Lamia was born a princess of Libya, the daughter of Belus, the legendary king whose family ruled Egypt and the lands around it, and she grew into a queen whose beauty was famous across the Mediterranean world. Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, saw her and desired her, and she bore him children. But Zeus's queen Hera, the goddess of marriage, never forgave her husband's lovers, and her vengeance always fell where it hurt most. She could not strike the king of heaven, so she struck his mortal beloved instead: Hera destroyed Lamia's children, and some tellings add the crueller twist that she drove the queen into a madness in which Lamia herself did the deed. In a single day the most fortunate mother in Libya became its most wretched, with empty arms and a mind cracked by grief.

Grief did what no curse could have done worse. Lamia's beauty withered and twisted: her face hardened into the features of a beast, her eyes burned with an endless hunger, and the sight of other women's children filled her with a rage she could not master. She began to hunt the thing she had lost. Night after night she slipped from her cave into the towns and farms of Libya, snatching babies from their cradles and devouring them, and no wall or watchman could keep her out. The historian Diodorus of Sicily, who gathered the old tales in the first century BCE, wrote that the most beautiful of queens became a terror in the shape of a woman, and that her name was enough to silence a crying child. And so it remained for centuries: Greek and Roman mothers used Lamia as the nursery bogey, the monster who would come for naughty children, and the playwright Aristophanes, who filled his comedies with jokes his Athenian audience would recognise, could raise a laugh simply by naming her on stage.

The gods did not leave her wholly to the dark. Hera had condemned her to sleeplessness, forcing her eyes to stay forever open upon the vision of her slaughtered children, and Zeus, who could not undo his wife's curse, softened it with a gift no other creature has ever received: Lamia could take her eyes out of her head and set them aside. The philosopher Plutarch, writing in the first century CE, gives the haunting picture: at home in her cave she keeps her eyes in a jar, blind and at peace, and only when she goes out hunting does she put them back in her face. Zeus granted her a second gift as well, the power of prophecy, so that the sleepless monster could see the future as clearly as she saw her victims. The queen who had lost everything now wandered the night with sight she could switch on and off and a foresight she had never asked for, a figure half pitiful and wholly terrible.

In time her single name bred a whole brood: the lamiae, serpent-bodied demons of Greek belief who seduced beautiful young men and fed upon them, and the most famous tale of them all was told by Philostratus, the biographer of Apollonius of Tyana, a wandering sage and wonder-worker of the first century CE. A handsome young philosopher named Menippus, travelling the road to Corinth, the wealthy city between two seas, was met by a rich and lovely Phoenician woman who claimed to adore him and drew him into a life of ease in her fine house, with golden cups and servants at every call. At their wedding feast the uninvited Apollonius looked at the bride and named her: the house, the gold and the servants were air, and the bride was a lamia, fattening her beautiful husband-to-be like a sacrificial beast, for such demons crave the flesh of the pure and the lovely. The phantom wept and begged him to be silent, then confessed, and in the next instant the palace, the treasure and the bride herself vanished into nothing, leaving Menippus standing in the empty road.

The story refused to die. In 1621 the English scholar Robert Burton retold the bride of Corinth in his Anatomy of Melancholy, a vast book on the sickness of love, and in 1820 John Keats, the young Romantic poet, turned Burton's pages into his poem Lamia: a serpent transformed into a woman of unearthly beauty, her doomed love for Lycius of Corinth, the cold sage Apollonius who names her true nature at the bridal feast, and the scream with which she vanishes as her lover falls dead. Painters followed the poets: John William Waterhouse and Herbert James Draper both put Keats's shimmering serpent woman on canvas. In Greece itself, the city of Lamia in the region of Phthiotis still bears the monster's name, and in later Greek folklore her daughters the lamiae went on stealing children for another thousand years, warded off with charms and prayers.