The Serial Killer of Temesa (Pausanias 6.6.7-11)

Debbie Felton (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Sometime in the 5th century B.C. the city of Temesa in Magna Graecia was plagued by a series of killings.  Pausanias (6.6.7-11; also Strabo 6.1.5) tells the local legend:  When Odysseus and his men, on their way back from Troy, landed at Temesa, one of the sailors raped a local girl and was consequently stoned to death by her townsfolk.  The ghost of the dead man then began killing the Temesans "indiscriminately", attacking "every age group" (OGDEN).    The Pythia advised the townspeople to propitiate the ghost by building him a temple and giving him a virgin as a bride every year; from then on, only the maidens were killed.  Finally the famous boxer Euthymus arrived in town and bested the daimon, saving the town and that year's maiden.  Pausanias also describes a painting he saw depicting the story in which the ghost was very black, was dressed in a wolfskin, and was named with the inscription "Lycas" ("Wolf").

Pausanias's description of this incident contains several procedural points now attributed to serial killers.  1) The murderer kills a number of people with a cooling off period between each murder, and these murders go on for months or years until the killer is stopped.  2)  The main motive for the murders is usually sex/rape or other sexual defilement, in this case, of the "brides".   3)  A fledgling serial killer may initially kill at random but later establish a pattern, choosing the same kind of victim-here, the indiscriminate killings at first, later settling into murdering young women only.  4)  The murders often show a high degree of redundant  violence, where the victim is subjected to a disproportionate level of brutality (VRONSKY et al.); here, this is suggested by the association of the daimon with a wolf.

In fact, the daimon described by Pausanias has sometimes been considered a werewolf rather than a ghost because of its wolfskin, name, and evidently corporeal presence (OGDEN et al.).  It is not a new idea that tales of werewolves , vampires, revenants (walking corpses), and other monsters might really be about serial killers; even Beowulf's Grendel  fits the description (VRONSKY; see also DUCLOS).  But the idea has not been taken back as far as classical antiquity.  Yet tales of werewolves and other liminal "hybrids" (JOHNSTON) seem to be one major expression of people's  unwillingness to face the idea that men themselves can be "monsters".

The story of the daimon of Temesa  bears a resemblance to the folktale type in which maidens are saved from monsters, such as in the legend of Perseus (AT 300, "The Dragon Slayer"; FELTON et al.).  Not only women but men, too, might fall victim to such a fate: in addition to his story about Temesa, Pausanias also tells how in Thespiae the people had to offer a young man every year to a dragon ravaging their land (9.26.7-8).  There are, in fact, a large group of such stories from antiquity in which young men and women are offered to appease the wrath of monsters, and often the young victims are intended as sexual partners to the horrible beasts.  Such tales may be relics of human sacrifice, but, especially given the lack of sacrificial language in these stories (HUGHES), we must also consider the possibility that these are unrecognized cases of what we would now call serial killings, described in the only way that made sense in earlier times-the language of folktales.