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Calydonian boar hunt

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Importance in Greek mythology and art

Tondo of a Laconian black-figure cup by the Naucratis Painter, ca. 555 BCE (Louvre)

Since the Calydonian boar hunt drew together numerous heroes—among whom were many who were venerated as progenitors of their local ruling houses among tribal groups of Hellenes into Classical times—it offered a natural subject in classical art, for it was redolent with the web of myth that gathered around its protagonists on other occasions, around their half-divine descent and their offspring. Like the quest for the Golden Fleece (Argonautica) or the Trojan War that took place the following generation, the Calydonian boar hunt is one of the nodes in which much Greek myth comes together.

Sources

Both Homer and Hesiod and their listeners were aware of the details of this myth, but no surviving complete account exists: some papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus are all that survive of Stesichorus' telling; the myth repertory called Bibliotheke ("The Library") contains the gist of the tale, and before that was compiled the Roman poet Ovid told the story in some colorful detail in his Metamorphoses.

The hunters

According to the Iliad, the heroes who participated in the hunt assembled from all over Greece. Bacchylides has Meleager describe himself and the rest of the hunters as "the best of the Hellenes". The hunters included Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, from Thessaly; Theseus, the king and founder-hero of Athens; Peleus, the king of Phthia, and father of Achilles; Peleus' brother Telamon, who was the father of two other Trojan War heroes Ajax the Great and Teucer; the Dioskouroi (Castor and Polydeuces), from Sparta. Others notable hunters were, ... and Atalanta, a heroine from Arcadia.

Theseus' companion Pirithous from Thessaly; Ancaeus and Kepheus from Arcadia; Idas and Lynkeus from Messenia; and Admetos and Eurytion from Thessaly.

Sources

Ancient

Aeschylus

The Libation Bearers

607–612

the daughter of Thestius,¹²⁷ the woman who lit the fire, burning up the red brand that was coeval with her son, ever since he had cried when he came from her womb, and that kept measure with his life all its length till the day decreed by fate.

¹²⁷ Althaea, the mother of Meleager. When her son was a week old, she was told by the Fates that he would die when the log then burning on the hearth was consumed; she seized the log and kept it in a chest. But when she heard that her brothers had been killed by Meleager in a quarrel over the Calydonian boar, she threw the log into the fire, and when it was burnt up Meleager, far away, almost instantly died. See Bacchylides 5.93–154; [Apollodorus], Library 1.8.1–3; Pausanias 10.31.4.

• See Gantz, p. 329

Apollodorus

1.7.10

Thestius had daughters and sons by Eurythemis, daughter of Cleoboea: the daughters were Althaea, Leda, Hypermnestra, and the males were Iphiclus, Evippus, Plexippus, and Eurypylus.

1.8.2

Althaea had also a son Meleager,¹ by Oeneus, though they say that he was begotten by Ares. It is said that, when he was seven days old, the Fates came and declared that Meleager should die when the brand burning on the hearth was burnt out. On hearing that, Althaea snatched up the brand and deposited it in a chest.² Meleager grew up to be an invulnerable and gallant man, but came by his end in the following way. In sacrificing the first fruits of the annual crops of the country to all the gods Oeneus forgot Artemis alone. But she in her wrath sent a boar of extraordinary size and strength, which prevented the land from being sown and destroyed the cattle and the people that fell in with it. To attack this boar Oeneus called together all the noblest men of Greece, and promised that to him who should kill the beast he would give the skin as a prize. Now the men who assembled to hunt the boar were these3:— Meleager, son of Oeneus; Dryas, son of Ares; these came from Calydon; Idas and Lynceus, sons of Aphareus, from Messene; Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus and Leda, from Lacedaemon; Theseus, son of Aegeus, from Athens; Admetus, son of Pheres, from Pherae; Ancaeus and Cepheus, sons of Lycurgus, from Arcadia; Jason, son of Aeson, from Iolcus; Iphicles, son of Amphitryon, from Thebes; Pirithous, son of Ixion, from Larissa; Peleus, son of Aeacus, from Phthia; Telamon, son of Aeacus, from Salamis; Eurytion, son of Actor, from Phthia; Atalanta, daughter of Schoeneus, from Arcadia; Amphiaraus, son of Oicles, from Argos. With them came also the sons of Thestius. And when they were assembled, Oeneus entertained them for nine days; but on the tenth, when Cepheus and Ancaeus and some others disdained to go hunting with a woman, Meleager compelled them to follow the chase with her, for he desired to have a child also by Atalanta, though he had to wife Cleopatra, daughter of Idas and Marpessa. When they surrounded the boar, Hyleus and Ancaeus were killed by the brute, and Peleus struck down Eurytion undesignedly with a javelin. But Atalanta was the first to shoot the boar in the back with an arrow, and Amphiaraus was the next to shoot it in the eye; but Meleager killed it by a stab in the flank, and on receiving the skin gave it to Atalanta. Nevertheless the sons of Thestius, thinking scorn that a woman should get the prize in the face of men, took the skin from her, alleging that it belonged to them by right of birth if Meleager did not choose to take it.

¹ The whole of the following account of the life and death of Meleager is quoted, with a few verbal changes and omissions, by Zenobius, Cent. v.33. The story is told by Bacch. 5.93ff., ed. Jebb; and, though without any express mention of the burning brand or of Meleager's death, by Hom. Il. 9.529-599. Compare Diod. 4.34; Ov. Met. 8.270ff.; Lactantius Placidus on Statius, Theb. ii.481; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 46ff. (First Vatican Mythographer 146). It was made the theme of tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides. See Nauck, TGF, 2nd ed. （Leipsig, 1889）, pp. 219ff., 525ff.; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, ii.64ff.

² For the story of the burning brand on which the life of Meleager depended, see also Aesch. Lib. 604ff.; Bacch. 5.136ff., ed. Jebb; Diod. 4.34.6ff.; Paus. 10.31.4; Ant. Lib. 2; Dio Chrysostom lxvii. vol. ii. p. 231, ed. L. Dindorf; Scholiast on Hom. Il. ix.534; Ov. Met. 8.445-525; Hyginus, Fab. 171, 174; Lactantius Placidus on Statius, Theb. ii.481; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. p. 47 (First Vatican Mythographer 146). The story belongs to a widespread class of tales concerned with the “external soul,” or the belief that a person's life is bound up with an animal or object outside of his own body. See Balder the Beautiful, ii.94ff.

2.7.2

Bacchylides

5.94–135

[Meleager:] “It is hard [95] for men on earth to sway the minds of the gods; for otherwise my father, horse-driving Oineus, would have appeased the anger of holy, white-armed Artemis with her garland of buds, [100] when he entreated her with sacrifices of many goats and red-backed cattle. But the maiden goddess' anger was unconquerable; she sent an immensely violent [105] boar, a ruthless fighter, to Calydon, the place of lovely choruses; there, his strength raging like a flood, he cut down vine-rows with his tusk, and slaughtered flocks, and whatever mortals [110] came across his path. We, the best of the Hellenes, fought hard to sustain the hateful battle against him, for six days continuously. But when some god gave the upper hand to the Aetolians, [115] we buried those whom the loud-roaring boar had killed in his violent attacks: Ancaeus, and Agelaus, the best of my dear brothers, whom [120] Althaea bore in the far-famed halls of Oineus. Ruinous fate destroyed ... ⁷ For not yet did the hostile goddess, the savage daughter of Leto, [stop] her anger. We fought hard for the beast's fiery hide [125] with the Couretes, steadfast in battle. Then I killed, among many others, Iphiclus and noble Aphares, my mother's swift brothers; for [130] strong-spirited Ares does not discern a friend in battle—shafts fly blindly from the hands against the souls of the enemy, and bring death [135] to whomever the god wishes. My mother, the hostile daughter of Thestius, did not take this into account; she brought about my evil fate, the fearless woman, and planned my destruction. [140] She took the log of my swift doom out of the ornate chest, and burned it. Fate had marked off that this should be the boundary of my life. I happened to be slaying [145] Clymenus, Daïpylus' valiant son, whose body was flawless; I had overtaken him in front of the towers. The others [150] were fleeing to the well-built ancient city of Pleuron. And my sweet soul diminished; I knew that my strength was gone, aiai! I breathed my last breath in tears, as I left behind splendid youth.”

⁷ There is a gap of two or three words in the papyrus here (lines 120-23).

Homer

ILiad

9.529—537

[Phoenix addressing Achilles:] "The Curetes on a time were fighting and the Aetolians staunch in battle [530] around the city of Calydon, and were slaying one another, the Aetolians defending lovely Calydon and the Curetes fain to waste it utterly in war. For upon their folk had Artemis of the golden throne sent a plague in wrath that Oeneus offered not to her the first-fruits of the harvest in his rich orchard land; [535] whereas the other gods feasted on hecatombs, and it was to the daughter of great Zeus alone that he offered not, whether haply he forgat, or marked it not; and he was greatly blinded in heart."

9.538–546

"Thereat the Archer-goddess, the child of Zeus, waxed wroth and sent against him a fierce wild boar, white of tusk, [540] that wrought much evil, wasting1 the orchard land of Oeneus; many a tall tree did he uproot and cast upon the ground, aye, root and apple blossom therewith. But the boar did Meleager, son of Oeneus, slay, when he had gathered out of many cities huntsmen [545] and hounds; for not of few men could the boar have been slain, so huge was he; and many a man set he upon the grievous pyre."

Phrynichos

Pleuroniai (see Gantz, p. 329)

Modern

Gantz

p. 329

The familiar tale of Meleagros' death by means of a burning brand is told in detail in Bakchylides in the same Ode 5, and was probably dramatized by Phrynichos in his lost Pleuroniai;²⁵ there is also a clear enough allusion in the second stasimon of Aischylos' Choephoroi. But our two earliest preserved sources, the Iliad and the Ehoiai, offer a rather different picture, and Pausanias, who cites the Minyas as aligned with them, specifies that Phrynichos' is the earliest account of the brand kown to him (although he concedes that the playwrite does not seem to be innovating: 10.31.3-4). The Iliad's version raises here as elsewhere the question of possible Homeric reshaping to dreate parallels, since phoenix tells the tale to Achilleus to make a point about the latter's own situation. (Il 9.529-99).²⁶ We start on what will become familiar ground, with Artemis angry at Oineus of Kalydon because he failed to sacrifice to her when he remembered all the other gods. As a result the Kalydonian Boar is dispatched to ravage the countyside, Meleagros, son of Oineus, gathers together many hunters, after much loss of life the Boar is slain. But Artemis then causes a war to break out between the Aitolians of Kalydon and the Kouretes (apparently the people of Thestios' city of Pleuron²⁷) over the hide.

Hard

pp. 414–418

p. 414

p. 415

Before taking the lead in the greatest adventure in Aetolian legend, Meleagros sailed with the Argonauts, ...

Melegros was best remembered as the young man who had led many of the foremost heroes of Greece in the hunt for thr Calydomian boar, and had perished soon after he had killed as the result of a quarrel over the allocation of the [cont.]

p. 416

trophies. The great hunt come to be convened in the following circumstances. When Oineus was once offering the first-fruits of his harvest (or simply a general sacrifice) to all the gods one year, he happened to forget Artemis, who was so angry that she sent a boar of unparalleled size and ferocity against the land; and it uprooted the crops, destroyed the livestock and killed anyone who was unfortunate enough to encounter it.^{84 [Hom. Il. 9.533-42, Apollod. 1.8.2, D.S. 4.34.2-3, Ov. Met. 8.271-99; Athen. 9.402a (boar white), Str. 8.6.22 (born of Krommyon).]} Although Oineus tried to appease the goddess with sacrifices of goats and red-backed oxen, her anger persisted,^{85 [Bacch. 5.97-110]} and he summoned leading heros from far and wide to hunt the boar, promising its hide as a prize of honour to the one who killed it.^{86 [E.g. Apollod. 1.8.2; half of kingdom too in Vat. Myth. 2.144]} Since the king was now too old to venture into the field himself, Melegros took command of the assembled force. Among the heros who responded to the challenge were Jason and a number of former Argonauts, Theseus and his friend Perithoos, Peleus and his brother Telamon, Ankaios and Kepheus from Arcadia, Idas and Lynkeus from Messenia, the Dioskouroi from Sparta, and Admetos, and Eurytion from Thessaly. The hunt took place after the voyage of the Argonauts but before the Theban War; if Amphiaraus joined the hunt, as he did in one account, he was the onlt boar-hunter who went on to march against Thebes. In addition to these heroes, a notable heroine, Atalanta, arrived from Arcadia to attend the hunt, and played a leading part in most accounts. Apollodorus and Hyginus provide useful catalogues of hunters, as does Ovid in his Metamorphoses.^{87 [Apollod. 1.8.2, Hyg. Fab. 173, Ov. Met. 8.299-317]}

Although the tale of the boar-hunt and the conflict that arose from it was almost as famous as the tale of the Argonauts, it so happens that no very important account of it survived. For the course of the hunt itself, Apollodorus and Ovid should be consulted first of all, together with the earlier though less complete account Bacchylides' fifth Ode.^{88 [Apollod. 1.8.2; Ov. Met. 8.329-424, Bacch. 5.111-20; earliest source, Hom. Il. 9.538-46]} When the boar-hunters set off on their mission after nine days of feasting, Kepheus, Ankaios and some of the other men were reluctant to take the field in the company of a woman, but Meleagros insisted that Atalanta should be allowed to come. As it turned out, she proved to be a more valiant and effective hunter than any of the men, apart from Meleagros himself. According to Bacchylides the hund lasted for six days and the main victims of the boar were Ankios (a redoubtable Arcadian who wore a bearskin and carried a double-headed axe, see p. 544) and Meleagros' favourite brother Agelaos.

p. 417

p. 418