Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Nyctimus.
The gallery
Jupiter and Lycaon
Jan Cossiers, c. 1636–1638
In this dramatic oil on canvas, now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Flemish Baroque painter Jan Cossiers depicts the moment that defines the house of Nyctimus. King Lycaon of Arcadia, having served human flesh to test the divinity of his guest, lurches up from the banquet table as Jupiter's eagle vomits thunderbolts and the king's own head already takes on the snarling shape of a wolf. The impiety of Lycaon and his sons is the engine of Nyctimus's story: in Apollodorus and Pausanias it is precisely after this sacrilege and the catastrophe it provokes that Nyctimus, the surviving son, succeeds to the Arcadian kingship, only for the great flood of Deucalion's age to break over his reign. Cossiers's tenebrist staging — flesh on the platter, fire in the dark, the god calm amid the ruin — captures the divine reckoning that frames the brief Arcadian dynasty Nyctimus inherits.
Lycaon (Lycaon Transformed into a Wolf), plate from the Metamorphoses
Hendrik Goltzius, 1589
This finely worked engraving by the Dutch master Hendrik Goltzius, part of his celebrated 1589 series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses, shows the punishment of Lycaon. Jupiter is seated at the king's table, his eagle at his feet and the cannibal dish before him, while amid burning buildings Lycaon flees with his head already changing into that of a wolf. The scene is the prelude to Nyctimus's reign: in the Arcadian tradition recorded by Apollodorus and Pausanias, the outrage of Lycaon's line brings down Zeus's wrath and the Deucalionic flood, and it is in the aftermath that Nyctimus — eldest son of Lycaon, who 'possessed all the power' — holds the throne before his nephew Arcas succeeds him. Goltzius's burin renders the moral horror of the moment with cool, virtuosic precision.