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 is quite the same as the shifting, liminal status of the werewolf of folklore.

Indeed, alongside a thorough discussion of this Olympian narrative, Ogden persuasively argues that other literary sources suggest the classical werewolf to have been a creature of superstition and oral tradition, related less to deities than to the witches and sorcerers of folklore and popular imagination. Far from being a myth of the gods, the overtly sensationalist werewolf story from Petronius’s

Satryricon emerges as a tall after-dinner tale where magic informs a bawdy low-life world of slaves, inn-keepers and adulterers. Comparison with the

Metamorphoses (“The Golden Ass”) of Apuleius confirms that the Romans at least had a taste for robust satirical comic fiction which happily accommodated human-into-animal motifs, albeit in this instance ass rather than wolf.

At the other chronological end of Ogden’s range of texts we are offered the tempting possibility of werewolves in the

Odyssey – does Circe transform hapless sailors into wolf-men and lion-men as well as pigs? Some vasepaintings suggest this interpretation, but the book offers no illustrations beyond a single line drawing of an isolated figure and, rather unnecessarily, a photograph of a wolf. By contrast it provides, as one would expect, full apparatus of index, bibliography and (many, many) footnotes, exemplary for a work of academic reference but perhaps indicating that Ogden’s text, though written in an engaging and accessible style, delivers a decidedly dense read for the non-classicist who doesn’t immediately know their Polybius from their Pausanias. Not exactly a page-turner, yet quite probably the best book that will ever be written on the topic. ★★★★