The author is a teacher of classics at the University of Exeter, where, incidentally, J.K. The werewolf fantasy and its multiple offshoots are the subject of this learned and often entertaining new study. Today werewolves are a staple of mass entertainment, seething in the cauldron of story beside other grisly and ghastly elements, including vampires, zombies, ghouls, cannibal fiends, and even the dementors from Harry Potter, with whom some share several characteristics-among them nocturnal roaming, violent predation, and scavenging for carrion. Moonlight, howling, marauding, bodily transformation into and out of lupine shape, and the telltale mark branding the culprit-these elements have always been part of the lore, which has only kept expanding since the Age of Reason. This dinner-party turn at Trimalchio’s is the “only one really good, corking story” in the classical corpus of werewolf lore, or so declares Daniel Ogden, author of The Werewolf in the Ancient World-and he has quested high and low for evidence. On his return home, Niceros finds the soldier in bed, with a doctor tending his neck wound. He sets off again and, scared, shivering, and sweating, at last reaches his lover, who tells him that overnight a wolf has ravaged their flocks but that they’d managed to spear him in the neck. Howling, the animal lopes off into the woods, and Niceros, investigating the clothes, finds a heap of stones instead. The soldier then turns into a wolf-“Don’t think I’m joking,” warns the storyteller. Niceros averts his eyes for a little while, then, looking up, finds that his companion has taken off his clothes and is pissing in a circle around them. They leave at dawn and are walking past the usual tombs lining the suburban road when the soldier stops for a pee against a gravestone. However, not wanting to travel alone, he persuades “a soldier, as brave as the devil…to accompany me as far as the fifth milestone.” Like the best spooky storytellers, Niceros begins with humdrum circumstances: he’d fallen in love with a married woman and one day, when his master was conveniently absent, he set out to join her in the countryside. During the wild party at the center of Petronius’s Satyricon, the host, Trimalchio, invites his friend Niceros, a freed slave like himself, to tell the company what once happened to him.