The subject of vampirism does not appear to have attracted litterateurs greatly. True, there are the operas of Palma, Hart, Marschner, and von Lindpainter; and Philostratus and Phlegon of Tralles have discoursed upon the phenomena. There are not, however, many works of fiction based upon the topic, or many poems in which the subject is introduced. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem with the title A Vampyre of the Fens, and a long, wearisome novel, full of gruesome details, entitled Varney the Vampire. Among modern authors, Mr Bram Stoker has made the vampire the foundation of his exciting romance Dracula; but mention of these works almost exhausts the references to separate works upon the subject.
Nor are the references to vampires and vampirism in the ancient Greek authors more numerous. The phantom of Achilles is represented by Euripides (Hec., 109, 599) as appearing on his tomb clad in golden armour and appeased by the sacrifice of a young virgin, whose blood he drank. Œdipus also in Sophocles (Œd. Col., 621), when foretelling a defeat which the Thebans would sustain near his tomb, declares that his cold, dead body will drink their warm blood. Human victims were offered at the funeral pyre of Patroclus in the Iliad (vol. i.).
Though human beings are not sacrificed in the Odyssey, yet the blood of slaughtered sheep was eagerly lapped up by the ghosts consulted by Odysseus (xi. 45, 48, 95, 96, 153, etc.). A sheep was also to be sacrificed at the tombs of mortals, and its blood was supposed to be an offering acceptable to the departed spirit.
Pausanias, Strabo, Ælian, and Suidas relate the legend of Ulysses in his wanderings coming to the town of Temesa, in Italy, where one of his associates was stoned to death by the townsmen for having ravished a virgin. His ghost forthwith haunted the inhabitants, and caused them such annoyance that many were thinking seriously of leaving the town when they were told by Apollo’s oracle that to appease him they must build the hero a temple, and sacrifice to him yearly the most beautiful virgin they had among them. The temple was accordingly raised: access to the sacred enclosure was prohibited to all except the priests, on penalty of death. An engraving of the evil spirit that is alleged to have infested Temesa is given on page 18 of Beaumont’s Treatise on Spirits (ed. 1705).
Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana (iv. 25, p. 165), says that the long intercourse which took place between a female spectre and the Corinthian Menippus was but a prelude to the feast of flesh and blood in which she meant to revel after their marriage.
Some have described the Hebrew lilith as a vampire, but the Jewish Encyclopædia states that: “There is nothing in the Talmud to indicate that the lilith was a vampire.” She was regarded as a nocturnal demon, flying about in the form of a night-owl, and stealing children, and was held to have permission to kill all children sinfully begotten, even from a lawful wife. The lilith is held to have the same signification as the Greek strix and lamiæ, who were sorceresses or magicians, seeking to put to death new-born children. The ancient Greeks believed that these lamiæ devoured children, or sucked away all their blood until they died. Euripides and the scholiast of Aristophanes mention the lilith as a dangerous monster, the enemy of mortals; and Ovid describes the strigæ as dangerous birds, which fly by night and seek for infants to devour them and nourish themselves with their blood. The aluka of Proverbs xxx. 15 is more akin to the vampire. It is a blood-sucking, insatiable monster; the word is synonymous with algul, the well-known demon of the Arabian popular stories, “the man-devouring demon of the waste,” known as the ghoul or goule in the translated edition of the Arabian Nights.
Goethe, in his ballad The Bride of Corinth, describes how a young Athenian visits a friend of his father, to whose daughter he had been betrothed, and is disturbed at midnight by the appearance of the vampire spectre of her whom death has prevented from becoming his bride, and who, when detected, says:—
From my grave to wander I am forc’d,
Still to seek The Good’s long-sever’d link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,