Striges

Strix (pl. striges or strixes), in the Ancient Roman and Greek legends was a bird of ill omen, product of metamorphosis, that fed on human flesh and blood. It also referred to witches and related maleficent folkloric beings.

They are birds with long golden beaks that they use to suck the blood of infants, their favorite victims. They also have wings, usually red, and four black legs, all with clawed feet. Their eyes are yellow and round, without pupils.

The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boios, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios, who were punished for their cannibalism. 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, dated to 191 BC, in which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the 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 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. Pliny, in his Natural History, 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 bat suckled its children.

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