Meditations XI.23

Socrates used to nickname the opinions of the multitude Ghouls,⁷⁴ bogies to terrify children.

• 74.Lamiae, or “vampires,” “fabulous monsters said to feed on human flesh,” Horace’s Ars Poetica 540; Apuleius’s Metamorphoses i. 57. Compare Epictetus’s Discourses ii. 1, § 14: ταῦτα Σωκράτης μορμολυκεῖα ἐκάλει. Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana iv. 25, whence Keats took his Lamia.

  The Lamiae were monsters of folklore said to devour children. Epictetus’s Greek, in translation: “these Socrates called bugbears.” Apollonius of Tyana was a 1st-century Pythagorean sage; Philostratus’s Life of him tells how he unmasked a lamia who had taken the form of a bride at Corinth, the story Keats retold in Lamia (1820).