On Reptilian Nightmares

Aside from the one photo my father showed me of his recent trip to Paris, he also paused briefly on a snapshot of this little gem out on it's fountain pedestal again:

That would be Hercules defeating the river god Achelous, and by "defeating," the Greeks apparently meant "beating to death with a fucking rock."

But my thought is this: That's obviously a giant snake. the Greeks would have been like, "Well, the evil river god took the form of a giant snake," and then they had one carved. A giant, unruly, badass megasnake. There's almost no way they could have imagined that seriously HUGE snakes actually existed. They just took something that could kill a man and get pretty sizable and then made it what they thought was impossibly huge, then said their great hero killed it.

How fast would an ancient Greek shit his pants if we showed him a thirty foot boa constrictor? Would he just freak the fuck out and ask to call Perseus or some other famous guy to kill the thing? I'm sure there's a nice zoo in modern Athens that would just make him drop a single, enormously long deuce continuously as he walked through the snake house.

Just don't tell him we went with the Roman names for all our planets. I don't think he could take that.