The Werewolf in the Ancient World

Abstract

The ancient world already cherished a rich folklore of werewolfism that broadly resembled the one copiously attested for the central medieval period in Europe. Our best access to the sort of narrative that underpinned such folklore comes in the well-known werewolf tale of the Neronian Petronius’ Satyricon, which shares some striking motifs with the equally famous AD 1160-78 Anglo-Norman tale of Bisclavret by Marie de France. It was, accordingly, folklore that determined the ancients’ conception of what a werewolf actually was. Almost all the evidence for werewolfism in antiquity should be regarded either as folkloric in nature or as secondary to and refractive of a folkloric core. The ancients re-deployed, finessed and parlayed this focal conception in distinct ways in diverse cultural contexts. Notions, themes and images were borrowed from this folkloric home and transferred, in as it were a metaphorical fashion, to other realms of human experience and endeavour, be this: aetiological myth, in the case of the material bearing upon Lykaon; rites of passage or of maturation, in the case of the material bearing upon the Lykaia rite; or medicine, in the case of the medical writers’ identification of the disease of ‘lycanthropy.’ It is this that accounts for what initially appears to be the incoherent, chaotic and centrifugal nature of the evidence-field for werewolves that the ancients have bequeathed to us.