Calydonian Boar

The Calydonian Hunt shown on a Roman frieze (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)^[1]

The Calydonian Boar (Greek: ὁ Καλυδώνιος κάπρος^[2][3] or ὁ Καλυδώνιος ὗς^[4]) is one of the monsters of Greek mythology that had to be overcome by heroes of the Olympian age. Sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in Aetolia because its king failed to honor her in his rites to the gods, it was killed in the Calydonian Hunt, in which many male heroes took part, but also a powerful woman, Atalanta, who won its hide by first wounding it with an arrow. This outraged some of the men, with tragic results. Strabo was under the impression that the Calydonian Boar was an offspring of the Crommyonian Sow vanquished by Theseus.^[5]

Importance in Greek mythology and art

The Calydonian Boar is one of the chthonic monsters in Greek mythology, each set in a specific locale. Sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in Aetolia, it met its end in the Calydonian Hunt, in which all the heroes of the new age pressed to take part, with the exception of Heracles, who vanquished his own Goddess-sent Erymanthian Boar separately. Since the mythic event drew together numerous heroes^[6]—among whom were many who were venerated as progenitors of their local ruling houses among tribal groups of Hellenes into Classical times—the Calydonian Boar hunt 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 Hunt is one of the nodes in which much Greek myth comes together.

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

Both Homer^[7] 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;^[8] 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.^[9]

Hunt

King Oeneus ("wine man") of Calydon, an ancient city of west-central Greece north of the Gulf of Patras, held annual harvest sacrifices to the gods on the sacred hill. One year the king forgot to include Great "Artemis of the Golden Throne" in his offerings^[10] Insulted, Artemis, the "Lady of the Bow", loosed the biggest, most ferocious boar imaginable on the countryside of Calydon. It rampaged throughout the countryside, destroying vineyards and crops, forcing people to take refuge inside the city walls (Ovid), where they began to starve.

Oeneus sent messengers out to look for the best hunters in Greece, offering them the boar's pelt and tusks as a prize.^[11]

Roman marble sarcophagus from Vicovaro, carved with the Calydonian Hunt (Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome)

Meleager et Atalanta, after Giulio Romano.

Among those who responded were some of the Argonauts, Oeneus' own son Meleager, and, remarkably for the Hunt's eventual success, one woman— the huntress Atalanta, the "indomitable", who had been suckled by Artemis as a she-bear and raised as a huntress, a proxy for Artemis herself (Kerenyi; Ruck and Staples). Artemis appears to have been divided in her motives, for it was also said that she had sent the young huntress because she knew her presence would be a source of division, and so it was: many of the men, led by Kepheus and Ankaios, refused to hunt alongside a woman. It was the smitten Meleager who convinced them.^[12] Nonetheless it was Atalanta who first succeeded in wounding the boar with an arrow, although Meleager finished it off, and offered the prize to Atalanta, who had drawn first blood. But the sons of Thestios, who considered it disgraceful that a woman should get the trophy where men were involved, took the skin from her, saying that it was properly theirs by right of birth, if Meleagros chose not to accept it. Outraged by this,^[13] Meleagros slew the sons of Thestios and again gave the skin to Atalanta (Bibliotheke). Meleager's mother, sister of Meleager's slain uncles, took the fatal brand from the chest where she had kept it (see Meleager) and threw it once more on the fire; as it was consumed, Meleager died on the spot, as the Fates had foretold. Thus Artemis achieved her revenge against King Oeneus.

Woodcut illustration for Raphael Regius's edition of Metamorphoses, Venice, ca. 1518

During the hunt, Peleus accidentally killed his host Eurytion. In the course of the hunt and its aftermath, many of the hunters turned upon one another, contesting the spoils, and so the Goddess continued to be revenged (Kerenyi, 114): "But the goddess again made a great stir of anger and crying battle, over the head of the boar and the bristling boar's hide, between Kouretes and the high-hearted Aitolians" (Homer, Iliad, IX 543).

The boar's hide that was preserved in the Temple of Athena Alae at Tegea in Laconia was reputedly that of the Calydonian Boar, "rotted by age and by now altogether without bristles" by the time Pausanias saw it in the second century CE. He noted that the tusks had been taken to Rome as booty from the defeated allies of Mark Anthony by Augustus; "one of the tusks of the Calydonian boar has been broken", Pausanias reports, "but the remaining one, having a circumference of about half a fathom,^[14] was dedicated in the Emperor's gardens, in a shrine of Dionysos".^[15] The Calydonian Hunt was the theme of the temple's main pediment.

Hunters

The heroes who participated assembled from all over Hellas, according to Homer;^[16] Bacchylides called them "the best of the Hellenes".^[17]

The table lists:

• Those seen by Pausanias on the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea.
• Those listed by Latin mythographer Hyginus (Fabulae 30); they include Deucalion, whose connection is unlikely.
• Those noted in Ovid's list from the 8th Book of his Metamorphoses.

The states which sent help to Oeneus

• Ternerdos, Iolcos, Sparta, Pleurone, Messene, Perrhaebia, Phthia, Magnesia, Salamin, Calydon, Thessalia, Oechialia, Ithaca, Tegea, Crete, Dolopia, Athens, [Magnesia], and Arcadia.(Hyginus, Fabulae 173A)

Notes

Bibliography

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Calydonian Boar.

• Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca I, VIII, 2–3;
• Homer, Iliad, ix
• Kerenyi, Karl, 1959. The Heroes of the Greeks pp114ff, et passim
• Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, 267–525.
• Ruck, Carl A.P., and Danny Staples, 1994. The World of Classical Myth p 196
• Swinburne, Algernon Charles. "Atalanta in Calydon"

External links

• Theioi.com: Hus Kaydonios: Literary quotes