thumb|right|upright|The appearance and calls of owls, such as the [[Eurasian scops owl, may have influenced Greek ideas of the blood-drinking strix.]]
thumb|right|"Le Stryge" Chimera overlooks Paris from atop [[Notre-Dame de Paris.]]
thumb|The striges of Notre-Dame.
The strix (plural striges or strixes), in the mythology of classical antiquity, was a bird of ill omen, the product of metamorphosis, that fed on human flesh and blood. It also referred to witches and related malevolent folkloric beings.
Description
Physical appearance
The strix is described as a large-headed bird with transfixed eyes, rapacious beak, greyish white wings, and hooked claws in Ovid's Fasti. This is the only thorough description of the strix in Classical literature.
The tale only survives in the form as recorded by Antonius who flourished 100–300 AD, but it preserved an older tale from the lost Ornithologia by Boios, dated to before the end of 4th century BC.
In this Greek myth, the ill-omened strīx herself did not perpetrate harm on humans. But one paper suggests guilt by association with her sons, and seeks to reconstruct an ancient Greek belief in the man-eating strīx dating back to this age (4th century BC). In an opposing view, one study failed to find the ancient Greeks subscribing to the strīx as a "terror" to mankind, but noted a widespread belief in Italy that it was a "bloodthirsty monster in bird form." This study surmises that the Greeks later borrowed the concept of strix as witches, a concept articulated in Ovid, and one scholar estimates the Greeks adopted the strix as "child-murdering horrors" by the "last centuries BC". The modern Greek form may betray an influence of a Latin diminutive .
Early passing reference in Latin
The first Latin allusion is in Plautus' comedy Pseudolus dated to 191 BC, in which an inferior cook's cuisine is metaphorized as the striges ("vampyre owls") devouring the diners' gastrointestinal organs while still alive, and shortening their lifespan. Commentators point to this as attestation that the striges were regarded as man-eating (anthropophagism).
Satyricon
Petronius's novel Satyricon (late 1st century AD) includes a tale told by the character Trimalchio, describing the striges that snatched away the body of a boy who had already died, substituting a straw doll. The striges made their presence known by their scream, and a manservant attending to the intrusion discovered a woman and ran her through with a sword so that she groaned, but his whole body turned livid and would die a few days later.