The Werewolf in the Ancient World

Daniel Ogden presents us with a well-written, thoroughly researched monograph on an aspect of ancient folklore that has long fascinated scholars: the werewolf. As avid readers of his Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, we recognize some of the sources adduced in this study, but here they are analyzed from another point of view and are made to yield new meanings. While Ogden sets out to discuss the werewolf in the ancient world, he provides a wider chronological scope than just classical antiquity, as the study covers sources from antiquity to the thirteenth century CE. He employs the later sources chiefly to tease out the implications of the ancient evidence, on the assumption that both ancient and medieval authors partook of oral traditions in their time and that they exhibit similarities because of this, not because of unlikely literary borrowing.Ogden’s book includes six chapters on different aspects of werewolfism, plus an introduction, conclusion, and three appendixes. Across the volume, he emphatically stresses the folkloric nature of werewolf stories in antiquity, which both accounts for the apparent disparity of the evidence and establishes a hierarchy for that evidence. He argues forcefully that, precisely due to its folkloric character, Petronius’s superb werewolf story (Satyricon 61–62), in which a soldier turns out to be a shapeshifter, ought to be regarded as the paradigmatic example of werewolfism in antiquity, rather than the aetiological myth of Lycaon, the ritual use of werewolfism in the Lycaea rite, or the medical discourse on lycanthropy as a disease, which are usually privileged in existing scholarly studies. Ogden transforms the primacy conventionally accorded ritual and myth into a secondary, derivative, and ultimately folklore-dependent role. Many scholars in the field of classics have a tendency to view myth and ritual as something apart from—and ultimately finer than—folklore genres such as legends and folktales. This division is still visible in Ogden’s text, even though he is doing his best to overcome it. We regard myth and ritual as subgenres of folklore just as much as legends and folktales, as folklorists generally do. Also of interest is Ogden’s discussion of the wolf as possessing a dual character in antiquity: On the one hand, the wolf was viewed as savage and was associated with the wilderness; on the other, it was human-like, civilized, and socially organized. Such ambivalence appears to have been common for several animals figuring in ancient legends, including the ape and the octopus.In chapter 1, “The Curse of the Werewolf: Witches and Sorcerers,” Ogden examines the link between magic and werewolfism, suggesting that apart from the standard form of owls, another preferred animal shape of ancient witches may have been wolves. Distinguishing between the paradigm of the witch as screech-owl and the witch as drunken bawd, both types evince connections to werewolves, not least in the literary imagery used. Many witches seem to have a propensity for howling, for instance, and the Latin term sometimes used to reference witches, lupulae, means both “wolves” and “prostitutes” (43). While the application of such names to prostitutes is well known, in the immediate textual context of animal transformation it is, as Ogden intimates, difficult to overlook the hint of werewolfism implied. He also explains that sorcerers were believed to sometimes shapeshift into wolves, as evident in Vergil’s description of Moeris (Eclogue 8.94–100).Chapter 2, “Werewolves, Ghosts, and the Dead,” provides an overview of the complex relationship among the three. Some werewolves, such as Herodotus’s Neuri and Vergil’s Moeris, are also described as sorcerers (goêtes) or as raisers of ghosts. According to Ogden, the persistent association of werewolves and cemeteries appears to account for the wolf imagery of medical lycanthropy, as a common feature of the disease was that the afflicted person would roll around among the graves. Ogden draws the conclusion that medical lycanthropy, rather than being the wellspring of folkloric stories like Petronius’s, is secondary and metaphorical, hinging on this association of werewolves and graveyards.The intriguing question of how the forms of human and of wolf were imagined to relate to each other provides the topic for chapter 3, “The Werewolf, Inside and Out.” The prevalent view in antiquity seems to have been that, when assuming human shape, the werewolf was human only on the outside, its inner core always remaining wolfish (82). In other words, the werewolf was a wolf inside, regardless of which physical form it took. By the medieval period this had changed, and a human core in a wolfish form was now considered to be standard. Ogden here discusses the curious motif of some men possessing a “hairy heart,” settling on the interpretation that these hairy hearts usually evoked canid characteristics more broadly, among them lupine ones (85–89). In this chapter Ogden also studies the motif of the identifying wound in depth: When a werewolf is physically harmed, the wound is visible on the same part of the body when the werewolf has resumed human form. Ogden observes that one of the idiosyncrasies of Petronius’s story might be attributed to the very traditionality of this motif: Oddly enough, Niceros, the story’s narrator, does not fully believe that the soldier is a werewolf until he sees the identifying wound, even though he actually witnessed the entire transformation from human to wolf. This chapter also sheds light on Niceros’s refusal to share bread with the werewolf-soldier ever again. As Ogden suggests, Niceros may have seen such an action as being tantamount to becoming a werewolf himself.Chapter 4, “Werewolves and Projected Souls,” works its way backward from the medieval and early modern evidence on the association between werewolves and soul-projection to the ancient sources where this connection usually remains latent. Ogden highlights the similarities between stories of Greek soul-projectors (whose souls were believed to separate from their bodies and travel to distant places) and narratives of werewolves, with one of the most striking being that both soul-projectors and werewolves, while in their alternate states, must protect their body and/or their clothing from interference. In both cases, the body and the clothes function as an outer shell; without a body, the projected soul has nothing to return to, and without clothing—a sign of civilization, in contrast to animal nature—a werewolf cannot revert to human form.In chapter 5, “The Demon in a Wolfskin: A Werewolf at Temesa?” Ogden explores the story known as “The Hero of Temesa,” pointing in particular to Pausanias’s description of the painting of the Hero that he once saw. In the image, the Hero—so called because of his military service in the Trojan War—is wrapped in a wolfskin, and his own skin is black. Ogden argues that he may have been considered to be a werewolf as well as a ghost, since ghosts were often described as black in antiquity (possibly because of an association with the ashes of cremation). The story also has affinities with narratives of champions saving victims from a more serpentine monster, such as in the story of Perseus saving Andromeda from the sea monster.In his final chapter, “The Werewolves of Arcadia,” Ogden takes on the tangled issue of the relationships between the myth of Lycaon, the Anthid rite at the Lycaea festival, and the story of Damarchus, all of which involve transformation into a wolf. The mythical king Lycaon, who served Zeus human flesh and was punished by being turned permanently into a wolf, is usually considered the mythical exemplar of which the others are reflections. Ogden turns this argument on its head and proffers the story of Damarchus as the primary one. According to the story, Damarchus was transformed into a wolf when he consumed human flesh, and when he became human again after nine years had passed, he proceeded to win the Olympic Games. Ogden notes that the textual evidence on the Lycaon myth is surprisingly late, whereas the story of Damarchus is attested earlier. He also conjectures that the performers of the Anthid rite (who were all descendants of one Anthus) partook in a coming-of-age ritual reminiscent of other such rituals in ancient Greece. In this rite, young men are said to swim naked across a pool of water, transforming into wolves. Living as wolves for nine years, they could return to their human shape only if they had abstained from eating human flesh during that period (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8.81). Ogden regards the written evidence as symbolical representations of a historical rite, where young men assumed “the life of a wolf” for some time (166). Finally, in his conclusion, Ogden discusses the storytelling contexts of werewolf stories and considers dinners and symposia, and travels and inns, as well as shrines and sanctuaries as typical occasions or places for relating such narratives.This brief summary of the book’s main points hardly does justice to the complexity of Ogden’s arguments and the erudition behind them. Some of his contentions might be more speculative than others, but he clearly succeeds very well in his ambitions to stress and promote the folkloric background of the werewolf stories, and in the dual aim of providing both an analytical text and a sourcebook—hence the many translations of ancient and medieval sources throughout the book. We also appreciate the subtle humor permeating the work, which makes it a delightful read. Overall, we perceive Werewolves in the Ancient World as a book best suited to an audience of experts, mainly within the fields of classics and medieval studies, given the detailed contents and intricate arguments, which require a fair amount of academic background if the reader is to appreciate them fully.