Strix

In Greek and Roman literary tradition the strix appears both as a monstrous nocturnal bird and as a term applied to certain malignant women. Antoninus Liberalis preserves a version (from Boios) in which a metamorphosed woman becomes a bird that cries by night with head downward and feet upward and is said to be a harbinger of war and civil strife. Latin authors (from Plautus through Ovid and later glossators) extend the concept into manifold literary episodes: metamorphosis narratives, witchcraft glosses, and anecdotes of corpse theft and infant attack.

Classical descriptions vary. Ovid (Fasti) gives a detailed birdlike account summarized as a large-headed bird with intense eyes, a rapacious beak, greyish-white wings, and hooked claws. Other accounts describe the strix as dark-colored or emphasize an inverted, hanging posture (head below, feet above) in origin-myth contexts. Literary usage also pictures human women who fly or transform into striges, so appearance can be avian, hybrid, or a denotation applied to certain women.

Sources attribute nocturnal cries and violent feeding on human flesh and blood to the striges: Ovid describes disemboweling of infants and blood-feeding; Plautus uses the image metaphorically of devouring humans; Petronius recounts striges snatching a corpse and substituting a dummy. Some classical and later reports (noted by Pliny and Titinius summaries) assert a motif of the strix squirting foul-smelling milk onto infants' lips. The name and parts of the creature (feathers, wings) appear in magical recipes (Horace, Propertius, the mythic catalogue of Medea's concoctions), and the term is used in maledictions and lexical glosses equating striges with witchy women (Festus, Isidore, John of Damascus).