The word Lamia, which has survived unchanged in form down to the present day save that the by-forms Λάμνα, Λάμνια and Λάμνισσα are locally preferred, did not originally it would seem indicate a species of monster but a single person. Lamia according to classical tradition was the name of a queen of Libya who was loved by Zeus, and thus excited the resentment of Hera, who robbed her of all her children; whereupon the desolate queen took up her abode in a grim and lonely cavern, and there changed into a malicious and greedy monster, who in envy and despair stole and killed the children of more fortunate mothers[458].
But a plural of the word, indicating that the single monster had been multiplied into a whole class, soon occurs. Philostratus[459] in speaking of ‘the Empusae, which the common people call Lamiae and Mormolykiae,’ says, ‘Now these desire indeed the pleasures of love, but yet more do they desire human flesh, and use the pleasures of love to decoy those on whom they will feast.’ A plural such as is here used might of course be merely a studied expression of contempt for vulgar superstitions; but the latter part of the quotation seems to give a fair summary of the character of ancient Lamiae. This is illustrated by a gruesome story, narrated by Apuleius[460], of two Lamiae who, in vengeance for a slight of the love proffered by one of them to a young man named Socrates, tore out his heart one night before the eyes of his companion Aristomenes.
Of these two main characteristics of the ancient Lamiae, the one, lasciviousness, has come to be mainly imputed in modern times to the Lamia of the Sea, the single deity who rules the sea-nymphs; while the craving for human flesh is the most marked feature of the terrestrial tribe of Lamiae. But the latter certainly are the truest descendants of the ancient Lamia, and occupy a place in popular belief such as she held of old; for few, it would seem, stood then in any serious fear of the Lamia; the testimony of several ancient writers[461] (the story of Apuleius notwithstanding) proves that more than two thousand years ago she had already fallen to the level of bogeys which frighten none but children.
Gelloudes.
In my account of the Nereids properly so-called, reference was made to certain beings known in the Cyclades as ἀγιελοῦδες or γιαλοῦδες and reckoned by several writers[462] among the nymphs of the sea. In this they certainly have the support of popular etymology; for in Amorgos Theodore Bent[463] heard that ‘an evil spirit lived close by, which now and again rises out of the sea and seizes infants; hence it is called Gialoù (from γιαλός[464], the sea (sic)).’ But it is, I think, only an erroneous association by the inhabitants of the Cyclades of two like-sounding words which has caused the Ἀγιελοῦδες to be regarded as marine demons; Bent’s information transposes cause and effect. Elsewhere in Greece there are known certain beings called Γελλοῦδες or Γιλλοῦδες, female demons with a propensity to carry off young children and to devour them; and it is strange that so careful an authority on Greek folk-lore as Bernhard Schmidt should not have recognised that the name ἀγιελοῦδες employed in some of the Cyclades is only a dialectic form of the commoner γελλοῦδες[465] with an euphonetic ἀ prefixed as in the case of νεράϊδες and ἀνεράϊδες. Enquiry in Tenos revealed to me the fact, not mentioned, though perhaps implied, in the statement of Bent, that the ἀγιελοῦδες are there believed to feed upon the children whom they carry off. This trait at once confirms their identity with the γελλοῦδες, and renders it impossible to class them as a form of nymph. It is of course believed that nymphs of the sea or of rivers, when they carry off human children to their watery habitations, do incidentally drown them, but by an oversight and not of malice prepense. But savagely to prey upon human flesh—for all the nymphs’ wantonness and cruelty, that is a thing abhorrent from their nature and inconceivable in them. This horrid propensity proves the γελλοῦδες or ἀγιελοῦδες to be a separate class of female demons.
The chief authority on these malignant beings is Leo Allatius[466], who both quotes a series of passages which enable us to trace the development of the belief in them, and also tells a story which is the only source of evidence concerning other of their characteristics than their appetite for the flesh of infants.
Their prototype, mentioned, we are told, by Sappho, was the maiden Gello, whose spectre after her untimely end was said by the people of Lesbos to beset children and to be chargeable with the early deaths of infants[467].
The individuality of this Gello continued to be recognised to some extent as late as the tenth century[468]; for Ignatius, a deacon of Constantinople, in his life of the Patriarch Tarasius named her as a single demon, though he added that the crime of killing children in the same way was also imputed to a whole class of witches. ‘Hence,’ comments Allatius, ‘it has come about that at the present day Striges (i.e. the witches of whom Ignatius speaks), because they practise evil arts upon infants and by sucking their blood or in other ways cause their death, are called Gellones[469].’ In the story also which exhibits the chief qualities of this demon, her name (in the form Γυλοῦ) appears still as a proper name.
But the multiplication of the single demon into a whole class dates from long before the time of Allatius. John of Damascus in the eighth century used the plural γελοῦδες as a popular word, the meaning of which he took to be the same as that of Striges (στρίγγαι); and Michael Psellus too in the eleventh century evidently regarded these two words as interchangeable designations of a class of beings (whether of demons or of witches, he leaves uncertain); for after an exact account of the Striges and their thirst for children’s blood, he says that new-born infants who waste away (as if from the draining of their blood by these Striges) are called Γιλλόβρωτα[470], ‘Gello-eaten.’
The story of Leo Allatius[471], which sets forth the chief qualities of Gello, is a legend of which the Saints Sisynios and Synidoros are the heroes. The children of their sister Melitene had been devoured by this demon, and they set themselves to capture her. She, to effect her escape, at once changed her shape, and became first a swallow and then a fish; but, for all her slippery and elusive transformations, they finally caught her in the form of a goat’s hair adhering to the king’s beard. Then addressing to her the words ‘Cease, foul Gello, from slaying the babes of Christians,’ they worked upon her fears until they extorted from her a confession of her twelve and a half names, the knowledge of which was a safeguard against her assaults.