Σμερδαλέον δὲ δέδορκεν, etc.
Now the Greeks were certainly sensitive to the expression of animal eyes—witness “cow-eyed” Hera, or the opprobrious epithet “dog-eyed”; altogether, the more we study what is left of their zoological researches, the more we realize what close observers they were in natural history. Aristotle, for instance, points out sexual differences in the feet of the crawfish which were overlooked up to a short time ago. And Hesiod also insists upon the dragon’s eyes. Yet it is significant that ophis, the snake, is derived, like drakon, from a root meaning nothing more than to perceive or regard. There is no connotation of ferocity in either of the words. Gesner long ago suspected that the dragon was so called simply from its keen or rapid perception.
One likes to search for some existing animal prototype of a fabled creature like this, seeing that to invent such things out of sheer nothing is a feat beyond human ingenuity—or, at least, beyond what the history of others of their kind leads us to expect. It may well be that the Homeric writer was acquainted with the Uromastix lizard that occurs in Asia Minor, and whoever has watched this beast, as I have done, cannot fail to have been impressed by its contemplative gestures, as if it were gazing intently (drakon) at something. It is, moreover, a “dweller in rocky places,” and more than this, a vegetarian—an “eater of poisonous herbs” as Homer somewhere calls his dragon. So Aristotle says: “When the dragon has eaten much fruit, he seeks the juice of the bitter lettuce; he has been seen to do this.”
Are we tracking the dragon to his lair? Is this the aboriginal beast? Not at all, I should say. On the contrary, this is a mere side-issue, to follow which would lead us astray. The reptile-dragon was invented when men had begun to forget what the arch-dragon was; it is the product of a later stage—the materializing stage; that stage when humanity sought to explain, in naturalistic fashion, the obscure traditions of the past. We must delve still deeper. . . .
My own dragon theory is far-fetched—perhaps necessarily so, dragons being somewhat remote animals. The dragon, I hold, is the personification of the life within the earth—of that life which, being unknown and uncontrollable, is eo ipso hostile to man. Let me explain how this point is reached.
The animal which looks or regards. . . . Why—why an animal? Why not drakon = that which looks?
Now, what looks?
The eye.
This is the key to the understanding of the problem, the key to the subterranean dragon-world.
The conceit of fountains or sources of water being things that see (drakon)—that is, eyes—or bearing some resemblance to eyes, is common to many races. In Italy, for example, two springs in the inland sea near Taranto are called “Occhi”—eyes; Arabs speak of a watery fountain as an eye; the notion exists in England top—in the “Blentarn” of Cumberland, the blind tarn (tarn = a trickling of tears), which is “blind” because dry and waterless, and therefore lacking the bright lustre of the open eye.