#000514
Greek Wolf-Lore
Richard Preston Eckels
A slim, specialized scholarly monograph—originally a University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation—surveying the wolf in ancient Greek myth, religion, and folk belief. In under ninety pages, Richard Preston Eckels gathers the classical sources on Greek "wolf-lore": the cult of Zeus Lykaios and the grim werewolf legends of Mount Lycaon, Apollo Lykeios, the wolf's place in omen and ritual, and the tangle of etymology and story surrounding the animal in the Greek imagination. It is a work of careful philology rather than popular writing, assembling and sifting the textual evidence for a narrow but genuinely intriguing subject. Long out of print and scarce, it is the kind of focused academic study that turns up mainly in classics libraries and among collectors of folklore and mythology—valuable precisely because so little else treats the topic in one place.
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The author
Richard Preston Eckels was a classical scholar; Greek Wolf-Lore was his 1937 doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. He is remembered chiefly for this contribution, the sort of tightly focused early-career monograph that quietly becomes a standing reference on its narrow subject.
The book
The study collects and analyzes the ancient evidence for wolves in Greek myth and cult—the human-sacrifice and lycanthropy traditions attached to Zeus Lykaios on Mount Lycaon, the wolf associations of Apollo, and the animal's role in omens and folk belief—organized as a piece of source-based classical scholarship rather than storytelling.
How it reads
It reads as what it is: an academic dissertation, dense with citations and aimed at specialists. It was noticed and reviewed in its day in journals like the American Journal of Archaeology and the Classical Review. Nearly a century on, some interpretations have been superseded by later scholarship on Greek religion, but as a compact gathering of the primary evidence it retains real reference value.
For more context
Read alongside modern studies of Greek werewolf myth and the Lykaia, which build on and revise this early groundwork.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Richard Preston Eckels
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania
- Place of publication
- Philadelphia
- Year
- 1937
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado