Lamia

Also Known As: Greek Λάμια; plural Lamiai, used interchangeably with the Empousai and the Mormolykeia
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: She takes newborn children out of their mothers’ arms and swallows them, and in her later form she conjures a whole illusory life in order to fatten a young man before eating him.
Role in Mythos: She is the bogey Greek adults named to frighten children, and the first ancestor of every seductive man-eating phantom that followed her.
Relation to Humans: For something like a thousand years her name was the standard threat used in Greek nurseries, and Diodorus says that in his own day it was still the most terrifying word a child could hear. She was never worshipped, never propitiated, and never given a temple; she was simply expected, after dark, in any house with a small child in it.

Eighteen days out of Cyrene, three thousand stades of dust behind them, the army of Ophellas came to a mountain that was sheer on both sides and split by a deep ravine. A smooth rock ran up from it to a lofty peak, and at the base of that rock there was a cave, thickly grown over with ivy and bryony. Ten thousand foot soldiers, six hundred horsemen, a hundred chariots, and ten thousand non-combatants dragging their wives and their children and their household goods toward a war with Carthage, and Diodorus stops the whole column to point at a hole in the rock. A queen of surpassing beauty had been born in there. He does not explain who she was. He did not need to.

She had been beautiful, and she had been a queen in Libya, and every version of her keeps those two facts and then diverges. In the story the Greeks told their children, Zeus noticed her, as Zeus tended to, and Hera noticed him noticing, as Hera tended to, and the children born to Lamia were taken from her one by one as they came. Grief broke her, and it did not break her quietly. She began to snatch the newborns of other women and kill them where she stood, and the savagery worked its way up into her face and set there, and the beauty that had pulled a god down out of the sky went with it.

Diodorus preferred a version with no gods in it, and his is worse for being believable. Her children died. All of them. She could not bear the sight of other women’s living ones, so she gave an order, and the newborns of Libya were snatched from their mothers’ arms and killed at once, and she was obeyed, because she was the queen. He adds one more detail, offered as sober history. She drank. When she was deep in the wine she stopped noticing what her people got up to, and they took their liberties and said among themselves that she could not see, and out of that, he insists, grew the strangest thing anyone ever said about her: that she took her eyes out of her head and dropped them into a flask. He calls it a metaphor for a wine measure. The Greeks preferred the literal reading, and in the mythic telling it is Zeus who gives her the power to remove her eyes and put them back, which is either a mercy or the cruellest gift in the story, since it means she could choose to stop watching what she was doing and then choose to watch again.

They were never clear about her body. Her name is simply the ordinary Greek word for a large shark, the solitary kind that takes a swimmer. Stesichorus makes her a daughter of Poseidon and the mother of Scylla, so that the thing in the strait with the dogs’ heads growing out of it is her daughter. Another line gives her a son by Zeus, Acheilus, so beautiful that he challenged Aphrodite and was turned into a shark for it. A commentator on Aristophanes explains her name from the size of her throat. What survives is not a creature but an appetite, refitted with a new body in every century that wanted one. The swallowing is the constant. Horace, telling young poets that invention has limits and that an audience will only be asked to believe so much, warns them not to write a scene in which a living boy is hauled back out of the Lamia’s belly after lunch. The joke only works because every reader already knew what she did with children, and how whole they went down.

Her cult, if it can be called that, was conducted in doorways. A woman calls a child in from the last of the light. The child does not want to come. The woman says the name, and the child comes, quickly, and does not ask to go back out. There were no altars and no festivals and no priesthood. There was only that, performed every evening for centuries, which is a longer and more faithful observance than most gods ever got.

By the Roman imperial period she had multiplied into a species. Philostratus tells the best of these stories, and it happened, he says, in the middle of Greece, and everyone had heard some vague version of it. A Lycian student named Menippus, twenty-five years old and built like an athlete, was walking alone on the road towards Cenchreae when a woman took his hand and told him she had been in love with him for a long time. She was Phoenician, she said. She lived in a suburb of Corinth, and she named the suburb. Come this evening, she told him, and you will hear me singing, and you will drink wine such as you have never drunk, and there will be nobody to disturb us. He went, and then he kept going. Apollonius of Tyana looked the young man over the way a sculptor sizes up a block of stone and told him he was cherishing a serpent and being cherished by one. Menippus married her anyway.

Apollonius came to the wedding breakfast. He looked at the gold on the tables and the silver on the sideboards and asked who owned it, and Menippus pointed at his bride, and then Apollonius simply said the thing out loud: this fine bride is one of the empousai, whom most people call lamiai, and they are given to the pleasures of Aphrodite but far more to the flesh of men, and they fatten with pleasure the ones they intend to eat. The bride told him to stop talking and get out. Then the golden cups proved as light as air and blew away, and the silver went with them, and the wine-pourers and the cooks and the whole household staff vanished, and the phantom wept and begged not to be made to say what she was. He would not let her off. She admitted it. She had been feeding Menippus delight in order to feed on him afterward, because she liked young and beautiful bodies, their blood being pure and strong.

That is the whole of her power and the whole of her weakness in one scene. She can build a fortune, a house, a face, a future, out of nothing, and hold a clever man inside it for weeks. Apollonius does not fight her. He uses no spell, no charm, no iron, no fire. He says what she is, correctly, in front of witnesses, and the banquet evaporates like breath off glass. The older Lamia has a limit of the same shape. She can take every child in Libya and it will not give her back one of her own. She is a wound that hunts.

At Delphi they used to show visitors a rock and tell them that a woman had once stood on it and chanted the oracles, the first of the Sibyls, Herophile, and that she was the daughter of Zeus by Lamia, daughter of Poseidon. So the name that Greek mothers used at dusk to frighten their children belonged also to the mother of the first prophetic voice in Greece. Nobody in antiquity appears to have found that awkward. Euripides put the matter more plainly, in a line Diodorus liked well enough to quote: who does not know the name of Lamia, Libyan in race, a name of greatest reproach among mortals? Nobody did. That was the entire point of her, and it is why an army with a war to get to stopped on a Libyan road to look at an empty cave.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lamia in Greek mythology?

Lamia was a queen of Libya who became a child-devouring monster. Zeus took her as a lover, and Hera destroyed the children she bore him, after which Lamia began snatching and killing other women’s newborns. Greek adults used her name to frighten children, much as later cultures used the bogeyman.

What did Lamia look like?

The sources never settled on one appearance. She began as a woman of exceptional beauty whose face was distorted into something bestial by her own cruelty, and her name is the Greek word for a large shark. Ancient writers also gave her a huge devouring gullet and, most famously, eyes she could take out of her head and put back in again.

Why does Lamia have removable eyes?

In the myth, Zeus gave her the ability to take out her eyes and replace them. Diodorus Siculus offered a rationalised explanation instead: the real queen drank heavily, and while drunk she noticed nothing her subjects did, so people said she could not see, and the saying hardened into the story of eyes kept in a flask.

What is the difference between a lamia and an empousa?

By the Roman period there was very little. Lamia had multiplied into a class of vampiric female phantoms, and Philostratus has Apollonius of Tyana say that the empousai are the same beings most people call lamiai or mormolykeia. They seduce young men, keep them in a world of conjured luxury, and eat them.

How was the Lamia of Corinth defeated?

Apollonius of Tyana defeated her by naming her. At the wedding feast of his student Menippus he declared out loud what the bride really was, and her illusory gold, silver and servants dissolved on the spot, after which she confessed that she had been fattening Menippus in order to devour him. No weapon or spell was used against her.