Literary notes about hydra (AI summary)
The word “hydra” in literature has been used as a potent metaphor for multiplicity, complexity, and the intractable nature of certain problems. Authors draw on its mythic image—a creature whose heads multiply when one is cut off—to symbolize challenges that seem to persist and even worsen when directly attacked. For example, Plato compares state maladies to a hydra’s regenerative heads, highlighting how issues multiply when suppressed [1, 2], while Chekhov and Milton use the hydra as an emblem of vice and chaos in human affairs [3, 4, 5, 6]. Moreover, the term appears in philosophical and poetic meditations on the accumulation of passions and the overwhelming force of nature itself [7, 8, 9, 10]. In this way, across genres and epochs, the hydra remains a vivid symbol of problems that are as multifaceted as they are formidable.
- The diseases of a State are like the heads of a hydra; they multiply when they are cut off.
— from The Republic by Plato - The diseases of a State are like the heads of a hydra; they multiply when they are cut off.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato - It’s the hydra of vice that I fear!”
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - If Yegorushka had had a fertile imagination he might have imagined that the hundred-headed hydra was hiding under the quilt.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, Gorgons and Hydra’s , and Chimera’s dire.
— from Paradise Lost by John Milton - My purpose is to conquer this many-headed hydra.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - With their fierce lord's own flesh he fed The wild steeds; Hydra overcame With fire.
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius - To grow by accumulating passions and fancies is at best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might be.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - Though she breed hydra, snake that crawls or flies, Twy-headed, or fine-speckled, no such store Of plagues, nor near so cruel, she supplies, [Pg 180]
— from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri - Or, again, O what could Cretan Bull, or Hydra, pest Of Lerna, fenced with vipers venomous?
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus
