From Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (tr.Hurley):
According to the Greek and Latin classics, the Lamia lived in Africa. From the waist up, their bodies took the form of a beautiful woman; below, that of a serpent. Some reports have called them sorceresses; others, malign monsters. They lacked the faculty of speech, but their whistling was melodious. They would lure travelers to themselves in the desert, and then devour them. Their remote origins were divine; they sprang from one of Zeus's many amours. In that part of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1622) that treats of the passion of love, Robert Burton tells the story of a Lamia that assumed human form and seduced a young philosopher "taking him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth":
She being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding came Apollonius, who by some probably conjectures found her to be a Serpent, a Lamia. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant.
Shortly before his death, John Keats (1795 - 1821) was inspired by Burton's tale to write his poem "Lamia."
The wonderful site bartleby has Keats's long and very beautiful poem here. An excerpt describing Lamia:
| She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, | |
| Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; | |
| Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, | |
| Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; | 50 |
| And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, | |
| Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed | |
| Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries— | |
| So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, | |
| She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, | 55 |
| Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. | |
| Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire | |
| Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar: | |
| Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! | |
| She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete: | 60 |
| And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there | |
| But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair? | |
| As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air. |
