Lycaon

Ovid describes the metamorphosis with a precision nobody has bettered. Lycaon flees into the countryside, tries to speak and cannot: what comes out is a howl. His clothes turn to hair and his arms to legs. And what is left of the king is exactly what he already had as a man: the same grey hair, the same violence in the face, the same gleaming eyes, the same image of ferocity. He does not become something else; it is simply that what he was inside is at last visible outside.

The first thing he does as a wolf is fall upon the flocks, and he still takes delight in blood. The king who argued with the gods is reduced to an animal that cannot utter a word, and that loss of speech is the punishment within the punishment: Ovid insists that he tries and fails.

In Pausanias the change happens differently, at the altar and without flight, the moment the child's blood wets the stone. And in Apollodorus it does not happen at all: there Lycaon dies by the thunderbolt. Of the three ancient sources, two make him a wolf, and neither of the two says he ever becomes a man again.

From Mount Lykaion came a belief that stayed alive into Roman times and that is often wrongly attributed to Lycaon himself. Pausanias tells it thus: ever since the time of Lycaon, at every sacrifice to Zeus Lykaios a man is turned into a wolf, but the change is not for life; if, while he is a wolf, he abstains from human flesh, after nine years he becomes a man again, and if he tastes it he remains a beast for ever.

That term belongs to the others, not to him. Lycaon has no nine years and no diet to save him: his transformation carries no term in any source. The old entry for this being called it 'reversible only by later divine intervention', and that conflates two different things: what is reversible is the rite, and what reverses it is not a god but abstinence.

Pliny records the same belief on the authority of Euanthes and gives it the same number of years, which shows how far it travelled. And the terror it expresses is very concrete for a region of shepherds and mountains like Arcadia: not the monster that comes from outside, but the neighbour who goes up the mountain to a sacrifice and comes down as something else.

Lycaon's name lies at the root of the word lycanthropy, from the Greek lykos, 'wolf', and anthropos, 'man', and his story is the first wolf-metamorphosis in Western literature. From there it passed into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and from there into the lycanthropy trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several of which this encyclopaedia records.

But it is worth saying what the Greek version does not contain, because that is nearly everything taken for granted today. There is no full moon: the transformation depends on the sacrifice and on the will of the gods, not on the calendar. There is no silver: silver as the werewolf's weakness is a far later invention, from the cinema and popular fiction of the twentieth century. There is no infection by bite, no two-legged wolfman, no monthly there-and-back.

And there is a confusion worth undoing here, because it came to affect this entry's own data: the king of Arcadia is not the only Lycaon in Greek mythology. There is another, a son of Ares, and a third, a son of Priam, whom Achilles kills in book XXI of the Iliad. The three share a name and nothing else, and mixing them up is the easiest mistake to make with this figure.