A new book, The Werewolf In The Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2021). News to me, and perhaps to you.

the werewolf is far older than [the medieval period]. The earliest surviving example of man-to-wolf transformation is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh from around 2,100 BC. However, the werewolf as we now know it first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome, in ethnographic, poetic and philosophical texts.

I wonder if Lovecraft knew that? If so, that would be relevant to his expressed interest in the possible writing of a werewolf saga (in the 1940s, but of course he never lived to explore the notion), and also his developing ideas for tales set in the African frontier of the Roman Empire. I’d always imagined that the unwritten werewolf saga would have been set on the mist-shrouded coasts of England and New England in the 18th century. But now I wonder… could he have had an eye on combining werewolves with Rome’s African frontier? Perhaps in a sort of transplanted revisiting of the themes of “Polaris” and Lomar, with a touch of Howard’s Solomon Kane? Of course, being Lovecraft it would likely have got a lot wilder than that (recall his comment about having “sympathy” for the werewolf), and could even have then jumped into having surviving Ancient Roman werewolves prowling his other favourite, 18th century London. He had spent so much time studying London of that period, that he felt he knew every inch of it. Sort of ‘H.P. Lovecraft via early Anne Rice’, is what I’m imagining.