Actaeon

Actaeon was a Theban hunter, the son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, who was killed on Mount Cithaeron by his own hounds. In the best-known version he was turned into a stag by Artemis after he saw her bathing; in others his offence was different. The details vary, but the ending, a hunter hunted down by his own pack, is the same.

Family

Apollodorus gives Actaeon’s father as Aristaeus and his mother as Autonoe, a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia (Library 3.4.2), which made him a cousin of Dionysus, the son of Autonoe’s sister Semele. His home was Boeotia, the land of Thebes, and Mount Cithaeron was his hunting ground. Apollodorus adds that he was brought up by the centaur Chiron, who trained him as a hunter (3.4.4).

The Hunter and the Goddess

According to Apollodorus, Actaeon was devoured on Cithaeron by his own dogs, and the reason is given in two forms (Library 3.4.4). The more general opinion was that he saw Artemis bathing. The other, which Apollodorus attributes to the early writer Acusilaus, is that Zeus was angry with him for courting Semele, Zeus’ own love. In the first version Artemis changed him into a deer and drove his fifty hounds mad, so that they devoured him without knowing who he was. When he was gone, the dogs searched for their master, howling, until they came to the cave of Chiron, who made an image of Actaeon to soothe their grief.

The earliest surviving telling of the bathing version is in Callimachus’ Hymn 5, On the Bath of Pallas (107–118). Consoling the nymph Chariclo for the blinding of her son Teiresias, Athena says that Autonoe and Aristaeus will one day wish their only son Actaeon had merely been blinded: though he will be a companion of Artemis in the chase, he will unwillingly see the goddess’s bath, his own dogs will devour their former master, and his mother will range the thickets gathering his bones.

Ovid’s Version

The fullest telling is by Ovid (Metamorphoses 3.138–252). Actaeon and his companions have been hunting all morning, and at midday, while the sun is high, he tells them to stop for the day. He wanders on alone into a sacred valley, Gargaphia, where there is a cave with a spring, and where Diana (Artemis) and her nymphs are bathing. The nymphs scream and crowd around the goddess, but she stands taller than they. Having no weapons within reach, she splashes his face and hair with water and tells him to describe, if he can, how he saw her unclothed. Antlers grow from his head, his neck lengthens, his ears become pointed, and he runs. Only when he sees his own reflection in a pool does he understand what has happened to him.

His hounds then catch his scent. Ovid names them one by one, and the pack chases him across the mountain. Actaeon’s companions, who arrive with the chase, shout for him to join the sport, and he wishes he were only a spectator. The dogs pull him down and tear him to pieces. Ovid is clear that the fault was no crime but ill luck: “you will find in him the fault of Fortune, not a crime,” since he had come on the goddess by mistake (3.141–142).

Other Versions

• In Euripides’ Bacchae (337–340), Cadmus recalls that Actaeon was torn apart by the hounds he had raised because he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis.
• Pausanias (9.2.3–4) saw on the road from Megara to Plataea a spring and a rock called the bed of Actaeon, where he was said to have rested from hunting and to have looked into the spring while Artemis bathed in it. Pausanias reports the version of the poet Stesichorus of Himera, that the goddess threw a deerskin over Actaeon so that his hounds would kill him, to stop him from taking Semele as his wife; his own opinion was that the hounds simply went mad, without divine interference.
• Apollodorus gives Acusilaus’ account, noted above, in which Zeus is the angry god and Semele the cause.
• Diodorus Siculus (4.81.3–5) reports two further explanations: that Actaeon, presuming on the first-fruits of the hunt he had dedicated to Artemis, proposed to marry the goddess in her own temple, or that he claimed to be a better hunter than she. Diodorus thinks either would have justified her anger, and adds that the metamorphosis explains why the dogs attacked him.
• Nonnus (Dionysiaca 5) tells the story at length in the bathing form, and has the ghost of Actaeon appear to his father Aristaeus to tell him where to find his remains; this is only a side story on the Theban material in that poem.

The sources agree that Actaeon’s hounds killed him, and that Artemis or Zeus was behind it. They do not agree on what he did, and the bathing version, though the most familiar today, is not attested before Callimachus.

The Dogs

Ovid names a long list of the hounds at Metamorphoses 3.206–225, among them Melampus (Blackfoot), Ichnobates (Tracker), Pamphagus (Glutton) and Laelaps (Storm). Apollodorus gives the number of the pack as fifty, and a verse fragment attached to his text names several more, among them Lynceus, Balius, Spartus and Omargus; Hyginus (Fabulae 181) preserves another list. The lists show that the pack was imagined as a set of individual dogs that Actaeon himself had raised and trained.

See Also: Aristaeus, Autonoe, Artemis, Cadmus, Semele, Zeus, Dionysus