Actaeon

Also Known As: Greek Aktaion; Latin Actaeon; son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, grandson of Cadmus of Thebes, pupil of the centaur Chiron
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A master huntsman trained by Chiron, he was turned by Artemis into a deer, or made to look like one, and torn apart by his own hounds.
Role in Mythos: Actaeon is the first grief of the house of Cadmus at Thebes, and the poets used his death as the standing example of what happens to a mortal who crosses a goddess.
Relation to Humans: His story was told as a warning, most famously by his grandfather Cadmus to the doomed Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. In Boeotia he was also a hero with a cult: the people of Orchomenus sacrificed to him every year after his ghost, they said, had ravaged their land.

It is noon on the mountain. The nets and spears are wet with the morning’s blood, the shadows have shrunk to nothing under the trees, and a young man tells his friends that the day has been lucky enough. They can pack up the nets and come back tomorrow. That is how Ovid opens the last hour of Actaeon’s life, in the third book of the Metamorphoses: with a good day’s hunting, a sensible order, and a hunter wandering off alone into woods he does not know.

Actaeon belonged to the royal house of Thebes. His mother was Autonoe, one of the daughters of Cadmus, and his father was Aristaeus, a son of Apollo. Apollodorus, the mythographer of the second century AD, says the boy was raised by the centaur Chiron to be a hunter. The training worked. No source doubts that he was a superb huntsman. Almost every source disagrees about why he had to die.

The oldest version is not about a bath at all. A scrap of papyrus now in Michigan preserves a note on the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Actaeon, it says, wanted to marry Semele, and by the will of Artemis he was changed into the likeness of a deer and torn apart by his own dogs. Semele was his mother’s sister, the woman Zeus had chosen for himself, who would become the mother of Dionysus. The lyric poet Stesichorus, as Pausanias reports, told it the same way: Artemis threw a deerskin over Actaeon so that his hounds would kill him, to stop him taking Semele as his wife. The early historian Acusilaus said plainly that Zeus was angry with him for wooing her. In these tellings the young man’s crime was to court his god’s bride, and Artemis was simply the instrument.

By the end of the fifth century BC another crime was in circulation. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Cadmus stands in front of his other grandson, Pentheus, and holds Actaeon up as a warning: the flesh-eating dogs he had raised himself tore him apart, because he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the first century BC, knew two stories and liked both. In one, Actaeon had offered the goddess the first-fruits of his hunting and presumed on the gift so far as to plan a wedding with her in her own temple. In the other, he claimed he outdid her in the chase. Either way, Diodorus concluded, the goddess had a right to be angry.

The bath came later, or at least it survives later. The Hellenistic poet Callimachus, in his hymn on the bath of Pallas, has Athena console the mother of Tiresias, whom she has just blinded for seeing her naked. Autonoe and Aristaeus, the goddess says, will one day burn offerings and pray that their son had only been blinded. Actaeon will be Artemis’ companion in the hunt, yet neither the chase nor their shared archery on the hills will save him when, without meaning to, he sees her bathing. His own dogs will eat their former master, and his mother will go through every thicket gathering his bones. Apollodorus, centuries later, calls the bath the more general opinion. The classicist Lamar Ronald Lacy, writing in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1990, argued that the evidence is too scant and too broken to line these crimes up in a tidy historical sequence. The stories disagree, and they always have.

Ovid made the bath the version everyone remembers. He sets it in Gargaphie, a valley thick with pine and sharp cypress, sacred to Diana, where a cave with an arch of pumice and porous tufa shelters a spring of clear water spreading into a grassy pool. The goddess arrives tired from the hunt. One nymph takes her spear, quiver and unstrung bow, another her robe, two untie her sandals, Crocale knots up her hair, and five more pour water over her from deep jars. Actaeon walks in through the trees. The nymphs scream, beat their breasts and crowd round her, but she stands a head taller than all of them, her face flushed the colour of clouds struck by the sun. Wishing she had her arrows, she scoops up the water she has instead and throws it in his face. Now tell people you saw me naked, she says, if you can.

He could not. Horns sprouted from his wet hair, his neck stretched, his ears sharpened, his hands became feet, his arms long legs, and his skin a dappled hide. Then she added fear. He ran, amazed at his own speed, and caught his reflection in the water. He tried to say “Oh, look at me,” and only a groan came out, while tears ran down a face that was no longer his. His mind was the one thing left unchanged, which was the cruel part.

The hounds found him while he was still deciding whether to go home or hide. Ovid names more than thirty of them: Melampus the Spartan and keen-nosed Ichnobates from Crete gave the first cry, and then came Arcadians, a wolf-sired dog, a dog lately gored by a boar, a black dog with a white blaze on its forehead, and many more. He fled over the rocks where he had so often been the pursuer, trying to shout “I am Actaeon, know your master,” and producing nothing. Three dogs that had taken a shortcut over the ridge caught him first and hung on his back and shoulder until the pack arrived. He sank to his knees like a man begging, swinging his head from side to side where his arms should have been. His friends, catching up, urged the dogs on with the old familiar cries, and called out for Actaeon, complaining that he was missing the kill. He turned his head each time they said his name.

Apollodorus says it happened on Mount Cithaeron and that the pack numbered fifty. He also preserves the grimmer ending. With their master gone, the dogs went looking for him, howling, until they came to Chiron’s cave. The centaur made them an image of Actaeon, and it eased their grief. The same passage quotes an older verse catalogue of the pack, naming Spartus, Omargus and Bores as the first to drink his blood. Nicander, a Hellenistic poet, claimed that a breed of Indian dog descended from them.

Greek painters were more interested in the killing than the crime. Lacy found that the offence itself barely appears in art before the Roman period, while the death was painted again and again. On a bell krater of around 470 BC in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Athenian artist known as the Pan Painter shows Artemis drawing her bow over Actaeon as he sinks under the dogs, and he is still wholly human. Artists only began giving him a deer’s attributes in the middle decades of the fifth century BC. A Boeotian pyxis of about the same date shows his family recovering his body while the dogs search and Artemis walks away.

The dead hunter did not stay quiet. Pausanias, travelling through Boeotia in the second century AD, was shown a spring beside the road from Megara to Plataea and, a little further on, a rock called the Bed of Actaeon, where he was said to have slept after hunting and from which he looked into the spring while Artemis bathed. At Orchomenus, the locals told him, a ghost carrying a rock had once ravaged the land. The oracle at Delphi ordered them to find what was left of Actaeon and put it in the earth, and to make a bronze image of the ghost and fasten it to a rock with iron. Pausanias saw that chained image himself, and the Orchomenians sacrificed to Actaeon every year as a hero. Pausanias, the sceptic, offered his own explanation of the whole affair. The dogs, he thought, had simply gone mad, and would have torn apart anyone they met.

Everything Actaeon had was a hunter’s gift: Chiron’s training, a famous pack, speed across the mountain and an eye for the quarry. Every one of those gifts was turned against him. The speed carried him away from the only people who might have helped, the dogs used the tracking he had taught them, and his friends urged them on with the same cries they had used all morning. Ovid insisted the fault was chance, not wickedness. A goddess who had been seen did not care about the distinction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Actaeon in Greek mythology?

Actaeon was a Theban hunter, the son of Aristaeus and Autonoe and a grandson of Cadmus, king of Thebes. He was trained in hunting by the centaur Chiron. He is known for being turned into a deer by the goddess Artemis and killed by his own hunting dogs.

Why did Artemis turn Actaeon into a deer?

The ancient sources give different reasons. The earliest accounts, from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Stesichorus and Acusilaus, say he wanted to marry Semele, the woman Zeus loved. Euripides says he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis, and Diodorus adds a story that he planned to marry the goddess herself. The best-known version, told by Callimachus and Ovid, says he saw Artemis bathing.

How did Actaeon die?

Actaeon was torn apart by his own hunting dogs, which did not recognise him after Artemis changed him into a stag. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses he could not speak to call them off, and his hunting companions urged the dogs on while calling for the missing Actaeon. Apollodorus places his death on Mount Cithaeron and says the pack had fifty dogs.

What happened to Actaeon’s dogs after he died?

According to Apollodorus, Actaeon’s dogs searched for their master, howling, until they reached the cave of the centaur Chiron. Chiron made an image of Actaeon, and it soothed their grief. The poet Nicander claimed that a breed of Indian dog was descended from Actaeon’s pack.

Was Actaeon worshipped in ancient Greece?

Yes, Actaeon received a hero cult at Orchomenus in Boeotia. Pausanias reports that the people there said his ghost, carrying a rock, had ravaged their land, and that the Delphic oracle told them to bury his remains and fasten a bronze image of the ghost to a rock with iron. Pausanias saw the image himself, and the Orchomenians sacrificed to Actaeon every year.