Acknowledgements
I thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the writing of this book with a one-year Research Fellowship, 2018–19. I am most grateful for active support for the project to James Davidson (Warwick), Debbie Felton (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and Susan Deacy (Roehampton). For useful references and discussions I thank Jan Bremmer (Groningen) above all, and also Elizabeth Baynham (Newcastle, NSW), Aude Doody (UCD), Richard Flower (Exeter), Johannes Heinrichs (Cologne), Sabine Müller (Marburg), Arthur Pomeroy (Wellington), and Richard Stoneman (Exeter). I would also like to record a more general debt of gratitude to Graham Anderson (Kent), for his inspiration over many years. A Vorstudie for this book, anticipating part of Chapter 4, has been published as Ogden 2019a: I am most grateful to Mr Roelf Barkhuis for permission to reproduce a revised and expanded version of that material here. At the Press I would like to thank Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, and Karen Raith, as well as its anonymous but most helpful readers. Finally, thanks also, for reasons given, to my students in Swansea and Exeter.
Iidabashi, 2019
3.
5.
6.
List of Abbreviations
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin 1972–
ATU Uther 2004 (i.e. ‘Aarne-Thompson-Uther’)
BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
BNJ Brill’s New Jacoby. 2006– (online resource)
CIL Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin 1863–
CMG Corpus medicorum Graecorum. 1907–
CP Classical Philology
CPG Leutsch and Schneidewin 1839–51
CQ Classical Quarterly
CR Classical Review
CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity
CW Classical World
DNP Der Neue Pauly. Stuttgart, 1996–2003
FGrH Jacoby et al. 1923–
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
JdI Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
KA Kassel and Austin 1983–
LIMC Kahil et al. 1981–9
LSJ Liddell et al. 1968
MI Thompson 1955–8
ML Roscher 1884–1937
OLD Glare 1982
PF Hallock 1969
PG Migne 1857–1904
PL Migne 1884–1904
PMG Page 1962
PP La Parola del Passato
QUCC Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica
RA Revue archéologique
RE Pauly et al. 1894–1978
REG Revue des études grecques
RhM Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
TAM Tituli Asiae Minoris. Vienna 1901–
TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association
TrGF Snell et al. 1971–2004
VC Vigiliae Christianae
WS Wiener Studien
ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
Note on Orthography and Translations
To spare the tedious bromides about the impossibility of full consistency in the transcription of Greek, my standing preference in this work, as in all my publications, has been for maximal Latinization or, as I would prefer to think of it, anglicization. I consider this not only to be the more aesthetic approach (those ks are so ugly), but also to give out the important message that classical antiquity is at home within our own culture and that, for all its delightful oddities, it is fundamentally the same, not different. (I make this claim not on the basis of any supposed nebulous continuity but because the culture of classical antiquity and the post-classical culture of early Christianity have been repeatedly folded into our own.). On this occasion, alas, I have felt compelled to compromise the (relative) purity of this approach in order to expose clearly for Greekless readers the connections or similarities between a series of Greek names and words (hence Lykaon, not Lycaon, to match lykos, etc.). Amongst the further anomalies to which this policy gives rise, the son of Periander, a character in our drama, must appear as ‘Lykophron’, whereas his namesake Hellenistic poet, a mere quarry of material, may continue to relax as ‘Lycophron’.
All translations from Greek and Latin texts (in all phases of these languages) are my own, but not separately indicated to be such. Where relevant, these generally correspond with translations previously supplied in my sourcebooks Ogden 2009 and Ogden 2013b, though usually with some minor adaptation. The authorship, including my own on occasion, of translations from other languages is indicated with the quotations.
Introduction
Petronius, Werewolves, and Folklore
The Ancient Werewolf Introduced: Petronius
If a jobbing classicist were asked to compile a list of good werewolf stories from the ancient world, the initial result would doubtless resemble a list of the sort for which the British satirical magazine Private Eye is well known:
1. Petronius Satyricon §61
2. er . . .
3. that’s it.
There is in fact quite a lot of ancient evidence for the subject of werewolves, be it of central or penumbral relevance, but, it must be conceded, at first glance the ancient world has bequeathed us only one really good, corking story about them, and Petronius supplies it in the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’ section of his comic Latin novel of c. ad 66, the Satyricon 1 By the end of this study we will hope to have raised the profile of at least three more decent werewolf tales from antiquity but, for now, let Petronius’ tale be our starting point.2 The tale in question is one of a pair of what might be termed ‘campfire horror stories’ exchanged at a tastelessly extravagant dinner party thrown by Trimalchio for his fellow nouveau-riche Campanian freedmen, and it is told by Niceros. The responding story, a glorious one about witches, is to be told by Trimalchio himself, and will be considered in its own right in Chapter 1. Niceros proceeds as follows:3
1 Cf. the observations of Summers 1933:153, Eckels 1937:32. For a statement of the standard view of the date and authorship of the Satyricon, see Rose 1971.
2 See Conclusion. The three further tales in question are that of the werewolf deprived of his clothes (Chapter 4), that of the Hero of Temesa (Chapter 5), and that of Damarchus (Chapter 6).
3 Technical commentaries on the tale: Friedlaender 1906:313–18, Maiuri 1945:196–9, Perrochat 1952:107–10, Marmorale 1961:119–27, Smith 1975:169–75, Schmeling 2011:252–60. There have been numerous discussions of the tale’s folkloric aspects (whether these are perceived to be genuine or artificial). Amongst the more significant are: Pischel 1888, Schuster 1930:149–65, Scobie 1982:66–70, McDougall 1984:68–146 (NB 83–5, where the motifs of Petronius’ tale, together with those of the Lykaon tales of Ovid, Apollodorus and Pausanias—for which see Chapter 6—are analysed against the grid of Thompson’s Motif-Index, 1955–8), Bettini 1989–91:72–7, Bronzini 1990:22–8, Salanitro 1998, d’Autilia 2003. More minor contributions on this theme include: Rini 1929, Johnston 1932, Crum 1933, Spaeth 1933, 1935, Kroll 1937, Borghini 1991. Discussions of the related question of the linguistic style in which the story is told: Blänsdorf 1990, Gaide 1995, Boyce 1991:85–7.
When I was still a slave, we lived in a narrow street. The house is now Gravilla’s. There, by the will of the gods, I fell in love with the wife of Terentius the innkeeper. You knew Melissa of Tarentum, that gorgeous creature. But, by Hercules, I didn’t love her just for her body or for sexual reasons, but because she had such a nice personality. If I asked her for anything, I was never refused. If she made tuppence, she gave me a penny. She kept my money for me, and never cheated me. Her husband met his end one day out on the estate.4 I did everything I could to get to her. It’s in times of need that you realise who your friends are. By chance the master had set off on his way to Capua to deal with some odds and ends.5 I seized the opportunity and persuaded our guest to come with me to the fifth milestone. He was a soldier, as brave as Orcus. We shifted our butts just before cock-crow.6 The moon was shining like the midday sun. We arrived among the tombs.7 My man went for a pee against a gravestone.8 I held back, singing and counting the stones. Then, when I looked back at my companion, he had taken all his clothes off and laid them beside the road. I almost died of fright, and I stood there like a dead man. He peed a circle around his clothes and suddenly
Discussions of further aspects of the tale in the Petronian literature: Miller 1942, Pinna 1978 [non vidi], Valentini Pagnini 1981:16–20, Baldwin 1986, Pàroli 1986, Fedeli 1995, Panayotakis 1995:92–93, Lefèvre 2003. Bouquet 1990 argues, on the basis of Petronius’ werewolf, Pliny the Younger’s haunted house (7.27) and Apuleius’ witches Meroe and Panthia (Metamorphoses 1), for the existence of a literature of the ‘fantastique’ (cf. ‘Gothic’) in the Roman world, by which he means a literature in which the supernatural is shown to intervene, in shocking fashion, in the familiar, realistic world of the quotidian and the banal. It is to be regretted that the tale goes unmentioned more often than not in the modern monographs devoted to Petronius, despite it being his finest episode.
Discussions of the tale in studies devoted to the ancient werewolf: Buxton 1987:97, Metzger 2011:233–6, Gordon 2015:46; a comment on these contributions below. Discussions of the tale in broader werewolf studies: (e.g.) Smith 1894:5–10, Summers 1933:153–6, Douglas 1992:41–4, Sconduto 2008:10–12.
4 I consider the attempt of Smith 1975:171 and Schmeling 2011:255 to differentiate Terentius, to whom Melissa is uxor (‘wife’), from her contubernalis (the word translated here as ‘husband’) to be sophistic; contrast Friedlaender 1906:315 and Marmorale 1961:121–2.
5 This implies that the setting of the tale is somewhere in Magna Graecia. Smith 1975:173 (on §62) contends that such a setting is designed to suggest that it is an example of Graeca credulitas (‘Greek gullibility’).
6 For Borghini 1991:29–32 and Gordon 2015:47, 51 n.34, 59 n.136 this (galicinia) is a knowing reference to the Greek term for ‘twilight’, lykophōs, literally ‘wolf-light’, so-called because wolves were held to have sharp sight even at night (Aelian Nature of Animals 10.26).
7 Petronius imagines a highway lined with tombs, on the model of the well-known Via Appia Antica; cf. Smith 1894:6, Smith 1975:172, Schmeling 2011:256.
8 Cf. Petronius Satyricon 71, where Trimalchio proposes to establish one of his freedmen as a guardian of his tomb, so that people may not run up and defecate against it. Note also a genre of inscription or graffiti protecting buildings: CIL iv.7714 and 7715 (Pompeii), Cacator cave malum (‘Shitter, look out for trouble’); CIL iv.7716 (Pompeii), Cacator cave malum aut, si contempseris, habeas Iovem iratum (‘Shitter, look out for trouble; or, if you scorn this warning, may the anger of Jupiter fall upon you’); CIL vi.13740 (Rome), qui hic mixerit aut cacarit, habeat deos superos et inferos iratos (‘If anyone pees or poos here, may the anger of the gods above and below alike fall upon him’); CIL vi.29848b (Rome), duodeci(m) deos et Deana(m) et Iovem Optumu(m) Maximu(m) habeat iratos quisquis hic mixerit aut cacarit (‘If anyone pees or poos here, let the anger of the twelve gods, Diana and Jupiter Best and Greatest fall upon him’). See Clarke 2007:60–2, Schmeling 2011:256.
became a wolf. Don’t think I’m joking. No one’s inheritance is worth so much to me as to make me lie. But, as I’d begun to say, after he had become a wolf, he began to howl and ran into the woods.9 At first I didn’t know where I was, but then I went to his clothes to pick them up. They had turned to stone.10 Whoever died with fright, if I didn’t then? But I drew my sword and † hacked at the shades,11 until I arrived at my girlfriend’s house. I was like a ghost when I got in, and almost bubbling out my final breath. My groin was awash with sweat, my eyes were dead, and I have barely recovered from the experience even now. Melissa expressed amazement that I’d walked there so late and said, ‘If you’d come earlier, at least you could have helped us. For a wolf got into the estate and among the flocks. He was draining the blood out of them like a butcher. But even if he got away, the last laugh was ours, for our slave managed to get a spear through his neck.’ When I heard this, I could not even think of sleep, but when it was fully light I ran off home like the robbed innkeeper.12 When I came to the place where the clothes had turned to stone, I found nothing but blood. But when I arrived home, my soldier was lying on his bed like an ox, and a doctor was attending to his neck. I realized that he was a skin-changer/werewolf [versipellis], and I could not thereafter bring myself to taste bread with him, not even if you had forced me on pain of death. Others can make up their own mind about this, but if I’m lying, may your guardian spirits exercise their wrath upon me.13 Petronius Satyricon 61–2 It has not proven possible to trace any direct antecedents to this tale in the extant literary record. Costas Panayotakis certainly goes too far in claiming that the tale was already to be found in Novius’ c.30 bc Atellan farce Fullones feriati or Fullers on Holiday, this on the meagre basis of a fragment reading, ‘He turns himself into all beasts and eats anything he can as much as touch.’14 We shall revisit Petronius’ story throughout the volume.
9 Smith 1894:9 contends that in some medieval cases of werewolfism the howl completes the act of transformation, but decisive examples are wanting.
10 This interesting magical feat is explained in Chapter 3.
11 The sole MS gives gladium tamen strinxi et †matavita tau† umbras cecidi, donec ad villam amicae meae pervenirem. I can find neither contextual nor palaeographical merit in Miller’s attempt (1942) to emend this phrase to gladium tamen strinxi et maturavi et evitavi umbras, which he then translates as ‘I drew my sword, hurried along and avoided dark spots’, removing mention of the ghosts. Bücheler’s conjecture of in tota via for †matavita tau†, ‘the whole way along’, has proven popular. Was the original phrase here Greek? See Tremoli 1975. For the ability of iron to resist ghosts, see Homer Odyssey 11.48, Virgil Aeneid 6.260, Apuleius Metamorphoses 2.32.6, Lucian Philopseudes 15; cf. Schmeling 2011:258.
12 This curious expression is discussed in Chapter 4.
13 The notion of transformation is jokingly taken up by Petronius’ narrator Encolpius at §64, when he observes that Niceros’ and Trimalchio’s stories were making the number of lamps multiply and the dining room change shape for him (triclinium esse mutatum)—i.e. their silliness was making his head swim or spin.
14 Novius Fullones feriati F i (Frassinetti 1955:54): vortit se in omnis bestias, comest quidquid tetigit tantum. Panayotakis 1995:92.
Terms and Definitions
It could be said that the ancient world did not have a proper term for ‘werewolf’, or at any rate an exclusive one. Most of the Greek texts discussed in this book employ no special term for the phenomenon but merely speak of people—always men, in fact15—turning into a wolf (lykos). Only in the second century ad did the medical poet Marcellus Sidetes develop the term lykanthrōpos, ‘lycanthrope’, together with its corresponding abstract, lykanthrōpia, ‘lycanthropy’, to describe what we would today consider to be a variety of mental illness. Thereafter these terms remained almost wholly confined to the narrow medical tradition that recycled Marcellus’ original work (for which see Chapter 2).16 Only two uses of the term lykanthrōpos before the fall of Constantinople invite further comment at this stage. First, the (fourth-century ad ?) amulet handbook, Cyranides, tells that lykanthrōpoi can be cured if they fast for three days and then eat the heart of a (pure) wolf.17 Let us note that, despite the visceral imagery, the context remains one of healing, albeit of a magical variety. Secondly, the early-ninth-century ad chronicler Theophanes the Confessor tells how in ad 803 or 804 the Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros I sent some like-minded partisans, ‘Lykaonians or lykanthrōpoi’, to blind the failed usurper Bardanes Turcus in the monastery to which he had retired. Here the use of the term is prompted primarily by Lykaonia’s evocation of the name of Lykaon, who famously transformed into a wolf, and its function is to serve as a colourful image for cruelty and violence. George the Monk (a.k.a. George the Sinner) redeployed Theophanes’ wordplay for his own chronicle later in the century, although he protested that the Lykaonians were acting without the authority of their emperor.18 Both of these contexts, the Cyranides
15 But there are female werewolves in the Latin tradition: the witches discussed in Chapter 1.
16 See Suda s.v. Μάρκελλος Σιδήτης (for Marcellus’ work); Aëtius of Amida Libri medicinales 6.11 (4th c. ad ); Oribasius Synopsis 8.9 (late 4th c. ad ; cf. Photius Bibliotheca cod. 218); Paul of Aegina 3.16 (7th c. ad ); Paul Nicaeus 24 (9th–11th c. ad ); Psellus Ponema iatrikon 837–41 (11th c. ad ); Joannes Actuarius On Diagnosis 1.35 (c. ad 1300); Anon. Περὶ λυκανθρωπίας (probably post-Paul Nicaeus at least; at Ideler 1842:ii, 282).
17 Cyranides 2.23, p.152 Kaimakis; see further Chapter 3.
18 Theophanes the Confessor Chronicle p.480 de Boor; George the Monk p.772 de Boor, recycled (again) at Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’ (excerpta) De insidiis 44. Lykaonia is in southern Asia Minor. For the historical context, see Treadgold 1988:131–5.
I cannot forbear to mention here the story of the werewolves of Constantinople recorded by the Lutheran natural philosopher Hiob Fincel (Jobus Fincelius), which is much cited in the werewolf literature, albeit everywhere tralatitiously, either by means of the wholly misleading references provided by Baring-Gould 1865:64–5 (who assigns it, unintelligibly, to Fincel’s ‘de Mirabilibus, lib. xi’) and Summers 1933:146, 174 n.67 (who appears to imagine that it derives from Fincel’s 1556 book, published in Jena, Wunderzeichen: Warhafftige etc.), or by means of the indirect allusions made to Fincel’s work in other early modern authors, such as Jean Bodin (1580:195). Let us put it back on track. The story is actually to be found in Fincel’s 1559 book, published in Leipzig, Der ander Teil Wunderzeichen (at pp.150–1 in the online facsimile provided by the Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Sachsen-Anhalt). According to this, Constantinople fell victim to a great plague of werewolves (or just wolves tout court after all?) in 1542. They did much harm and caused the inhabitants to barricade themselves in their own homes. Mustafa Pasha fortified and
cure and the Bardanes Turcus tradition, entail that the term lykanthrōpos is deployed (at last) to signify or at any rate evoke a werewolf proper.
Turning to Latin now, while the term versipellis, literally ‘skin-changer’, may carry the specific connotation of ‘werewolf’ in our Petronian passage, other attestations indicate that it could also have a wider application.19 In one further passage at least it does seem to carry the specific connotation of ‘werewolf’ again. Pliny, writing before ad 79, introduces his words on the rites and myths of the Lykaia, to which werewolfism is central, in the following terms:
We should be confident in the belief that it is untrue that men are turned into wolves and restored again to their own form. Otherwise, we should believe everything that we have learned to be fabulous over all these centuries. All the same, we will indicate the origin of the popular superstition that skin-shifters/ werewolves [versipelles] are among those subject to a curse [maledictis].
Pliny Natural History 8.8020
In three texts the term is applied to those that can change an outer form either into a different humanoid shape or into a variety of animal shapes. In his Amphitruo (c.190 bc ) Plautus describes Zeus as versipellis/vorsipellis as he changes his form into that of Amphitryon, in order to sleep with the latter’s wife, Alcmene, and sire Heracles.21 In his Metamorphoses (later-second-century ad ) Apuleius applies the term to the witches of Thessaly that change themselves into the forms of different animals, specifically birds, dogs, mice, flies, or, as the unfolding narrative reveals, weasels.22 In his Against the Pagans (c. ad 300) Arnobius applies versipellis as an epithet to Circe. While it could be intended here merely in the degraded sense of ‘deceitful’ (which we shall discuss next), it is strongly tempting to read the term as making allusion to her transformations of men into animals (for which see Chapter 1). It could be that the term is therefore used to signify ‘a changer of the skins of others’, but it is also possible that Arnobius infers that Circe must have had the ability to change her own form too.23 As we shall see (in Chapter 1 again), both the witches of Thessaly and Circe may be more closely associated with wolf transformation than is immediately apparent.
manned the city walls, and then swept through the city so as to corral the wolves in a corner of the fortifications, where he surrounded them. Facing death, the wolves leapt over the wall, never to be seen again in the city or the region.
19 For discussion of the significance of term versipellis, see Summers 1933:18–19, Valentini-Pagnini 1981:6–8 (with care), McDougall 1984:131–5, Pàroli 1986:288–91, Metzger 2011:237–42.
20 A fuller quotation of this passage is supplied in Chapter 6, where it is given detailed discussion. Cf. the corresponding phrase in the contents list in Book 1: de lupis. unde fabula versipellium.
21 Plautus Amphitruo 123.
22 Apuleius Metamorphoses 2.22; cf. 2.25. See van Mal-Maeder 2001 ad loc., esp. 318.
23 Arnobius Against the Pagans 4.14.
But in extant Latin texts the term is more often deployed, rather, to describe someone capable of adapting their own personality and therefore of being deceitful. Plautus provides the earliest example of this usage too: in his Bacchides he applies the term to a slave who is able to change his personality in order to deal with different types of individual.24 The bulk of the remaining examples of this personalitychanging usage are late, mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries ad . 25 Despite its relative popularity, the usage looks secondary. It looks like a metaphorical adaptation of the outer-form-changing uses, and indeed a rather poorly conceived one: one who changes his personality surely changes not his carapace but his core.
One small point of light in the yawning silence on werewolves in the Latin west between the end of late antiquity and their twelfth-century renaissance (of which more anon) comes in one of the brief dramas of Hrotswitha, the learned nun of Gandersheim (c. ad 935–75). In her Sapientia, Hope addresses Antiochus: ‘You speak, Antiochus, with the deceit of a fox, and flatter with the cunning of a versipellis.’26 Here the general significance of deceitfulness is evidently uppermost
24 Plautus Bacchides 658.
25 Thus:
• Lucilius Carmina Book 26 F34 Charpin = ll. 669–70 Marx = ll. 652–3 Warmington = ll. 647–8 Krenkel (2nd c. bc ). In this rather obscure fragment of the Roman satirist the speaker seems to be claiming to be able to adapt his personality in the same way as the slave of the Bacchides: ‘But a freedman-agent, a “Tricorian”, a very Syrian, a whipping boy – with whom I’ll become a versipellis and with whom I’ll transform everything’ (at libertinus, Tricorius, Syrus ipse, at mastigias, quicum versipellis fio et quicum commuto omnia). The Tricorii were a people of Gallia Narbonensis, but the term is deployed here to suggest a miscreant so vile that his punishment will wear out three whips (cf. Plautus Poenulus 139: tris . . . corios). Presumably the speaker means that he will change himself into the ‘freedman-agent (etc.)’. The fragment is preserved by the (4th–5th c. ad ) grammarian Nonius Marcellus (38.5), who introduces it with the explanation, ‘People that change themselves in any way they wish are called versipelles’ (versipelles dicti sunt quolibet genere se conmutantes). See Marx 1904–5:ii, 244–5, Christes 1971:40–2, Charpin 1978–91:ii, 281–2, Metzger 2011:239.
• Prudentius Cathemerinon 9.92 (later 4th c. ad ). Prudentius refers in passing to the Serpent of Eden’s exhortation of Eve as versipellis, inevitably ‘deceitful’.
• De physiognomonia liber 78 (text at Foerster 1893:3–145; 4th c. ad ?). This anonymous tract On Physiognomony observes that those that produce a ‘sharp and dry voice’ are ‘versipelles and tricky’ (qui acutam vocem cum siccitate promunt, versipelles ac subdoli sunt), implying a meaning along the lines of ‘deceitful’.
• Servius on Virgil Aeneid 6.724 (c. ad 400). Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid treats us to a version of the old theory that the dispositions of the peoples of the world are shaped by the climates in which they live. Hence, the Greeks are inconstant, the Gauls lazy, while the Africans are versipelles—presumably again something along the lines of ‘deceitful’.
• Jerome Vulgate, Proverbs 14:25 (c. ad 405). In his ‘Vulgate’ Latin translation of the Bible, Jerome offers the following proverb: ‘A faithful witness liberates souls and a versipellis one brings forth lies.’ This corresponds to the Greek Septuagint’s ‘A faithful witness will deliver a soul from evils, but a tricky one [δόλιος] kindles lies’, and to the Hebrew Bible’s ‘A truthful witness saves lives, but one who utters lies is a betrayer’ (here quoted in the Revised Standard Version).
• Martianus Capella De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 4.330 (early 5th c. ad ). In his Marriage of Philology and Mercury the Platonist Capella supplies an allegorical biography of Dialectic. Before she had acquired the greatness of Socrates and Plato, she had dwelled with Parmenides, where she had been subject to the calumny that she was a ‘skin-shifting pursuit’ (versipellis studii), i.e., presumably, a deceitful one.
26 Hrotswitha Sapientia scene v: vulpina fraude loqueris, et versipelli astutia, Antioche, adularis. Shortly afterwards werewolves receive another mention—without the use of versipellis—in the
again, but the parallelism of the second phrase with the first, where versipellis stands opposite ‘fox’, impels us to find a werewolf lurking here too.
For the purposes of definition for this project, the term ‘werewolf’ will be taken to define a creature that changes form, or appears to do so, or can be inferred to do so, in whole or in part, between the humanoid and the lupine. I do not make any assumptions about which of these two forms is the base form; about the relationship between the two forms within a single body; about the permanence, impermanence, or duration of the switch; about the cause of the condition; about the modus operandi of those affected; or about whether they are living or dead.27 I sympathize a little with Jost’s protestation that Lykaon, who—arguably—is simply changed, in a one-off transformation, from a pure man into a pure wolf, is not thereby a werewolf. But when one then asks what the critical distinctions would be between the case of Lykaon and the cases of those one would describe as werewolves instinctively and without hesitation, it is difficult to settle upon anything compelling or satisfactory.28
The derivation of the English word werewolf (likewise German Werwolf), which is first attested, in the form werewulf, in the writings of Bishop Wulfstan (c. ad 1000)29 and then in an Anglo-Saxon ordinance of King Canute (r. ad 1017–35),30 is not itself of great moment for this study, but a few words may be said. The former element remains mystifying and controversial. The old explanation—which goes all the way back to Gervase of Tilbury (ad 1210–14)—derives it ultimately from Latin vir, ‘man’, or from an English form cognate with it, so that werewulf would literally mean ‘man-wolf’, and here we might compare the standard Italian term lupo mannaro, where the second word in the expression is borrowed from the German ‘Mann’.31 The more recent and now generally accepted
(c. ad 1012–20) Corrector sive Medicus that forms the nineteenth book of Burchard of Worms’ Decretorum libri xx: here there is (post-Augustinian) censure for the belief that ‘whenever a man should wish it, he may be transformed into a wolf, or into a “Werewulf” as it is called in German, or into some other form’ (ch. 5, at PL cxl, 971); cf. Kratz 1976:63.
27 For problematization of the definition of the werewolf see de Blécourt 2015b esp. 1–4. Taxonomies of werewolfism were once popular in the scholarship: (i) voluntary vs involuntary; (ii) fixed-term vs cyclical; (iii) congenital/‘constitutional’ vs acquired. See Smith 1894:5, 8, 19, 20, 22–4, 40, Eckels 1937:40–4. Only occasionally is it possible to situate ancient werewolves in parts of this grid—and Petronius’ werewolf not at all.
28 Jost 2005:14; see Chapter 6. Of course, the picture becomes murkier when we consider that, as we have just seen, Greek effectively did not possess a term for ‘werewolf’ distinct from that for ‘wolf’. Whether or not Lykaon is a satisfactory werewolf himself, he was unquestionably both an aetiology and a paradigm for a series of most satisfactory Arcadian ones, and so well earns his place in this volume.
29 Wulfstan Homilies xli p.191 Napier. However, its usage here seems broad: Wulsftan speaks of the importance of the clergy protecting the flock of the faithful from the wodfræca werewulf, the ‘raging Devil’. See Jacoby 1974:77.
30 Text at Thorpe 1840:160–1, reproduced at Otten 1986:5; cf. Pluskowski 2006:175. The context is an odd one, with the term not obviously signifying anything more than ‘wolf’ tout court.
31 Gervase of Tilbury Otia Imperialia xv: vidimus enim frequenter in Anglia per lunationes homines in lupos mutari, quod hominum genus gerulfos Galli nominant, Anglici vero werewlf [sic] dicunt: were enim Anglice virum sonat, wlf lupum. Cf. Summers 1933:6, Jacoby 1977:78–9.
