Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Pausanias and Apollodorus recount Lycaon son of Pelasgus as an early Arcadian king who founded Lycosura and established the cult of Zeus Lycaeus on the mountain. Apollodorus’s darker strand: Lycaon (or his sons) tests Zeus’s divinity by serving a murdered child—sometimes identified as their brother Nyctimus—mixed in a sacrifice banquet; Zeus overturns the table, blasts the criminals with thunderbolts, and in widespread lore turns Lycaon into a wolf. Pausanias, more cautious, records that Lycaon sacrificed a human baby on Zeus’s altar and was made a wolf at the sacrifice’s moment, and that the Lycaean precinct still forbids entry: man or beast who trespasses dies within a year; the air grows dark to those who penetrate it. He also notes games called Lycaea and local stories of men who become wolves for a time if they taste the sacrificial meat. Ovid’s Roman banquet-metamorphosis elaborates Zeus’s visit and the wolf-change; label it secondary. Catalogue Arcadian Lycaon apart from Priam’s son: founder, sacrificant, wolf, and namesake of Zeus Lykaios’s dread precinct.