Lamia: From Libyan Queen to Village Bogey

No ancient sculptor, as far as we know, ever carved a statue of Lamia. No temple held her image, no festival honoured her, and no city put her on its coins. She lived in voices: the nurse’s warning, the grandmother’s tale, the comic poet’s joke. The geographer Strabo, explaining why myths are useful in raising children, lists the frightening figures used to keep them in line: Lamia, the Gorgon, Ephialtes, Mormolyke. That list is where most of her long life was spent. But she had a story first, and it began with grief.

A queen in a Libyan cave

The fullest early account comes from the historian Diodorus of Sicily, and it turns up in an unexpected place: a military march. Describing an army crossing the Libyan desert at the end of the fourth century BCE, Diodorus pauses at a cave where Lamia was said to have been born. She was a queen of extraordinary beauty, he says, but her children died, and in her grief and her envy of other mothers she ordered babies to be torn from their mothers’ arms and killed. Over time the savagery of her spirit made her face like a beast’s. Children, Diodorus adds, still tremble at her name, and he quotes a line of Euripides as proof that she was Libyan by birth.

Diodorus likes to rationalize, and he explains away the strangest part of the legend. People said Lamia could take out her eyes. In his version she drank heavily, and when drunk she paid no attention to what anyone did, so the story grew that she put her eyes away.

An older version, told by Duris of Samos around 300 BCE and preserved by later commentators, is closer to myth. Lamia was a beautiful Libyan woman whom Zeus loved; Hera, in jealousy, destroyed her children; grief made her hideous, and she began to snatch the children of others. In some tellings Zeus, in pity, granted her the power to take out her eyes. Hera’s anger falls on the woman rather than the god, as it does on the nymph in Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus, though here the result is far darker. The genealogies do not agree: Pausanias, writing about the Sibyls, mentions a Lamia who was a daughter of Poseidon and mother, by Zeus, of the first Sibyl.

Eyes in a jar, a monster for children

By the fifth century BCE Lamia was already a household word in Athens. Aristophanes uses her for coarse comedy, piling her body parts onto his caricature of the politician Cleon, and his audience was expected to get the joke without explanation. A bogey that can be mocked is a bogey everyone knows.

Plutarch, writing on the vice of curiosity, turns her eyes into a moral image.

As in the fable, Lamia sleeps blind at home, her eyes put away in a jar, but when she goes out she sets them back in and sees; so each of us is sharp-eyed abroad and blind to what is at home.

Plutarch, On Curiosity (our rendering)

The Roman poet Horace, warning playwrights not to strain belief, offers as his absurd example a live child pulled from the belly of a Lamia who has just dined. By then the figure was so familiar, in Rome as in Greece, that a single line could summon her.

The bride at Corinth

The Lamia of poetry, the seductive serpent-woman, comes from another strand. In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in the early third century CE, Philostratus tells of Menippus, a handsome young student of philosophy at Corinth. On the road outside the city he meets a beautiful foreign woman who invites him home, and they are soon to marry, until Apollonius, the wandering sage, comes to the wedding feast and exposes her. The gold and silver tableware vanishes like a mirage; the bride, pressed hard, admits that she is an empusa, one of the creatures many people call lamias, and that she has been fattening Menippus in order to devour him, because she loves young bodies whose blood is pure.

Corinth, the city of shrewd kings and of Sisyphus and his stone, thus became Lamia’s stage. In 1621 Robert Burton retold the episode in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and John Keats, reading Burton, built a long poem on it. His Lamia, published in 1820 with Burton’s paragraph printed at the end, turns the story inside out. Keats’s Lamia begins as a dazzling serpent, spotted with vermilion, gold, green and blue, whom Hermes transforms into a woman in return for a favour. She truly loves the young Lycius, and it is the philosopher’s unblinking stare that destroys her at the wedding. Keats asks whether all charms fly “at the mere touch of cold philosophy”, and his sympathies lie with the vanishing bride.

Sculpture finally caught up with her at the end of the nineteenth century, when George Frampton made his Lamia, a bust in ivory and bronze set with opals, now in the collection of the Royal Academy in London. After more than two thousand years as a voice in the dark, the bogey had a portrait.

The lamia of the villages

Meanwhile, in the Greek countryside, the older Lamia had never gone away. The word survives in modern Greek as lámia, and folk tradition kept much of her ancient appetite while letting her beauty go. When Leo Allatius, a scholar from Chios working in Rome, wrote in 1645 about the beliefs of the Greeks of his day, he described the gello, a spirit blamed for harming newborn children, which carries forward much of what ancient writers told of Lamia.

In the legends gathered by Nikolaos Politis, the founder of Greek folklore studies, in his Paradoseis of 1904, and discussed by the Cambridge scholar J. C. Lawson in 1910, the lamia of the villages is rarely seductive. She is huge, greedy and often slow-witted, living in caves, ruined towers or near springs, sometimes as the mother or wife of a drakos, the ogre of Greek fairy tales, and she is the kind of monster a quick-thinking youngest son can outwit. Her greed passed into everyday speech: in Greek, a person who eats ravenously can still be said to eat “like a lamia”. Some coastal communities also told of a lamia of the sea, a dangerous spirit of the shore linked with sudden storms.

These are beliefs that families and storytellers handed down with care, sometimes half in earnest and sometimes purely as entertainment, and they deserve to be read on their own terms rather than as broken remnants of a classical original. Yet the line from Diodorus’s cave to the village hearth is real. A grieving queen became a child-snatcher, the child-snatcher became a fairy-tale ogress, and in English poetry she became a woman who loved too much. Each age gave her the face it needed.