DOI 10.1515/tc-2013-0014 TC 2013; 5(2): 234–259 Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi A Scenario for Stesichorus’ Portrayal of the Monster Geryon in the Geryoneis Abstract: My reading of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis in this article is that of a poem that presents a different idea of relations between settlers and settled-upons and one that accommodates change through the adjustments in the representation of the monster Geryon – a reflection of and reaction to colonial encounters with non-Greeks in the West, both in Himera (Stesichorus’ hometown and the furthest Western colony of Sicily) and in Spain, where the poet sets the myth and the site of a Greek emporion in the sixth century BCE. Keywords: Geryon, Heracles, Iberia, Stesichorus, monster, colonial experience, hybridity Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi: XXXXX, E-Mail: minoussia@lit.auth.gr In a recent collection of essays entitled The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture, Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke 2003, in “an effort to historicize and politicize a structuralist approach to myth and text,” insist that “symbolic material be seen as embedded in social, political, and cultural discourses and as subject to change and renegotiation through time.”¹ This perspective assumes that symbol systems have a logic but that this logic is also subject to modification. It has great appeal for the study of myths, especially those of colonial antiquity. In general, Greek myth was a powerful tool for processing cultural contact, diversity and cultural exchange, which were the results of the interactions of Greeks with non-Greeks from the Bronze Age onward. In this process, the grand travels of the mythical Greek heroes could be seen as a mythical paradigm for the Greek experience * This paper was originally written for the conference Greek Poetry in Italy, organized by Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, 11–12 June 2007, whose proceedings were not published. It was subsequently given as a lecture at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies on March 2008. While reworking the paper for individual publication, new works on the Geryoneis were produced. Two of them, in particular, an article by C. Franzen published in QUCC 2009 and a commentary by P. Curtis on the Geryoneis published by Brill in 2011, provide explanations for the portrayal of Geryon. While their arguments are not the same as mine, this article has been recently revised in consideration of these two publications. 1 Dougherty-Kurke 2003, 6.