Where did the werewolf REALLY come from?

Welcome to another episode of 31 Days of Halloween! This is our chance to get in the mood for the scariest, scariest month of the year as we turn our attention to horror and Halloween fun. For the month of October, we’ll be sharing various pieces from underrated horror books, comics, movies, and television to keep you scared and entertained until Halloween.

Almost every popular book on werewolves will tell you that the technical term for becoming one is lycanthropy, derived from the myth of King Lycaon of Arcadia, who, when he learned he was going to host Zeus, made the ill-considered decision to test God’s omnipotence by serving him a meal of human flesh. Outraged, Zeus transformed Lycaon into the first werewolf.

But Daniel Ogden wants to question this narrative. Ogden is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter, England, and the author of several authoritative books on Greco-Roman witchcraft and dragons. In his new book, The Werewolf in the Ancient World, Ogden embarks on a multi-pronged assault on interpreting the myth of King Lycaon as a werewolf tale by first reminding us that werewolves are fundamentally shapeshifters, while Lycaon was merely a transformed human into a wolf. This type of retribution was not unique in Greek mythology either, as the god Poseidon once turned a whole gang of bandits into wolves.

Ogden argues that while Lycaon was certainly a murderer and blasphemer, he was not a cannibal. Rather, Lycaon’s metamorphosis appears to be based on his name, which already means wolf, which makes Zeus’ choice of animal an appropriate punishment. Werewolf in Antiquity also notes that while the term “lycanthropy” is now considered a synonym for werewolves, it was not used as such by ancient writers who instead viewed those suffering from lycanthropy as being of extreme “melancholy” plagued characterized ”, often on the verge of“ absolute misanthropy ”(72).

Despite this criticism, Ogden does not want to throw away the Lykaon myth entirely, but merely “distracts from studying the subject”. […] of the old werewolf ”(166). In other words, Ogden acknowledges that the myth of Lycaon is a werewolf, just not the actual werewolf.

For Ogden, the only correct Greco-Roman werewolf story is the more obscure story of Niceros from Petronius’ Satyricon (c. 66 AD), in which Niceros tells of an overnight trip he took to visit his girlfriend. For fear of bandits, Niceros hired a Roman soldier as a bodyguard. When night fell, the two men came to a moonlit cemetery, whereupon the soldier said he had to pee.

Niceros averted his gaze, but then turned and saw the man completely naked. The soldier urinated in a circle and turned into a wolf before running off into the night. Scared, Niceros ran the rest of the way to his girlfriend’s house and passed out. When he came to, he learned that shortly after him a wolf had arrived and attacked his girlfriend’s sheep, but was driven away by a farmhand who stabbed the wolf in the throat. When he returned home, Niceros met the same soldier who now had a suspicious wound on his neck.

Much of The Werewolf in the Ancient World consists of a very careful reading of Petronius’ story, going through it line by line, examining every detail, and working to explain every secret. In Chapter 1, Ogden asks how this anonymous soldier became a werewolf by looking at the rich tradition of witches who turn themselves and others into animals. Chapter 2 asks why the story takes place in a cemetery and what werewolves have to do with ghosts and the dead. Chapter 3 examines whether Petronius’ werewolf is an animal transforming into a human or a human transforming into an animal, as well as the trope of the “identifying wound.” Chapter 4 concludes Ogden’s analysis of Petronius’ werewolf story by asking whether it could be evidence of a surviving shamanistic ritual.

Chapter 5 of Werewolf in Antiquity shifts focus by examining the story of Euthymus, an Olympic prize fighter who freed the city of Temesa from a monster. Ogden notes that descriptions of this monster are often confusing – it appears to be a ghost, demon, and protective deity all at the same time – but claims that its true identity could actually be a werewolf. His reasoning is quite cumbersome and draws comparisons to several different dragon slayer myths. Despite the presence of a detailed table outlining the differences and similarities between these myths, I found this chapter to be the most difficult to follow.

Chapter 6 then returns to King Lycaon and, as explained earlier, elaborates Ogden’s criticism of this myth. The book closes with three appendices: one deals with the character of Circe from Homer’s The Odyssey, a second with old accounts of Cynocephali (dog-headed men) and a last one about two Greco-Roman pseudo-werewolf stories.

Overall, The Werewolf in the Ancient World is an immense scientific work. It should be commended for not succumbing to the unusually common problem of hyperfixation for a period of time in order to create the appearance that the werewolf is not a myth that has existed since Antiquity exists. Rather than just focusing on Ancient Greece and Rome, Ogden is working to point out how the tropes set up by Petronius in the Satyricon reappear in folklore of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and even in fictional works of the early 20th, 1914) and Guy Endores Werewolf of Paris (1933).

The Temesa monster?

However, the breadth and depth of Ogden’s work also makes it disappointing that The Werewolf in ancient times is not more accessible to a general audience. Some chapters are easy to digest for the non-specialist, but others delve into the subjects of philology and theoretical structuralism, which requires a higher level of erudition and possibly a dictionary nearby. One can only hope that the knowledge that Ogden provides will at some point find its way into popular literature on the subject that he considers so critical.

AIPT Science is jointly presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.

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