night-monster, “Heb. Lilith.” In classical Latin, lamia is defined by Lewis and Short as “a witch who was said to suck children’s blood, a sorceress, enchantress.” I doubt whether this is a very accurate definition, although possibly it will cover the meaning in Horace, Ars Poetica, 340:
Ne quodcumque uelit poscat sibi fabula credi,
Neu pransae lamiae puerum uiuum extrahat aluo.
Which Francis translates:
The probable maintain,
Nor force us to believe the monstrous scene,
Which shows a child, by a fell witch devour’d,
Dragg’d from her entrails, and to life restor’d.
Apuleius, Metamorphoses, I, has: “Quo (odore spurcissimi humoris) me lamiae illae infecerunt.” Here lamia is hardly the equivalent of anything more than “witch.” So the meaning of Vampire had been to a large extent lost or submerged. This idea, however, seems to have remained in Aristophanes, when in the Wasps (1177) Philocreon boasts what tales he can tell: πρῶτον μὲν ὡς ἡ Λάμἰ ἁλοῦσ᾿ ἐπέρδετο.
Liddell and Scott define Λάμια as: “a fabulous monster said to feed on man’s flesh, a bugbear to frighten children with,” referring to this passage in Aristophanes, which does not seem a very satisfactory or scholarly explanation. Tertullian, Aduersus Ualentinianos, which de Labriolle dates at 208–211, uses the phrase lamiae turres as nursery tales, Contes de nourrice, contes bleus. Theil in his Grand Dictionnaire de la Langue Latine terms lamia by “lamie, sorcière, qui suçait, disait-on, le sang des enfants; magicienne.” These lexicographers for some extraordinary reason do not appear to have remarked the use of the word in the Vulgate. Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia has some account of lamias, so called, he states, because they lacerate children: “lamiae uel laniae, quia laniant infantes.” In country places even yet many an old nurse dares not trust a child in a cradle without a candle or lamp in the room for fear of the night-hag.
Rabbinical literature is full of legends concerning Lilith. According to tradition she was the first wife of Adam and, the
