In Book 6 of his Fasti, the Roman poet Ovid describes creatures he calls striges. They fly at night. They have huge heads, goggle eyes, beaks built for tearing, and talons fitted with hooks. They seek out nurseless infants in their cradles, snatch them from their blankets, and feed on them.
Ovid, writing around 8 CE, was not inventing this. He was recording something Romans already knew. The strix was part of the furniture of Roman fear, as familiar to an ordinary Roman parent as the evil eye or the curse tablet. What no one in Rome could have predicted is where the word would go after the empire fell.
The Latin strix became the Italian strega: witch. It became the Romanian strigoi: vampire. It became the Albanian shtriga: a hag who drinks the blood of sleeping children. It became the Polish strzyga: a demon born with two souls, one of which refuses to die.
One word. Four countries. Two thousand years. And the creature it describes sits at the exact point where the European vampire and the European witch share a common ancestor.
What Ovid Saw
Ovid’s account in Fasti 6.131-142 is the most detailed Roman description of the strix. He tells the story through the legend of Proca, an infant prince of Alba Longa, the city that preceded Rome. Five days after Proca’s birth, the striges came for him. They found his cradle and began feeding on the boy’s chest, and the child’s cries filled the house.
His nurse found him with his cheeks scored by talons, his skin the color of old leaves.
Ovid claims not to know what the striges are. He poses the question directly: are they birds born that way, or are they old women transformed by Marsian spells? He never answers. This honesty matters. Ovid was not writing a zoological treatise. He was recording a folk belief that had already split into competing explanations, and he left both explanations standing. The same Fasti that preserves this strix account also gives us our best description of the Liberalia, the March 17 festival where old women sold honey cakes at portable altars and a phallus on a cart rolled through the fields to ward off the evil eye. Ovid documented Roman folk religion with a care that nobody else matched.
The goddess Carna saved Proca. She touched the doorposts three times with a branch of arbutus (a relative of hawthorn). She sprinkled water on the threshold. She held the raw entrails of a two-month-old pig and spoke: “Birds of the night, spare the child’s entrails. A small victim falls for a small boy.” She left the entrails outside in the open air and forbade anyone in the household to look at them. A rod of whitethorn was set where a window shed light into the room.
After that, the striges avoided the cradle. Proca survived.
On the Kalends of June, Romans offered beans and bacon fat to the goddess Carna and prayed for the health of their internal organs. The festival was an annual reminder that the strix could come for anyone’s child.
The Witch’s Ingredient List
Ovid gives the most structured account, but he was not alone. The strix appears across Roman literature, and each author adds something different.
Horace, writing a generation before Ovid, describes the witch Canidia in Epode 5 (around 30 BCE). Canidia is preparing a love potion from horrifying ingredients: wild fig trees uprooted from tombs, funereal cypress wood, eggs smeared with toad blood, herbs from Iolcos, bones snatched from a starving dog, and the feathers of a screech owl, a strix. The strix feathers are one ingredient among many, but their presence confirms the bird was already associated with dark magic in Horace’s time. In the same poem, Canidia buries a boy up to his chin and lets him starve in sight of food, so she can harvest his dried liver and bone marrow. She is, in Daniel Ogden’s phrase, a strix-figure herself: a woman who preys on children.
Petronius, writing around 60 CE in his Satyricon, gives a different angle. At Trimalchio’s dinner party (chapter 63), one of the guests tells a story from his youth. A beloved slave-boy in the household dies. The family gathers around the body. Outside, the striges begin to shriek, a sound like hounds running after a hare. A Cappadocian slave, a tall and reckless man, grabs a sword and charges out the door. He stabs one of them. When he comes back, his entire body is blue, as if beaten with clubs.
When the mother finally embraces her dead son’s body, she finds it is nothing but a bundle of straw. No heart, no entrails. The striges have already taken the boy and left a changeling.
In Petronius, the strix is no longer a bird hovering over a cradle. It is something that can be fought with a sword, something that leaves physical marks on anyone who strikes it, and something that steals not just blood but the entire body, leaving only a husk of straw behind.
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, is characteristically skeptical. He knows the name strix is used as a curse-word. He knows the folklore. But he confesses he cannot identify the bird with certainty, and he notes that tales of striges nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat suckles its children. Even in the first century, the strix occupied a space between zoology and nightmare that no Roman could pin down. Pliny tried. He failed.
Seneca places striges on the outskirts of Tartarus in his Hercules Furens, alongside other creatures of the underworld. For Seneca, the strix belongs to the geography of death.
The Greek Background
The word strix comes from the Greek strix (στρίξ), meaning screech owl, probably from an onomatopoeic root imitating the bird’s call. But the Greeks had their own nocturnal predators, and they were not the same thing.
Lamia was originally a Libyan queen who had an affair with Zeus. Hera, enraged, killed Lamia’s children (or forced Lamia to kill them herself, depending on the source). Grief drove Lamia to prey on the children of others. Diodorus Siculus and Aristophanes both reference her. Over time, “lamia” stopped being one queen’s name and became a category, a type of beautiful, shapeshifting woman who lured young men to drain their blood. But the original Lamia had a personal history, a motivation, a story.
Empusa was a different creature sent by the goddess Hecate. She had one leg of bronze and one leg of a donkey. She could take the form of a beautiful woman and seduce young men to drink their blood. Aristophanes mentions her in The Frogs. Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, tells the story of Apollonius exposing an Empusa that had disguised itself as a young woman to seduce one of his students.
Mormo was a child-frightener, a bogeywoman invoked by Greek nurses to scare misbehaving children.
The strix was something else. Where the Greek creatures were individualized figures, each with an origin story or a patron deity, the Roman strix was a species. It had no backstory. No one cursed it into existence. No god sent it. It was simply there, a predatory thing in the Roman night, closer to a natural hazard than a mythological character. That durability is the key. You can retire a character from the cultural imagination. You cannot retire a category.
For the deeper traditions of Lilith, the Mesopotamian night demon who shares the strix’s association with owls and infant death, the connections run even further back.
The Law Speaks
The strix entered Roman and post-Roman law in an unexpected way. The legal question was never whether the creature existed. It was whether people could be killed for being one.
The Twelve Tables, Rome’s earliest legal code (around 450 BCE), prohibited certain forms of harmful magic: charming away someone’s crops, casting malicious incantations. The strix is not named directly, but the legal framework for prosecuting supernatural harm was established early.
The real turning point came six centuries after Rome fell. In 643 CE, the Lombard king Rothari issued his Edictum Rothari, the first written compilation of Lombard law. Clauses 197, 198, 199, and 376 address the striga directly.
The most striking is clause 376. Rothari declared: “No one may presume to kill another man’s aldia or woman slave as if she were a striga, which the people call masca, because it is in no wise to be believed by Christian minds that it is possible that a woman can eat a living man from within.”
Read that sentence again. In 643, in Lombard Italy, people were killing women accused of being striges. The accusation was specific: that these women could devour a person from the inside. Rothari declared the killing illegal and imposed a fine of 100 solidi on top of the compensation for the murder itself. He did not bother arguing whether striges were real. He simply made it a crime to act as if they were.
The law reveals two things at once. The strix-belief was alive and dangerous in seventh-century Italy, powerful enough that people committed murder over it. And at least one Lombard king considered the belief incompatible with Christian reason, enough to legislate against it.
In 643 CE, Lombard law imposed a fine of 100 solidi on anyone who killed a woman accused of being a strix. The law did not argue whether striges existed. It simply made it a crime to act on the belief.
The Canon Episcopi and the Night Flight
The next major legal document is the Canon Episcopi, compiled in 906 CE by Regino of Prüm, an abbot from the Rhineland. This text shaped European witch-belief for the next five centuries.
The Canon describes “certain wicked women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons,” who believe that they ride at night upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana and a great host of other women, covering vast tracts of country in the silence of the dead of night.
The Canon’s position is clear: the night flight is not real. It is a demonic illusion. The women who believe they fly are not witches. They are deceived. The sin is the belief, not the act.
This text was incorporated into Burchard of Worms’ Decretum (around 1008-1012), and later into Gratian’s Corpus juris canonici (around 1140), making it canon law for the entire High Middle Ages.
The word used in many versions of this text for the flying women is strigae. The same word. The Roman blood-drinking owl-demon had become the medieval night-flying woman, and the Church was trying to convince people she did not exist. The Church would eventually reverse this position. By the fifteenth century, the official stance shifted: the night flight was real, the witches were real, and they deserved to burn. The strix had won.
For a parallel story of medieval demonology and what the Church believed supernatural beings could do, see What Demons Can and Cannot Do: A Jesuit Exam from the Thirty Years’ War.
One Word, Four Monsters
This is where the strix story becomes a linguistic map of European fear. The Latin strix (or its variant striga) spread with the Latin language across the former Roman world. In each place, it merged with local traditions and produced something different.
Italian: strega (witch). In Italian, the strix lost its wings and its beak. What survived was the woman who operates at night, who harms through supernatural means, who preys on the vulnerable. The strega is the Italian witch, full stop. The word is still considered derogatory by older generations. The connection to the screech owl is forgotten. Only the malice remains.
Romanian: strigoi (vampire). The Roman conquest of Dacia in 106 CE brought colonists, soldiers, and Latin. The word striga merged with local Dacian death beliefs (the Dacians had their own traditions about restless dead under their god Zalmoxis) and produced the strigoi. Romanian folklore, documented by the folklorist Tudor Pamfile in his Mitologie românească, splits the strigoi into two types: the strigoi viu (living strigoi), a kind of sorcerer who can project his soul at night, and the strigoi mort (dead strigoi), a corpse that rises from the grave to torment the living. The dead strigoi is, by any functional definition, a vampire. And its name is Roman.
For the later history of what happened when these beliefs collided with Enlightenment-era Habsburg officials, see The Medveđa Vampire Panic and The Vampire of Zarožje.
Albanian: shtriga (blood-drinking witch). The Albanian shtriga retained almost the full Roman profile. She is a woman (usually old, with pale eyes and a crooked nose) who attacks sleeping infants at night and drains their blood. After feeding, she transforms into a flying insect, typically a moth or a fly. In northern Albanian folklore, a cross made of pig bone placed at the entrance of a church on Easter Sunday could trap any shtriga inside, preventing her from crossing the threshold. The detail about pig bone echoes Ovid’s description of Carna using pig entrails to ward off striges, separated by nineteen centuries.
Polish: strzyga (two-souled vampire demon). The Polish version added something the Roman original never had: a theory of origin. A strzyga was born with two souls and two sets of teeth (the second row barely visible). At baptism, only one soul was baptized. The other remained wild. When the person died, the baptized soul departed. The unbaptized soul animated the corpse, which rose as an owl-like creature to attack travelers and drain their blood. The strzyga is a vampire, but it flies like the strix, and its name is the same Latin word run through Slavic phonetics.
The Vampire’s Oldest Name
The modern vampire, the figure that Bram Stoker put in a Transylvanian castle in 1897, draws from many sources: Slavic revenant traditions, Serbian and Greek burial practices, the German Nachzehrer, the medical confusion about decomposition in premature burials.
But the name that runs deepest is strix.
Daniel Ogden, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter, traced this thread in his 2021 study The Strix-Witch, published by Cambridge University Press. Ogden reconstructs what he calls the “strix-paradigm,” a pattern of motifs that appears in Ovid, reappears in Petronius, resurfaces in the Byzantine writer John Damascene, and continues into Victorian vampire fiction. The pattern is: a nocturnal female predator enters a home by stealth, targets the most vulnerable person inside (usually an infant), drains or devours them, and either escapes or is repelled by specific ritual countermeasures.
This pattern predates Rome. Ogden connects it to what he calls the “longue-durée notion of the child-killing demon,” a figure found in Mesopotamian incantation texts, in the ardat-lili spirits of Sumerian and Akkadian tradition, and in the Hebrew Bible’s reference to lilith in Isaiah 34:14, which older English translations render as “screech owl.”
The owl keeps appearing. In Mesopotamia, Lilith is depicted with owl-like features on the Burney Relief (around 1800-1750 BCE). In Rome, the strix is explicitly an owl. In Poland, the strzyga flies in the form of an owl. In Albania, the shtriga transforms into a flying insect. The specific animal varies. The flight does not.
Whether this continuity represents cultural transmission (Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to medieval Europe) or independent invention (every culture fears the thing that comes for children at night) is the question Ogden leaves open. The evidence supports both readings. The strix sits at the center of both.
The Latin word “strix” survives in at least five modern languages: Italian (strega), Romanian (strigoi), Albanian (shtriga), Polish (strzyga), and French (stryge). In each language, it means something slightly different, but all trace back to the same Roman screech owl.
What the Strix Tells Us
The Roman strix was never a character. It had no name, no tragic backstory, no fall from grace. It was a category of threat, something that flew and fed and came for the smallest members of the household. The rituals against it, hawthorn at windows, water on thresholds, pig entrails left in the open air, are the rituals of people who believe the danger is real and recurring. Not a one-time catastrophe. A permanent condition of the night.
That is probably why the word survived when so much else did not. The Lamia needed her myth and the Empusa needed Hecate. The strix needed nothing but darkness and a sleeping child.
Roman colonists brought the word to Dacia in the second century. The Lombards were still using it when they wrote their laws in the seventh. Albanian grandmothers were still invoking it when they warned children about the shtriga in the nineteenth century. Romanian villagers were still acting on it when they dug up corpses and drove stakes through them in the eighteenth.
The strix never stopped being what Ovid described: a creature that defied classification, that could not be pinned to any single explanation, that existed in the space between bird and woman, between superstition and experience, between the thing you name and the thing you fear.
It is still there. In every language that Latin touched, the word waits. Strega. Strigoi. Shtriga. Strzyga. Say any of them aloud at night and listen. The screech owl is older than the name we gave it.
By the Author
Serbian Folk Tales by Đorđe Kojanović Stefanović, ed. Rade Kolbas Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales Vol. 1 by Rade KolbasFor fiction set against these traditions: The Vampire: Novel from Bulgaria by Hans Wachenhusen, trans. Rade Kolbas
