The werewolf in ancient sources: Petronius, Pliny and Lycaon
From the tale of Niceros in the Satyricon to Pliny's scepticism, from Lycaon to the Neuri of Herodotus: the earliest evidence for lycanthropy in Europe.
The idea that a man can turn into a wolf is one of the oldest and most widespread beliefs in Europe. Long before Gothic novels and films, the figure of the werewolf already appears in Greek and Latin texts, where it is told as myth, as a frightening anecdote around a laden table, or as a superstition to be refuted. Reading these sources helps us understand how the belief arose and how, even in antiquity, some regarded it with distrust.
Lycaon and the Neuri
The mythical model is Lycaon, king of Arcadia. Ovid, in the first book of the Metamorphoses, relates that Jupiter, a guest of the king, was offered human flesh as a test of his divinity; as punishment Lycaon was turned into a wolf, keeping in his savage appearance the traits of his own character. The king's very name recalls the Greek word for wolf, lykos, from which the term lycanthropy derives.
Herodotus, in the fourth book of his Histories, reports that the Neuri, a people north of the Black Sea, were said to turn into wolves for a few days every year. The historian makes clear that he is repeating what the Scythians and the Greeks of the region say, and openly declares that he does not believe it. It is one of the first records of a critical attitude towards metamorphosis.
The tale of Niceros in the Satyricon
The most vivid text is by Petronius, written in the first century AD. During Trimalchio's dinner the freedman Niceros tells how he set out at night with a soldier to reach the woman he loved. When they came among the tombs, under a very bright moon, his companion undressed and, the narrator says, «subito lupus factus est», suddenly became a wolf, howled and fled into the woods, while his clothes had turned to stone.
Arriving at the villa, Niceros learned that a wolf had attacked the flock and that a servant had wounded it in the neck with a spear. The next morning he found the soldier in bed, while a doctor tended his neck. Niceros concludes that he understood the man was a versipellis, a skin-changer. The tale, full of humour, reveals a popular belief that was already well defined, with the wound that betrays the secret identity.
Pliny's scepticism
Pliny the Elder, in the eighth book of his Natural History, tackles the subject decisively. He reports the story, taken from Greek authors, of an Arcadian family that chose one of its members to swim across a pool and live as a wolf for nine years, and that of Demaenetus of Parrhasia. He then states that we must hold these transformations to be, with confidence, false: «falsum esse confidenter».
Pliny also notes that the word versipellis had entered common speech as an insult, a sign that the belief was rooted among the people. In the imperial age physicians such as Marcellus of Side described lycanthropy as a form of melancholy that drove the sick to wander at night among the graves. This medical reading was handed down to Byzantine and medieval treatises.
Between myth, anecdote and rational criticism, the ancient sources already contain all the elements of the later legend: the moon, the night, burial places, the revealing wound. The Sicilian lupu minaru and the werewolf of the Italian countryside descend from this tradition, enriched over the centuries by local beliefs, but their most recognisable ancestor remains the soldier who frightened Niceros among the tombs.