The Werewolf in the Ancient World by Daniel Ogden
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This is an exhaustively researched, scholarly book on werewolves and werewolf-adjacent stories in the ancient world, and is probably the best book of its kind that I've read. The author has written a series of books on supernatural topics in the ancient world, and this one, like many of Ogden's books, is both a source book and a scholarly analysis of those sources, suitable for teaching a course on the subject.
The stories themselves make for very amusing reading. Consider Damarchus, who lived in an Arcadian town that practiced human sacrifice alongside conventional animal sacrifice. Damarchus ate some of the human sacrificial meat, either out of hubristic curiosity or by accident, and was cursed by the Gods with the form of a wolf. He lived as a wolf for ten years, and then turned back into a human (the sources don't explain how). Bizarrely, he then went on to win Olympic victories in a sport called Pankration (somewhere between boxing and wrestling, a bit like modern MMA), and is attested independently in several sources, so likely was an actual Olympic victor (if not an actual cannibal cum werewolf).
It's hard to imagine a more compelling story than "I just rode out a ten-year curse as a wolf for eating human flesh and now I'm ready to shock the world with my fighting prowess." I momentarily wondered at the oddity of the ancients' relationship with their athletes such that they felt that werewolfism was the best explanation for unusual fighting ability, but after reflecting on it, it's not so very odd. To my mind, Mike Tyson's saga has a similar energy, just in reverse: an athletic champion, who subsequently resorted to cannibalism, and was symbolically exiled, called an "animal," etc.. But I digress.
Ogden's analysis of the sources is also deeply fascinating. For example, Ogden identifies structural features that ancient werewolf stories share with modern stories (e.g. the moon), but also features that are largely absent from modern werewolf stories, such as the intense importance of the ancient werewolf's clothes in facilitating the transformation (or reversing it). It's fair to say that ancient werewolf stories reflect a very different set of preoccupations than modern werewolf stories do, and Ogden does a great job of sketching those out.
My only criticism is that Ogden takes some fairly contrarian positions on several points that I'm not sure are well supported by the sources that he relies on. But, to his credit, he shows his work and each individual reader can draw their own conclusions about whether, say, the Lykaon/Lykaia myths were late confections conflated with the story of Damarchus.
Recommended for students of classical civilization, folklore generally, or unusually devoted werewolf fans.