Lycaon
Lycaon, the Arcadian king who served human flesh
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Europe
Ancient Greece(Greece)
Son of Pelasgus, king of the oldest city
Lycaon reigned in Arcadia as the son of Pelasgus, whom Arcadian tradition held to be the first man, and he fathered fifty sons by many wives. Apollodorus lists them one by one, and the list is more interesting than it looks: among them are Mantineus, Clitor, Stymphalus and Orchomenus, which are the names of four Arcadian cities. Lycaon's sons are not a decorative figure but the genealogy by which Arcadia explained where its own peoples had come from.
The father is credited with founding Lycosura, on the slope of Mount Lykaion, and Pausanias calls it the oldest city the sun has ever seen. He is also credited with instituting there the cult of Zeus Lykaios, and that cult always carried a reputation for human sacrifice: it was still standing in Roman times, and Plato mentions it when he speaks of the man who tastes the entrails and turns into a wolf.
So the figure of the king is not that of any ordinary tyrant. Lycaon is at once the founder of the oldest city, the founder of a cult and the man who defiled it, and the myth does not separate the three: the altar he stains is the one he raised himself.
Three versions of the same crime
The ancient sources do not tell the same story, and the difference matters, because even the identity of the victim depends on it.
Ovid, at the opening of the Metamorphoses, has Jupiter come down disguised as a man. The people recognise him as a god and pray; Lycaon mocks them, decides to test the matter by killing him in his sleep and, before that, serves him the flesh of a Molossian hostage he held.
Apollodorus says nothing of a disguised guest: it is the fifty sons who, to test Zeus, mix the entrails of a boy of the country with those of the sacrificial victims.
Pausanias tells of no banquet at all. In his version Lycaon brings a human baby to the altar of Zeus Lykaios and pours its blood over the stone, and that is enough.
The old entry for this being said the victim was, 'according to the most widespread version', his own son Nyctimus. He is not, in any of the three: in Ovid it is the Molossian hostage, in Pausanias a newborn and in Apollodorus an unnamed boy of the country. Nyctimus does appear, and prominently, but in the opposite role.
The overturned table
Zeus overturns the table. Apollodorus adds the detail that turns the myth into an aetiology: the place where he overturned it is still called Trapezus, which in Greek means 'the table'. Then he blasts Lycaon and his fifty sons with the thunderbolt, and only one is saved, Nyctimus, the youngest, because Earth was quick enough to seize Zeus's right hand and appease him.
This is worth spelling out, because it is what the old entry had backwards: in Apollodorus, Nyctimus is the survivor, not the dish. And in Apollodorus, moreover, Lycaon is not turned into a wolf. He dies by the thunderbolt like his sons. The wolf belongs to Ovid and Pausanias, not to him.
In Ovid the lightning brings down the palace and the king escapes into the countryside, and there he is transformed. In Pausanias there is no flight and no thunderbolt: the change is immediate, at the altar itself, the moment the child's blood falls on the stone. Three accounts, three different punishments, and the habit of telling them as though they were one is what produced almost every error this entry has had to undo. What follows, already as a beast, is told in the entry for his wolf form.
Relics
Symbology
Element
Wolf
Number
1
Color
Gray
Animals
Wolf
Sigils:
Traits
Powers
Weaknesses
Behavioral
Resistances
Relations with other beings
Rival of
In the Atlas
Travel the beings’ world of origin and the cosmos of their dimensions.
Mythologies
Greek mythology developed in Ancient Greece from the Late Bronze Age and reached its most elaborate form during the archaic and classical periods, between the 8th and 4th centuries BCE. It emerged among the Hellenic peoples who inhabited the Greek peninsula, the Aegean islands and the coasts of Asia Minor, and was transmitted mainly through the oral poetry of Homer and Hesiod, as well as local traditions collected in sanctuaries and festivals. Its worldview presents a universe ordered by a hierarchy of divinities that intervene in human and natural affairs, with Olympus as the dwelling of the principal gods and Hades as the destination of the deceased. The central deities include the twelve Olympians, headed by Zeus, god of the sky and sovereign, together with Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Demeter and Dionysus. Before them, the Titans, among whom Cronus and Rhea stand out, ruled the cosmos until they were deposed by the Olympians in the Titanomachy. Other important entities are the Muses, the nymphs, the Cyclopes and the Moirai, who embody cosmic forces and destinies. This tradition exerted a lasting influence on the literature, art and thought of Rome, the European Renaissance and subsequent Western culture, supplying motifs, characters and narrative structures that have endured in philosophy, astronomy and the arts to the present day.
Sources
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Poetic work by Publius Ovidius Naso narrating myths of transformations, including references to Hippolytus and Virbius.
Library
Apollodorus · 100
Mythological compendium attributed to Apollodorus summarizing Greek legends.
Pausanias' Description of Greece
Pausanias · ca. 150 CE
Pausanias’ "Description of Greece" (2nd century), a geographical and religious guide to the Greek world. It tours sanctuaries, monuments and local cults, preserving myths, heroes and divinities that would otherwise have been lost.
Frequently asked questions
Whom did Lycaon serve at the banquet?
It depends on the source, and in none of them is it his son Nyctimus. Ovid says it was a Molossian hostage he held; Apollodorus, an unnamed boy of the country, served by the fifty sons; Pausanias tells of no banquet at all and speaks of a newborn slaughtered at the altar. Nyctimus is, in Apollodorus, the only son who survives the thunderbolt.
Is Lycaon turned into a wolf in every source?
No. In Apollodorus there is no wolf: Zeus blasts him with the thunderbolt along with his fifty sons, and that is the end. The wolf belongs to Ovid, where the king flees into the country after the palace burns, and to Pausanias, where the change happens at the altar itself. Attributing the transformation to Apollodorus is a common error this entry has had to correct.
Why is that place called Trapezus?
Because there, according to Apollodorus, Zeus overturned the banquet table, and Trapezus means 'the table' in Greek. It is an aetiology, that is, a myth that exists to explain a place name that already existed. The detail matters because it shows what the story was for in Arcadia: not only to condemn the king, but to leave the mark of the punishment on the map.
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