Like many women in Greek mythology, Lamia is dealt a bad hand in life just by virtue of being born beautiful—and by somehow not managing to stay out of Zeus’s sight. And we all know what Zeus does to beautiful women…and who it is that gets blamed afterward.
The story goes that Lamia was once the queen of Libya, who became a beloved mistress of the god Zeus (by choice or by force, we’re never told). Naturally, Zeus’s wife Hera found out about the affair—she had a knack for that sort of thing—and instead of punishing her husband, she took out her anger on Lamia. This isn’t unusual for Hera, though the concept of blaming the woman for the man’s infidelity is a theme that runs throughout much of history and ancient myth.
To punish Lamia, Hera transformed into a monster and murdered Lamia’s children while Lamia watched, helpless to stop the goddess’s fury. There are several different accounts that explain what happened here, depending on the source:
1. As if killing her children wasn’t enough, Hera then took away Lamia’s ability to blink or close her eyes, so that she would be forever haunted by the sight of her dead children.
2. Hera didn’t actually kill the children—she only stole them—causing Lamia to go insane with grief and tear out her own eyes.
3. Rather than kill the children herself, Hera forced Lamia to kill and devour her own children.
And whether it happens out of the madness found in grief for her children’s’ death, as a part of Hera’s punishment, or as a gift from Zeus in order to exact revenge on the world for what has been done to her, Lamia is transformed into a serpentine monster that hunts and devours other people’s children.
After her transformation, “the Lamia” (note how she becomes referred to as a thing once she’s a monster, instead of named as a person) was said to wander the earth in a jealous rage, devouring the children of others so that none could be happy—and in some versions of her story, this act is what turns her into a monster in the first place.
As time progressed, the myth of the Lamia became less about devouring the children in full, and more focused on sucking their blood. She became known as a vampiric figure of ancient myth, and rumors of her presence were used by mothers in ancient Greece to scare their children—probably to get them to behave, much like the “bogeyman” tales from more recent history.
Mythology has a way of shifting and changing over time, and as the myth of the Lamia passed into Roman mythology, another aspect was added to her character: she became a prototype of sorts for the modern vampire. Instead of having a serpent’s tail, she remained in appearance like a beautiful woman—as she’s depicted in the 1905 painting Lamia (first version) by John William Waterhouse or the 1909 painting The Lamia by Herbert James Draper—and was said to seduce men in order to drink their blood and drain their life.
These later traditions would then shift into more folkloric beliefs about multiple lamiae, who retained the same dangerous quality of seducing young men in order to drink their blood.