The appearance and sound of the screech owl influenced Roman ideas of the blood-drinking strix. (Note that the owl depicted here is an Eastern Screech Owl, which is native to the Americas but resembles the European Scops Owl that was familiar to the ancient Romans.)

The strix or striga (pl. striges; occasionally bastardized to stirge) was an Ancient Roman legendary creature, usually described as a nocturnal bird of ill omen that fed on human flesh and blood, like a vampire. Unlike later vampires, it was not a revenant—a risen corpse—but the product of metamorphosis. The name is Greek in origin and means 'owl', with which bird it is usually identified (the name of the genus Strix follows this meaning).

Classical stories

The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boio , which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios (their father being a wild bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, like Lycaon, by being transformed into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix "that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men". The first Latin allusion is in Plautus's Pseudolus (819), dated to 191 BCE, in which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the striges—i.e., disemboweling a hapless victim. Horace, in his Epodes, makes the strix's magical properties clear: its feathers are an ingredient in a love potion. Seneca the Younger, in his Hercules Furens , shows the striges dwelling on the outskirts of Tartarus. Ovid (Fasti, vi.101 ff.) tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king Procas in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus and placated with the meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the Kalends of June.

Though descriptions abound, the concept of the strix was nonetheless vague. The scientific Pliny, in his Natural History (xi.232), confesses little knowledge of them; he knows that their name was once used as a curse, but beyond that he can only aver that the tales of them nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat² suckled its children.

Medieval and modern

The legend of the strix survived into the Middle Ages, as recorded in Isidore's Etymologiae (book 12, ch. 7.42, and gave both name and attributes to the strega , the Italian witch.

See also

• Lamia
• Lilith
• Strigoi

Notes

Note 2: In the ancient world the bat was commonly classified as a bird; only Aristotle differed, considering it halfway between bird and land animal. See Oliphant, p. 134 n. 4

References

• Classical works are cited in the text.
• "The Story of the Strix: Ancient", by Samuel Grant Oliphant, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association', Vol. 44. (1913), pp. 133-149
• "Carna, Proca and the Strix on the Kalends of June", by Christopher Michael McDonough, in Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), Vol. 127. (1997), pp. 315-344.