DRAGON, a fabulous monster, usually conceived as a huge winged, fire-breathing lizard or snake. The word is derived through the French and Latin from the Greek bpauccov, connected with &picouac "see," and interpreted as "sharp-sighted." The equivalent English word "drake" or "fire-drake" is derived from Anglo-Saxon draca. In Greece the word bpahccwv, was used origi nally of any large serpent, and the dragon of mythology, what ever shape it may have assumed, remains essentially a snake. For the part it has played in the myths and cults of various peoples and ages see the article SERPENT-CULTS. Here it may be said, in general, that in the East, where snakes are large and deadly (Chaldaea, Assyria, Phoenicia, to a less degree in Egypt), the serpent or dragon was symbolic of the principle of evil. Thus Apophis, in the Egyptian religion, was the great serpent of the world of darkness vanquished by Ra, while in Chaldaea the god dess Tiamat, the female principle of primeval Chaos, took the form of a dragon. Thus, too, in the Hebrew sacred books the serpent or dragon is the source of death and sin, a conception which was adopted in the New Testament and so passed into Christian mythology. In Greece and Rome, on the other hand, while the oriental idea of the serpent as an evil power found an entrance and gave birth to a plentiful brood of terrors (the ser pents of the Gorgons, Hydra, Chimaera and the like), the dra contes were also at times conceived as beneficent powers—sharp eyed dwellers in the inner parts of the earth, wise to discover its secrets and utter them in oracles, or powerful to invoke as guardian genii. Such were the sacred snakes in the temples of Aesculapius and the sacri dracontes in that of the Bona Dea at Rome ; or, as guardians, the Python at Delphi and the dragon of the Hesperides.
In general, however, the evil reputation of dragons was the stronger, and in Europe it outlived the other. Christianity, of course, confused the benevolent and malevolent serpent deities of the ancient cults in a common condemnation. The very "wis dom of the serpent" made him suspect ; "the devil," said St. Augustine, "is a lion and a dragon ; a lion because of his rage and a dragon because of his wiles." The dragon myths of the pagan East took new shapes in the legends of the victories of St. Michael and St. George ; and the kindly snakes of the "good goddess" lived on in the immanissimus draco whose baneful activity in a cave of the Capitol was cut short by the intervention of the saintly pope Silvester I. In this respect indeed Christian myth ology agreed with that of the pagan north. The similarity of the northern and oriental snake myths seems to point to a com mon origin in remote antiquity. Whatever be the origin of the northern dragon, the myths, when they first appear, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the south and east. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram—even of Lancelot, the beau ideal of mediaeval chivalry. Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors. In the works of the older naturalists, even in the great Historia animalium of so critical a spirit as Conrad Gesner (d. 1564), they still figure as part of the fauna known to science.
As to their form, this varied from the beginning. The Chal daean dragon Tiamat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings. The Egyptian Apophis was a monstrous snake, as were also, origi nally at least, the Greek dracontes. The dragon of the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 3), "the old serpent," is many-headed, like the Greek Hydra. The dragon slain by Beowulf is a snake (worm), for it "buckles like a bow" ; but that done to death by Sigurd, though its motions are heavy and snake-like, has legs, for he wounds it "behind the shoulder." On the other hand, the dragon seen by King Arthur in his dreams is, according to Malory, winged and active, for it "swoughs" down from the sky. The belief in dragons and the conceptions of their shape were undoubtedly often deter mined by the discovery of the remains of the gigantic extinct saurians.
The qualities of dragons being protective and terror-inspiring, and their effigies decorative, they were early used as warlike emblems. Thus, in Homer (Iliad, xi. 36 seq.), Agamemnon has on his shield, besides the Gorgon's head, a blue three-headed snake, just as ages afterwards the Norse warriors painted drag ons on their shields and carved dragons' heads on the prows of their ships. From the conquered Dacians, too, the Romans in Trajan's time borrowed the dragon ensign which became the standard of the cohort as the eagle was that of the legion; whence, by a long descent, the modern dragoon. Under the later East Roman emperors the purple dragon ensign became the ceremonial standard of the emperors, under the name of the 8parr6vTECoV. In England before the Conquest the dragon was chief among the royal ensigns in war. Its origin, according to the legend pre served in the Flores historiarum, was as follows : Uther Pen dragon, father of King Arthur, had a vision of a flaming dragon in the sky, which his seers interpreted as meaning that he should come to the kingdom. When this happened, after the death of his brother Aurelius, "he ordered two golden dragons to be fashioned, like to those he had seen in the circle of the star, one of which he dedicated in the cathedral of Winchester, the other he kept by him to be carried into battle." From Uther Dragon head, as the English called him, the Anglo-Saxon kings borrowed the ensign, their custom being, according to the Flores, to stand in battle "between the dragon and the standard." The dragon ensign which was borne before Richard I. in 1191, when on cru sade, "to the terror of the heathen beyond the sea," was that of the dukes of Normandy; but even after the loss of Normandy the dragon was the battle standard of English kings, and was displayed, e.g., by Henry III. in 1245 when he went to war against the Welsh. Not till the loth century was the dragon officially restored as proper only to the British race of Uther Pendragon, by its incorporation in the armorial bearings of the prince of Wales. Thus the dragon and wyvern (i.e., a two-legged snake, M.E. wivere, viper) took their place as heraldic symbols (see