Lamia

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Lamia is a figure of Greek myth: a woman who lost her children and, in her grief and rage, became a devourer of the children of others. The Greeks knew her as a bogey invoked to frighten the young, and as something darker than that — a being whose suffering had curdled into appetite. By the late fifth century BCE she was already a household word: Aristophanes can throw her name into a comic insult and trust the theater to flinch, the way a name does only when nurses have used it for generations to quiet a restless child.

“Lamia and the Soldier” (1905) by John William Waterhouse, Auckland Art Gallery; the moulted snakeskin in her lap is the only sign of her nature — Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The queen of Libya

The oldest version makes her a queen of Libya, loved by Zeus. Hera, in the familiar pattern of that goddess’s jealousy, destroyed Lamia’s children; what was left of the mother turned monstrous, hunting the infants of other women out of a grief that could not be undone. This is the shape the historian Duris of Samos gives her around the turn of the third century BCE — a once-beautiful sovereign disfigured by loss into a thing that takes what it can no longer keep. The mythographers add the genealogy: she is a daughter of Belus, the eponymous king of the Libyan east, which sets her at the rim of the Greek world, in the half-known south where Greek imagination liked to lodge its marvels and its monsters.

Diodorus Siculus preserves the most circumstantial telling, and characteristically strips the supernatural out of it. In his account Lamia was a real Libyan queen of surpassing beauty, born in a great cave near Automala, who — maddened by the deaths of her own children — ordered that the infants of her subjects be torn from their mothers and killed; over time her face was so deformed by savagery and drink that she became the bugbear later ages made of her. Even the famous detail of the laid-aside eyes Diodorus rationalizes: the queen, sodden with wine, governed as though sightless, letting her people do as they pleased unwatched, and from this, he reasons, grew the folk-tale that she kept her eyes in a jar. The rationalizing impulse is itself a measure of how firmly the monstrous Lamia had taken hold; a sober historian felt obliged to explain her away.

The sleepless mother and the borrowed eyes

A grimmer strand of the tradition holds that Hera robbed her of sleep, so that she could never rest from her mourning — and that Zeus, in pity, gave her eyes she could take out and set aside, a small mercy granted to a thing past saving. The two halves of the curse fit together with a cruel economy: a mother forced to stay awake forever before the absence of her children, granted only the power to set her own seeing on a shelf. Later moralists found the image too good to leave alone. Plutarch, in his essay on idle curiosity, turns Lamia into an emblem of the busybody — blind to her own household, where she stows her eyes in a vessel, but sharp-sighted the moment she steps abroad into other people’s affairs. The myth here is read as a parable of attention misdirected, the gaze that has nothing kind to look at turning outward to consume.

The details vary by teller; what is constant is the shape of the story, a wound transformed into a threat. The very name carries the wound: the Greeks heard in Lamia the word laimos, the throat or gullet, and read her as the devourer named for the act itself — the swallowing throat made into a person. Whether the etymology is sound or only felt, it tells us how she was understood. She is hunger given a face, and the face was once a grieving woman’s.

From one Lamia to many

Over time the single Lamia multiplied. Greek and later Roman writers speak of lamiai in the plural — a class of female demons, kin to the empousai and the striges, who took the form of beautiful women to seduce young men and then fed on their blood or flesh. The kinship is loose and the borders blur on purpose. The empousai, shape-shifting servants of Hecate glimpsed on lonely roads, the strix or screech-owl demon that drinks the blood of infants in their cradles, the bogey called Mormo whom Corinthian mothers named to terrify the disobedient, the child-snatcher Gello known from a fragment of Sappho — all bleed into one another, all female, all hungry, all invoked at the edge of sleep. The Greeks did not keep a tidy bestiary of them. What they shared mattered more than what divided them: each was a night-shape that fed where a household was most defenseless, at the cradle or the marriage bed.

Here the figure shifts from grieving mother to predatory seductress, and it is this second face that proved the more durable. The plural lamia no longer needs a backstory of stolen children; she is simply a beautiful surface over an appetite, and the danger she poses is to the young man who mistakes the surface for the whole. Where the queen of Libya hunts infants out of a sorrow turned inside out, the wedding-night lamia hunts the bridegroom out of nothing more than what she is. The myth has shed its grief and kept its mouth.

“Lamia” (1909) by Herbert James Draper, picturing the seductress whose serpent nature shows only in the skin about her arm — Herbert James Draper, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Philostratus and the bride at Corinth

One of antiquity’s most quoted instances comes in Philostratus’s life of the sage Apollonius of Tyana, the long biographical romance composed in the early third century for the empress Julia Domna. In its fourth book, at Corinth, a young Lycian named Menippus — a student of philosophy, five-and-twenty and handsome — is captivated by a wealthy and lovely foreign woman who has appeared to him on the road and invited him to her house. He intends to marry her. Apollonius, attending the wedding feast, sees through it: the gold and the servants and the very house are phantasms, and the bride, when he presses her, confesses she is an empousa, a lamia, who had been fattening Menippus with pleasures so as to devour his body, for it was the way of such beings to feed on the young and beautiful because their blood was pure. The phantom dissolves; the philosopher’s cold clarity is the cure. Later writers retold the scene for centuries, and it became the single episode that carried Lamia, intact, out of antiquity and into the modern imagination.

The lamia and the witch

That episode carried the figure into the Western imagination well past antiquity. Medieval and early-modern demonology folded the lamia into the vocabulary of witch-belief, where she lent her name to night-creatures said to steal and devour infants; the word appears in learned treatises on witchcraft as a near-synonym for the witch herself. The Latin lamia slid easily against the striga — the Roman screech-owl demon whose name gives Italian its strega — and against the Germanic Hexe, so that by the fifteenth century clerical writers used all of them interchangeably for the contemporary woman accused of nocturnal flight and infanticide. The classical demon had become a legal category. Ulrich Molitor’s dialogue of 1489, De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus — “On Lamiae and Pythonic Women” — put the word in the title of what became the first illustrated witchcraft treatise, with its six woodcuts; it went through more than forty editions over the next two centuries, outprinting the notorious Malleus Maleficarum. A century later the Jesuit Martin Del Rio, in his vast Disquisitiones Magicae of 1599–1600, treated lamia with a philologist’s care, marshalling the ancient texts to anchor a thoroughly contemporary fear. In the demonologists’ hands the lamia drifted toward the older Greek figures of the dangerous knowing woman — the witch-queen Medea and the crossroads goddess Hecate whose servants the empousai were — until seductress, child-killer and sorceress had collapsed into the single composite the trials would prosecute. The bereaved Libyan queen had become an item of evidence in the case against living women — the history not of a creature but of a belief, and of what a borrowed name can be made to license.

The “witches’ meal” woodcut from Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (c. 1489), one of the six images that made it the first illustrated witchcraft treatise — woodcut by Johann Zainer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Romantic enchantress

Romantic poetry recovered her again, this time as a tragic enchantress rather than a fiend. The thread runs through Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621 retold the Corinthian episode from Philostratus, and from Burton straight to John Keats, who took it as the seed of his narrative poem Lamia, written in 1819 and published in 1820. Keats keeps the bones of the old story — the serpent given a woman’s beauty, the love of a young Corinthian named Lycius, the philosopher Apollonius arriving at the wedding feast — but reverses its sympathies. In his telling the cold sage’s gaze that unmasks her is no deliverance but a killing; the disenchanting eye withers her away, and the bridegroom dies of the loss. The monster has become the casualty, and the exposer of illusion the destroyer of something beautiful. It is the last great turn of the figure, and it inverts the very logic of the Philostratus scene that founded her fame.

“Lamia” (1909, second version) by John William Waterhouse, the solitary enchantress recast in the Romantic key drawn from Keats — John William Waterhouse, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What the figure tracks, across these uses, is a single anxiety wearing different masks — the fear of what preys on the child, and the older intuition that such hunger might begin in a sorrow of its own. Scholars treat the lamia less as one coherent being than as a name that kept attracting new fears, a slot in the imagination that successive ages filled with whatever frightened them most. Like the Lydian weaver Arachne, another mortal woman fixed forever in the form her transformation gave her, Lamia is remembered less for who she was than for what she was turned into. The grieving queen and the wedding-night demon are not quite the same creature; the name simply held the door open between them.

Sources and scholarship

The figure has to be assembled from scattered ancient notices rather than read off any single text. The fullest narrative survivals are the rationalized account in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 20.41, which preserves the Libyan queen, the cave, the slain children and the eyes-in-a-jar, and the fragment of Duris of Samos (third century BCE) behind it, edited in Felix Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker as no. 76 F17. The comic and proverbial Lamia surfaces in Aristophanes (Wasps 1035, Peace 758) with the ancient scholia that gloss her, and the moralizing eyes appear in Plutarch’s On Curiosity (De curiositate). The single most influential literary appearance is the Menippus episode in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.25, standardly read in F. C. Conybeare’s Loeb edition (1912); the site’s library holds G. R. S. Mead’s earlier study and translation, Apollonius of Tyana (1901). For the demonological afterlife, Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (1489) and Martin Del Rio’s Disquisitiones Magicae (1599–1600) document the slide from monster to witch; the modern study of the ancient child-killing daemons as a class is Sarah Iles Johnston’s Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999), and Daniel Ogden’s work on Greek and Roman dragon-lore and the Drakōn tradition situates Lamia among her serpentine kin. The Romantic recovery is best followed in Keats’s own text, with the poet’s note pointing back to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as his source.

→ In the library: Philostratus — Apollonius of Tyana (Mead, 1901)

→ Related: Witchcraft · Zeus · Hera · Apollonius Of Tyana · Arachne · Demon · Hecate · Medea