Lamia- Greek CreatureCreature · Monster"Queen of Libya"
Also known as: Λάμια
Titles & Epithets
Symbols
Description
She plucks out her own eyes to find sleep, then sets them back to resume her hunt through nurseries at night, a grief-maddened Libyan queen whom Hera's cruelty reshaped into every Greek mother's warning.
Mythology & Lore
The Queen's Grief
Zeus took Lamia, queen of Libya, as a lover. Hera discovered the affair and struck at the children, killing them one by one. The grief drove Lamia mad, and madness remade her: the beautiful queen became something that crept through houses at night, hunting other women's children to devour.
Diodorus Siculus records that envy fed her cruelty. She could not bear the sight of mothers who still had living children. Duris of Samos preserves the strangest detail: Zeus, pitying his former lover, gave her the ability to pluck out her own eyes and set them aside so she might finally sleep. Her dead children haunted her waking sight. When she wanted to hunt again, she put the eyes back in.
The Nursery Terror
Aristophanes names her in the Wasps and in Peace without a word of explanation. Every Athenian in the audience knew. Mothers whispered her name over cradles, and nurses warned children she would come for them in the night. By the fifth century BCE, "Lamia will come" was all a Greek nurse needed to say.
Relationships
- Enemy of