Empusa in Greek mythology: Hecate's shape-shifting phantom with a bronze leg

Empusa (Greek Empousa) is a night phantom of Greek mythology, tied to the goddess Hecate. Her defining traits are that she never keeps the same shape and that her body does not match: in Aristophanes, her face blazes like fire, one leg is made of bronze and the other of dung. She began as a comic bogey on the Athenian stage and, under the Roman Empire, became a seductive demon who lures young men in order to eat them, merged with Lamia and the lamias.

A phantom in Hecate’s retinue

Empusa has no family tree and no origin story. What defines her is her link with Hecate, goddess of crossroads, thresholds and the restless dead. The scholia on the Frogs and the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia, describe her as a phasma, an apparition, sent by Hecate to frighten the unfortunate; some commentators thought she was simply a form the goddess herself put on.

That connection sets her territory: night, lonely roads, the edges of the world of the living. Empusa appears to solitary travelers, to initiates on their way to the Underworld, to anyone the gods want to test. She shares that ground with other female ghosts of Greek folk belief, such as Mormo, Gello and Lamia, and over time she blurs into them.

Aristophanes’ Frogs: an apparition on the road to the dead

Her key text is a scene from Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BC, lines 285-305). Dionysus, disguised as Heracles, travels to the Underworld with his slave Xanthias to bring back the poet Euripides. In the darkness, Xanthias spots “a huge beast” that changes form from moment to moment:

1. first an ox,
2. then a mule,
3. then a beautiful woman,
4. then a dog.

Terrified, Dionysus cries out: “It’s Empusa!” Xanthias confirms it: her whole face shines like fire, and she has one bronze leg and one of dung. The god runs to hide behind his own priest, seated in the front row of the theater, and the apparition vanishes.

The scene is played for laughs, but it only works because the audience already knows the creature; Aristophanes does not need to introduce her. It also sets up the arrival of the Eleusinian initiates who form the Frogs’ chorus. Empusa is the terror on the road of the dead, much like the frightening visions believed to test candidates in the Mysteries before the final revelation.

A name used as an insult

Empusa was also a slur. In Assemblywomen (1056-1057), Aristophanes likens an old woman to an Empusa “covered in bloody blisters”. Demosthenes, in On the Crown (130), attacks his rival Aeschines by recalling that his mother was nicknamed Empusa “because she would do anything and have anything done to her”. Here the name stands for a woman capable of every transformation, and therefore every compromise.

Both uses capture the creature’s double image: frightening ugliness and boundless changeability.

From bogey to seductress: Philostratus

Six centuries after Aristophanes, Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 3rd century AD) gave Empusa her most lasting form.

• On the road to India (2.4), Apollonius and his companions meet an empusa at night that keeps changing shape and vanishing. The sage drives it off by heaping abuse on it and telling his companions to do the same; it flees, shrieking.
• In Corinth (4.25), the young philosopher Menippus is about to marry a rich and beautiful foreign woman. Apollonius, a guest at the wedding feast, reveals that she is an empusa, “one of those whom many call lamias or mormolykes”. The gold and silver of the banquet vanish like an illusion. Under questioning, the creature confesses that she was fattening Menippus with pleasures in order to devour his body, because empusae love young flesh and pure blood.

In Philostratus, Empusa is no longer Hecate’s grotesque phantom but a seductress who feeds on her lovers. She is now indistinguishable from the lamias. This episode, retold by Robert Burton and then by John Keats in his poem Lamia (1820), shaped the modern image the two creatures share.

Variants: a bronze leg or a donkey’s leg

The sources disagree about Empusa’s leg. Aristophanes says bronze and dung, a comic clash between noble metal and excrement. Later commentators and the Suda call her onoskelis, “donkey-legged”: beneath her disguises, the creature gives herself away by an animal foot. They also connect her name with a being that moves on a single foot. Goethe remembered this in the Classical Walpurgis Night of Faust, Part Two, where Empusa greets Mephistopheles as a cousin because her donkey’s foot matches the devil’s horse’s hoof.

What the ancient sources say

• Aristophanes (Frogs 285-305) is the main witness: successive transformations, a fiery face, a bronze leg, an apparition at the gates of the Underworld.
• Aristophanes (Assemblywomen 1056-1057) and Demosthenes (On the Crown 130) show the name used as an insult.
• The scholia on the Frogs and the Suda tie her to Hecate and record the donkey’s leg.
• Philostratus (2.4 and 4.25) makes her a seductive demon and equates her with the lamias.

Further reading

For the goddess who sends Empusa, read the page on Hecate. The female demon she merges with is covered on the Lamia page. The comic descent of the Frogs stars Dionysus dressed up as Heracles, heading for the realm of Hades. Other dangerous female creatures share the same imaginative world: the Sirens and the Harpies. For the bigger picture, visit the Greek mythology hub.