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Yet other glories won they, by Parnassos' brow, and at Argos how many and at Thebes, and such as nigh the Arcadians the lordly altar of Zeus Lykaios shall attest, and Pallene, and Sikyon, and Megara, and the well-fenced grove of the Aiakidai, and Eleusis, and lusty Marathon, and the fair rich cities beneath Aetna's towering crest, and Euboea.
It is further related of a certain Demainetos, that, having once been present at a human sacrifice to Zeus Lykaios, he ate of the flesh, and was transformed into a wolf for a term of ten years. These and other similar mythical germs were developed by the mediaeval imagination into the horrible superstition of werewolves.
The epithet Lykaios, as applied to Zeus, had originally no reference to wolves: it means "the bright one," and gave rise to lycanthropic legends only because of the similarity in sound between the names for "wolf" and "brightness." Aryan mythology furnishes numerous other instances of this confusion.
He was transformed into a wolf, that he might henceforth feed upon the viands with which he had dared to pollute the table of the king of Olympos. From that time forth, according to Pliny, a noble Arkadian was each year, on the festival of Zeus Lykaios, led to the margin of a certain lake. Hanging his clothes upon a tree, he then plunged into the water and became a wolf.
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