Lamiae
（
Λαμίαι). Fabulous monsters, the vampires of ancient
legend, commonly represented with the head and breast of a woman and the body of a serpent.
According to some, they changed their forms at pleasure, and, when about to ensnare their
prey, assumed such appearances as were most seductive and calculated to please. The blood of
young persons was believed to possess peculiar attractions for them, and for the purpose of
quaffing this they were wont to take the forms of beautiful women, the better to allure young
men. The Lamiae possessed also another means of accomplishing their object. This was a species
of hissing sound emitted by them, so soothing and attractive in its nature
that persons found themselves irresistibly allured by it. When not in disguise and when they
had sated their horrid appetites, their form was hideous, their visages glowed like fire,
their bodies were besmeared with blood, and their feet appeared of iron or of lead. Sometimes
they showed themselves completely blind; at other times they had a single eye, either in the
forehead or on one side of the visage. The popular belief made them frequent Africa and
Thessaly, in both of which countries they watched along the main roads and seized upon unwary
travellers.
The fable of Queen Lamia has some analogy to this fiction, and both, in all probability, owe
their origin to one and the same source. Lamia, according to Diodorus Siculus and other
ancient authorities, was a queen of Africa, remarkable for beauty, who, on account of her
cruel disposition, was eventually transformed into a wild beast. Having lost, it seems, her
own children by the act of Heré, who was jealous of Lamia's intercourse with Zeus,
she sought to console her sorrow by seizing the children of her subjects from their mothers'
arms, and putting them to death. Hence the transformation inflicted upon her by the gods
(
Diod. Sic.xx. 41; Wesseling,
ad Diod. l.
c.). The Lamiae figured extensively in the nursery-legends of antiquity, and their names and
attributes were standing objects of terror to the young ( Diod. l. c.; cf.
A.
P. 340;
Suet. Vesp. 1177). See also
Empusa;
Lemures; Mormolycé.
