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In support of this story, Varro relates others no less incredible
about that most famous sorceress Circe, who changed the companions of
Ulysses into beasts, and about the Arcadians, who, by lot, swam
across a certain pool, and were turned into wolves there, and lived in
the deserts of that region with wild beasts like themselves. But if
they never fed on human flesh for nine years, they were restored to the
human form on swimming back again through the same pool. Finally, he
expressly names one Demaenetus, who, on tasting a boy offered up in
sacrifice by the Arcadians to their god Lycaeus according to their
custom, was changed into a wolf, and, being restored to his proper
form in the tenth year, trained himself as a pugilist, and was
victorious at the Olympic games. And the same historian thinks that
the epithet Lycaeus was applied in Arcadia to Pan and Jupiter for no
other reason than this metamorphosis of men into wolves, because it was
thought it could not be wrought except by a divine power. For a wolf
is called in Greek lukos, from which the name Lycaeus appears to be
formed. He says also that the Roman Luperci were as it were sprung
of the seed of these mysteries.
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