Limos- Greek SpiritSpirit"Daughter of Eris"

The Spirit of Famine

Eris bore Limos without a father — famine given form, one of the many baleful children of Strife. Hesiod names her beside Ponos (Toil) and the Algea (Pains). Through Eris she belonged to the lineage of Nyx, primordial night that preceded even the Titans. She dwelt far from any plowed field or harvest, in lands so barren that even weeds fought for root.

The Curse of Erysichthon

When the Thessalian king Erysichthon felled Demeter's sacred oak grove, the goddess resolved to curse him with insatiable hunger. But Demeter and Limos could never meet — abundance and famine cannot exist in the same place.

Demeter dispatched an Oread nymph to the frozen wastes of Scythia where Limos dwelt. The nymph found a creature barely recognizable as human: hair matted and coarse, eyes sunken, skin so thin her organs showed through it, joints protruding beneath withered flesh. She was on her knees, scraping at barren ground with her nails, pulling sparse weeds from stony earth.

Limos flew to Erysichthon's house and breathed her essence into him as he slept, wrapping herself around him and filling his veins with famine. Her task complete, she returned to her desolate home. Erysichthon awoke consumed by a hunger no amount of food could satisfy. He spent his fortune. He sold his daughter Mestra again and again — she could change her shape and escape each buyer, only to return and be sold once more. When nothing and no one was left, Erysichthon turned his teeth upon himself.

At the Gates of the Underworld

Limos's Roman counterpart Fames appears among the personified horrors stationed at the entrance to the Underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, alongside Disease and Death — famine posted among the terrors a soul must pass on the way to the land of the dead.