Lycaon

Licaón was, in Greek mythology, a primitive king of Arcadia, son of Pelasgo (the first man according to the Arcadian tradition) and father of a numerous offspring, famous for his impiety. The foundation of the city of Licosura, considered the oldest in the world, and the institution of the cult of Zeus Liceo on Mount Liceo are attributed to him. To this cult were associated archaic and somber rites: Pausanias collects the belief that in the sacrifices of Mount Liceo whoever tasted the human entrails mixed with those of the animal victims transformed into a wolf during nine years, recovering the human form only if in that time he abstained from eating human flesh. These accounts linked Arcadia, a mountainous and pastoral region, with an ancient terror to the wild and with the border between civilization and the beast.

The most famous myth of Lycaon tells how Zeus, disguised as a traveler, appeared in his palace to test the king's reputation for impiety. To check if his guest was really a god, Lycaon served him a terrible banquet prepared with the flesh of a human being, according to the most widespread version that of his own son Nyctimus. Zeus, who discovered the sacrilege instantly, knocked down the table horrified, struck the sons of Lycaon with lightning and transformed the king into a wolf, preserving in him traits of his former nature: the fierce gaze, the gray fur and the thirst for blood. Ovid narrates this episode at the beginning of his Metamorphoses, and in it critics have seen the first account of lycanthropy in Western literature, a divine punishment for the violation of sacred hospitality and for the abomination of cannibalism.

Turned into a wolf, Lycaon embodied the irruption of the beast in the human being, the loss of reason under the dominion of the instincts. The tradition extended the curse to his lineage and to the cult of Mount Lycaeus, where it was believed that certain men transformed temporarily into wolves and returned to their form if they respected the prescribed abstinence. This Arcadian background, with its sacrifices and its ritual metamorphoses, made the myth of Lycaon the ancient model of the werewolf, the figure of the human being who, due to his transgression, remains condemned to alternate between humanity and the beast. Unlike the modern versions of the lycanthrope, linked to the full moon and to silver, the Greek tradition centered the transformation on the sacrifice, cannibalism and the will of the gods.

Licaón passed into posterity as the original archetype of the werewolf, and his name is at the very origin of the word «licantropía» (from the Greek lykos, «wolf», and anthropos, «man»). His myth, transmitted by Ovidio, Pausanias and Apolodoro, influenced European legends of metamorphosis from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and laid the foundations of the tale of the man condemned to become a beast. The cult of Mount Liceo, with its fame of human sacrifices, endured until Roman times. In modern culture, the figure of Licaón remains alive as the classical root of the lycanthrope myth and as a symbol of the wild and repressed side of human nature.