A new study led by Lowell Edmunds of Rutgers University identifies four stories from ancient Greece and Rome as early examples of urban legends.
Published in Arethusa, the paper argues these brief narratives share key features with modern urban legends: ordinary settings, short form and an expectation that listeners will believe them. The research links rumor, place names and social anxiety in the classical world.
1. ‘The Horse and the Girl’
Ancient sources including Aeschines and Aristotle preserve a grim tale known as “The Horse and the Girl.” In the account, an Athenian father confines his daughter with a horse as punishment for premarital sex. Both die inside the building. In some versions the horse eats the girl. Later generations said the place kept a name tied to the event. Edmunds traces another possibility.
He points to archaeological finds of high-status burials made with horses. Those graves might have been misread long after their creation. A ruined tomb with equine remains could have turned into a story of human cruelty. Over time, the material trace and the rumor fused. The result was an etiological tale that explained a place-name and warned against moral transgression.
2. ‘Trireme’ in Acragas
A second example comes from Sicily. Timaeus, quoted by Athenaeus, tells of a house called “Trireme” in Acragas. A group of young men drank until they convinced themselves their room had become a ship in a storm. They threw furniture out as if to lighten a vessel. When magistrates arrived, the men still acted at sea. One claimed to have lain in the ship’s hold.
The crowd pardoned them but warned against excess. The name “Trireme” stuck. Edmunds reads this as a classic urban-legend move. The tale ties a vivid anecdote to a real place. It makes a local oddity memorable. It also serves an etiological function, explaining why a house carries an odd label.
3. ‘Petronius and the Werewolf’
A Roman instance appears in Petronius’s Satyricon. At a lavish dinner, the freedman Niceros recounts a frightening walk. His companion, a soldier, strips beside a roadside graveyard, urinates around his clothes and then transforms into a wolf. The clothes turn to stone. The wolf attacks sheep and later suffers a spear wound to the neck. The soldier returns wounded and tended by a doctor.
Niceros insists he tells the truth. Edmunds treats the episode as urban-legend style. It begins in an everyday place — a road by tombs — and ends with a startling twist. The story blends the ordinary and the uncanny. That mix made it a memorable rumor for listeners and readers.
4. ‘Christian Initiation’
The fourth case comes from North Africa. Both Tertullian and Minucius Felix record what pagans said about Christian initiation rites. The accusations are lurid: murder of infants, drinking blood, darkness, and sexual orgies. Minucius Felix gives a fuller, more grotesque version that involves an infant hidden under grain and dismembered during a ritual. Tertullian records similar charges but with different details.
Edmunds treats these reports as the classical analog of modern urban legends about gang initiation or clandestine rites. The accusations circulated widely. The varying details show how such rumors mutate with each retelling and with local concerns.
How these tales fit the urban-legend model?
Edmunds distinguishes these stories from myths, folktales and fables. Myths often involve gods and grand causes. Folktales travel across cultures with recurring motifs. Urban legends, by contrast, keep to the plausible world of ordinary people. They often mention a place a listener can still see. They are short and sharp. They expect belief, or at least serious credence.
In the classical texts, tellers sometimes point to concrete evidence. Aeschines, for example, names surviving foundations. Timaeus cites a house. Petronius places events on known roads. Those markers help give the tales authority.
Scholars have analyzed these stories in different ways. Some focus on a single version and read it against social norms. Others compare multiple versions to trace change.
Edmunds favors a mixed method. He pays attention to single elements — the house in Athens, for instance — and looks for archaeological parallels. That focused work can link literary narrative to material culture.
It also shows how communities turn physical traces into moral tales. The study rejects the search for one universal plot across the four legends. The stories do not reduce cleanly to a single narrative template. Instead, they share function more than form.
Why this matters?
Edmunds’s study shows how past societies made sense of odd finds and social fears. It points out continuity between ancient rumor and modern urban legend. Communities used short, striking tales to explain names, police behavior, sexual norms and religious conflict.
The research also suggests a fresh source of evidence for historians and archaeologists: rumor itself. Stories that once seemed marginal may preserve clues about burials, local memory and social tensions. Treating these accounts as urban legends opens a path to study ordinary perception in the ancient world.
Edmunds concludes that the four tales deserve sustained attention. He argues they enrich classical studies by placing rumor alongside epic and myth.
