The classical werewolf
The Werewolf in the Ancient World
Daniel Ogden
Oxford University Press 2021
Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319
Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits admirably. His knowledge of the source material (and the vast body of modern literature discussing it) is dazzling, united here with a willingness to consider related motifs from mediæval and later writers to expand his structural analysis of the classical references. I can’t imagine a more thorough treatment of his theme, but it rapidly emerges that there isn’t a superabundance of original material to draw on, and much of what exists is fragmentary, obscure and subject to the ambiguous nuances of translation.
In a world where the gods could transform both themselves and mortals into anything from a bull to a stream, a belief in shape-shifting from human to wolf hardly seems unlikely, though I had previously thought of it more as a northern, not to say Nordic, concept.
None of the great Olympian myths, however, deals with lycanthropy, while (despite the linguistic resonance of his name) the keynote story of the Arcadian King Lykaon being turned into a wolf as punishment for feeding human flesh to Zeus raises the knotty issue of whether a one-off change from human to animal
