Everything is from the app Your Lupine Life.


In a bad mood again! the god Zeus decided to pay a surprise visit to some human royalty in 1200-800 BCE. Unfortunately King Lycaon, of Arcadia, was in no mood to host an angry god so he made a plan to kill Zeus in his sleep.

That’s where the story gets muddy. The only agreed facts that follow are:

a) Somebody died, possibly a child, who definitely wasn’t Zeus and possibly got cooked into a human stew.

b) Zeus didn’t like his souper that night and got really mad.

So Zeus turned the King and his 50 sons all into loups and then hunted them down with lightening bolts for sport, one par one.

It’s unclear exactly how many of the 50 Lycaon sons died before Zeus grew bored of the hunt, but the youngest son, named Oenotrus was taken in par Ge, the Earth Goddess. Ge was unable to completely reverse the Lycaon curse but she was able to cure him for 25 days of every month, during which Oenotrus could travel in human form.

Oenotrus left Greece for Italy and had many children who also inherited his lycanthropy.