Some learned men have thought they discovered some vestiges of vampirism in the remotest antiquity; but all that they say of it does not come near what is related of the vampires. The lamiae, the strigae, the sorcerers whom they accused of sucking the blood of living persons, and of thus causing their death, the magicians who were said to cause the death of new-born children by charms and malignant spells, are nothing less than what we understand by the name of vampires; even were it to be owned that these lamiae and strigae have really existed, which we do not believe can ever be well proved. I own that these terms are found in the versions of Holy Scripture. For instance, Isaiah, describing the condition to which Babylon was to be reduced after her ruin, says that she shall become the abode of satyrs, lamiae, and strigae (in Hebrew, _lilith_). This last term, according to the Hebrews, signifies the same thing, as the Greeks express by _strix_ and _lamiae_, which are sorceresses or magicians, who seek to put to death new-born children. Whence it comes that the Jews are accustomed to write in the four corners of the chamber of a woman just delivered, "Adam, Eve, begone from hence _lilith_." The ancient Greeks knew these dangerous sorceresses by the name of _lamiae_, and they believed that they devoured children, or sucked away all their blood till they died.[474] The Seventy, in Isaiah, translate the Hebrew _lilith_ by _lamia_. Euripides and the Scholiast of Aristophanes also make mention of it as a fatal monster, the enemy of mortals. Ovid, speaking of the strigae, describes them as dangerous birds, which fly by night, and seek for infants to devour them and nourish themselves with their blood.[475] These prejudices had taken such deep root in the minds of the barbarous people that they put to death persons suspected of being strigae, or sorceresses, and of eating people alive. Charlemagne, in his Capitularies, which he composed for his new subjects,[476] the Saxons, condemns to death those who shall believe that a man or a woman are sorcerers (striges esse) and eat living men. He condemns in the same manner those who shall have them burnt, or give their flesh to be eaten, or shall eat of it themselves. Wherein it may be remarked, first of all, that they believed there were people who ate men alive; that they killed and burnt them; that sometimes their flesh was eaten, as we have seen that in Russia they eat bread kneaded with the blood of vampires; and that formerly their corpses were exposed to wild beasts, as is still done in countries where these ghosts are found, after having impaled them, or cut off their head. The laws of the Lombards, in the same way, forbid that the servant of another person should be put to death as a witch, _strix_, or _masca_. This last word, _masca_, whence _mask_, has the same signification as the Latin _larva_, a spirit, a phantom, a spectre.