Strix

The strix (plural striges or strixēs) was a bird of ill omen believed to be the result of metamorphosis and known for feeding on human flesh and blood. It was also associated with witches and other malevolent beings in folklore. Ovid’s Fasti offers the most detailed classical description of the strix as a large-headed bird with staring eyes, a ravenous beak, greyish-white wings, and hooked claws, though other sources describe it as dark-colored. In early Greek myth, the strīx (στρίξ, στριγός) was said to cry at night and hang upside-down with its feet raised and head lowered, characteristics that suggest an owl but are also reminiscent of a bat. According to Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses, the strix was the transformed form of Polyphonte, who, along with her cannibalistic sons Agrios and Oreios, was punished by being turned into birds; the strix in this version is described as a night-crying bird without need for food or drink and an omen of war and civil strife. Though this tale survives only through Antoninus (100–300 AD), it preserves an older story from the lost Ornithologia of Boios, dating to before the 4th century BC. In that myth, the strix does not directly harm humans, but some scholars suggest an association with her sons implicates her in ancient beliefs about man-eating birds. While one study finds no evidence that early Greeks viewed the strix as a threat to humanity, it notes the widespread Roman belief in the strix as a bloodthirsty, monstrous bird, and suggests that the Greeks later adopted this more sinister image—ultimately depicting striges as child-killing witches by the last centuries BC, a concept solidified in Roman sources like Ovid and reflected in the modern Greek word στρίγλα, which may derive from the Latin diminutive strigula.