Agriopas (werewolf account)

In the version preserved by compilers citing the ancient writer Agriopas (author of an Olympionicae, himself known principally via later citations such as Pliny), a man of Parrhasia named Demaenetus (variantly spelled Demnetus) assisted at the Arcadian sacrifices to Zeus/Jupiter Lycaeus, tasted the viscera/flesh of a human child offered in that ritual, and was thereby turned into a wolf. Some recensions report the metamorphosis endured for ten years, after which the man reverted and subsequently competed in the ancient Olympic Games. The episode is preserved as a mythic-historical exemplum in the classical corpus and in later werewolf compendia that quote Agriopas via Pliny and related sources.

Sources record only that the afflicted individual was "turned into a wolf." Classical and modern reprints quoting Agriopas do not provide further morphological detail (no sustained description of color, size, bipedal traits, or intermediate hybrid form appears in the supplied material), beyond treating the state as a wolf-form assumed by a human who had committed the sacrificial transgression.

The supplied accounts emphasize the causal link—ingestion of human sacrificial entrails—and the temporary metamorphosis (one recension gives a ten-year term and eventual reversion). The sources do not catalog other supernatural abilities (such as speech, superhuman strength, or longevity) for the wolf-form; they present lycanthropy here as a conditioned, time-bound consequence of ritual impiety rather than as an ongoing autonomous power.