The strix was a persistent feature of the folklore of the Roman world and subsequently that of the Latin West and the Greek East.
The concept of the strix is contextualised against the longue-durée notion of the child-killing demon, which is found already in the ancient Near East, and shown to retain a currency still as informing the projection of the vampire in Victorian fiction..
The motif-set of the ideal narrative of a strix attack - the \'strix-paradigm\' - is reconstructed from Ovid, Petronius, John Damascene and other sources, and the paradigm\'s impact is traced upon the typically gruesome representation of witches in Latin literature.
She was a woman that flew by night, either in an owl-like form or in the form of a projected soul, in order to penetrate homes by surreptitious means and thereby devour, blight or steal the new-born babies within them.
The strix was a persistent feature of the folklore of the Roman world and subsequently that of the Latin West and the Greek East
