Saturday, July 24, 2010

Myths and Legends: Lykaon

Lykaon. To find out more about Lykaon, the original "wolfman," see this Wikipedia article: link; for information about the image: image source.

Lykaon's name is from the Greek word for wolf, lykos. Lykaon was originally the king of Arcadia, and he was an altogether evil fellow. When he was entertaining Zeus as his guest, he decided to test Zeus by serving him a dish of human flesh to see whether Zeus would eat what was served - and the flesh was that of Lykaon's own son. Zeus was outraged, and turned Lykaon into a wolf, as you can see in the illustration below.

You can also find more myths and legends for the week of July 22-28 here. For more information and links to the actual javascript code, see the Myths & Legends Widget Reference Page.