Ambrose & Elsewhere

The question came up in my myth class today: do all these werewolf and vampire stories go back to ancient Greece and Rome?

The short answer is: not all, but some. Blood-drinking ghosts are a feature of Greek myth from its earliest recorded period; that’s a good start on vampires. And werewolves are more unambiguous: there’s the story of Lycaon (which is why the topic came up today), and the famous werewolf from Petronius’ Satyricon, who pauses after he becomes a wolf and urinates in a ring around his clothing. According to strict scientific principles, this makes them change into stone (so that nobody can run off with them while he’s running around in lupine form).

As it happens, I was reading around in Pliny’s misnamed Natural History today, and he records some werewolf legends, too. He doesn’t seem to believe them, and he’ll believe almost anything, so maybe they weren’t in general circulation in Rome… but Pliny thinks they explain why versipellis (“skin-changer; werewolf”) is used as an insult in common speech (which it is as far back as Plautus, more than two centuries earlier).

I’ll put the Latin (because Everything is better with Latin!™), complete with ethnic slurs, a translation and some visual evidence after the jump.

Continue reading Whenwolves?