The Calydonian boar hunt in ancient art

The Calydonian boar hunt in ancient art
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. Insulted, Artemis, the "Lady of the Bow", loosed the biggest, most ferocious wild 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, 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. 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. Many of the men refused to hunt alongside a woman but not Meleager. Atalanta was first to the boar with an arrow, then Meleager finished it off, but offered the prize to Atalanta for drawing first blood. This resulted in many of the hunters turning upon one another, contesting the spoils. Pausanias reported seeing the hide of the Calydonian boar in the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in Laconia "rotted by age and by now altogether without bristles" in the 2nd century CE. Pausanias stated that the tusks had been taken to Rome as booty from the defeated allies of Mark Anthony by Augustus and one tusk had been broken. "But the remaining one, having a circumference of about half a fathom, was dedicated in the Emperor's gardens, in a shrine of Dionysos."




Images: Terracotta plaque of the Calydonian Boar Hunt from Melos 460 BCE (inv 175B) at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Dick Osseman. Roman sarcophagus depicting the Calydonian boar hunt at the Palazzo dei Conservatori courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Marie-Lan Nguyen. A study of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar by Peter Paul Rubens at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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