Draco
The Romans loved their dragons (dracones, serpentes). Their narratives of the great dragon fights of Greek myth are more expansive, more detailed, and richer than any earlier accounts on the Greek side itself. These narratives typically focalize large parts of their accounts of the fights through the figure of the dragon himself, who is often anthropomorphized, endowed with a feisty personality and with the dignity and nobility of a warrior, and treated with a certain degree of sympathy. Paradoxically, the Romans had little interest in developing new dragon-traditions of their own. The single significant exception is the tale of the Dragon of the river Bagrada, which is defeated by distinctively Roman means, namely by their army with its ballistas. But the Roman world was full of the imagery of kindly dragons, including the genii loci that embellished every home.