Chapter 17.—What Varro Says of
the Incredible Transformations of Men.
In support of this story, Varro
relates others no less incredible about that most famous sorceress
Circe, who changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and about
the Arcadians, who, by lot, swam across a certain pool, and were
turned into wolves there, and lived in the deserts of that region
with wild beasts like themselves. But if they never fed on human
flesh for nine years, they were restored to the human form on
swimming back again through the same pool. Finally, he expressly
names one Demænetus, who, on tasting a boy offered up in sacrifice
by the Arcadians to their god Lycæus according to their custom,
was changed into a wolf, and, being restored to his proper form in
the tenth year, trained himself as a pugilist, and was victorious
at the Olympic games. And the same historian thinks that the
epithet Lycæus was applied in Arcadia to Pan and Jupiter for no
other reason than this metamorphosis of men into wolves, because it
was thought it could not be wrought except by a divine power. For
a wolf is called in Greek
λυκὸς
, from which the name
Lycæus appears to be formed. He says also that the Roman Luperci
were as it were sprung of the seed of these mysteries.