Odyssey. This also probably explains why herding is so important to them, as they need more cattle and sheep to supply their population.
