The Grey Wolf

Extract

In a previous paper (1) an attempt was made to describe the inter-relations of man and bear in Europe from early times to the present day. In many ways the influence of the wolf has been more important than that of the bear on the habits and thoughts of European man. Occasionally it has figured in a favourable light, as in the case of the she-wolf credited with suckling the twin founders of the City on Seven Hills (though even here the double meaning of lupa—applied in a transferative sense to ladies whose character would not bear close investigation—has led some authors to a conjecture which it might not have been politic to mention to any patriotic inhabitant of the grandeur that was Rome). But in general, whether in Italy or elsewhere, no animal has been so hated and feared. Among the ancient Greeks in the south—whose Lyceum at Athens and sanctuary of Apollo Lukeios at Sicyon may have originated in efforts to propitiate the wolves-as among the Letts of the north who, perhaps as late as the 17th century, sacrificed a goat each December to the wolves so that their other livestock might be spared(2) ; from Scotland where priests offered the prayer, quoted by Fittis (3) from the old Litany of Dunkeld, for deliverance ‘from robbers and caterans, from wolves and all wild beasts’, to Russia where peasants pronounced a spell on St. George's Day with the recurring plea, ‘God grant the wolf may not take our cattle‘ (4); the wolf was the great destroyer, the despoiler of flocks and herds and man's chief enemy in the animal world.