The Werewolf in the Ancient World
Daniel Ogden, Oxford University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780198854319
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 inn-keeper. 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. 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. 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. The moon was shining like the midday sun. We arrived among the tombs. My man went for a pee against a gravestone. 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 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. 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. Whoever died with fright, if I didn’t then? But I drew my sword and † hacked at the shades, 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. 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.
—Petronius, Satyricon 61–2
That passage, one of the best horror stories in Roman literature, gives you the whole deal: horror, humour, sex, madness, and storytelling as a weapon against disbelief. Daniel Ogden takes it seriously—as he does the other scattered and unsettling reports that survive from antiquity about men who become beasts. His book, The Werewolf in the Ancient World, is not intended as entertainment. It is a study in comparative belief and the logic of transformation, and in its way, it tells us far more about the ancient mind than any amount of modern rationalisation.
The aim of the book, as Ogden sets out in the opening chapters, is to rescue ancient werewolf stories from the margins of folklore and to treat them as structured, coherent mythologies. He is not interested in dismissing these stories as allegory, nor in treating them as primitive misunderstandings of disease or mental illness. Rather, his focus is on how these stories functioned—how they circulated, why they persisted, and what underlying cosmologies they revealed. The key theme is continuity: ancient werewolf stories were tied not only to violence and transformation but to territory, kinship, law, and the fragility of human identity. They are, as Ogden makes plain, not fantasy but cultural data.
There are no original-language texts in this book, which is a shame. Anyone who wants to verify the Greek or Latin must go hunting across the Perseus website—assuming it hasn’t collapsed again under the weight of its own bad interface. Given the scholarly weight of the book, this omission feels like a misstep. Readers who care enough to read Ogden will also care enough to want the original words. That aside, the book is methodical, well-organised, and builds its case with care. He places each source into context, outlining regional variations and tracing how ideas travelled across space and centuries.
The most interesting passages are those that show how belief in lycanthropy shaded into medical thought. Take this piece from Aëtius of Amida:
Men afflicted with the disease of so-called cyanthropy or lycanthropy go out by night in the month of February in imitation of wolves or dogs in all respects, and they tend to hang around tombs until daybreak. These are the symptoms that will allow you to recognize sufferers from this disease. They are pallid, their gaze is listless, their eyes are dry, and they cannot produce tears. You will observe that their eyes are sunken and their tongue is dry, and they are completely unable to put on weight. They feel thirsty, and their shins are covered in lacerations which cannot heal because they are continually falling down and being bitten by dogs. Such are their symptoms. One must recognize that lycanthropy is a form of melancholia. You will treat it by opening a vein at the time of its manifestation and draining the blood until the point of fainting. Then feed the patient with food conducive to good humours. He is to be given sweet baths. After that, using the whey of the milk, cleanse him over three days with the gourd-medicine of Rufus or Archigenes or Justus. Repeat this a second and third time after intervals. After the purifications one should use the antidote to viper bites. Take the other measures too prescribed earlier for melancholia. As evening arrives and the disease manifests itself, apply to the head the lotions that usually induce sleep and anoint the nostrils with scents of this sort and opium. Occasionally supply sleep-inducing drinks too.
—Aëtius of Amida, Libri medicinales 6.11
That’s not a metaphor. It’s a clinical protocol. The distinction between “werewolf” and “mental patient” was already being negotiated in late antiquity, and the response was leeching, purging, and sedatives. The haunting image of a blood-drained, night-wandering man scratching at his legs and sobbing beside tombs is not far from the accounts we have of shell-shock or PTSD. Ogden doesn’t push the comparison, but he lays out the evidence well enough that the modern echoes are hard to ignore.
Most people today think of werewolves as a pop-cultural cliché—something to sell aftershave or pad out a Halloween special. Ogden reminds us that they were once a way of thinking about personal danger, social collapse, and the barely maintained boundary between man and monster. The ancients didn’t laugh at these things. They feared them. And given how civilised we claim to be, we should probably stop laughing too.
