Atalanta

Also Known As: Greek Atalante; in the Arcadian tradition the daughter of Iasus or Iasion and Clymene, in Hesiod’s Boeotian tradition the daughter of Schoeneus, and in Euripides the daughter of Maenalus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A mortal huntress raised in the wild who could outrun any man, shoot as well as the best of them, and throw a hero in wrestling.
Role in Mythos: She is the one woman in the company of the great hunters and adventurers of the generation before Troy, the first to draw blood from the Calydonian boar and the bride who could only be won in a footrace that cost the losers their lives.
Relation to Humans: To the men around her she was a rival, a prize and a threat at once, and the Calydonian hunt ended in killing partly because a trophy was handed to her. Her suitors paid for losing to her with their lives, and the one who beat her did it with gifts from a goddess rather than speed.

The spring at Cyphanta comes out of the rock cold. When Pausanias passed the place in the second century AD, a ruined town in the hills of the Laconian coast with a cave sacred to Asclepius, the locals told him where the water had come from. A huntress, worn out with thirst in the middle of a chase, had struck the stone with her spear, and the spring gushed out. They did not need to explain who she was. Everyone in Greece knew Atalanta: the girl who hunted with heroes, ran down every man who tried to marry her, and finished her life as a lion.

She started out as somebody else’s disappointment. Apollodorus says her father Iasus wanted sons, so he had the baby girl left out in the wild. A she-bear came to her again and again and gave her suck, until hunters found the child and brought her up among themselves. The Roman-era writer Aelian tells it more tenderly, with a bear whose own cubs had been taken by hunters, and who took to the abandoned child and nursed it. He gives the grown girl a home as well: a deep cave at the bottom of a ravine, its mouth guarded by a sheer drop, ivy climbing the trees around it and crocuses and hyacinths in the soft grass. Which father abandoned her depends on who is talking. Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women made her the daughter of Schoeneus, a Boeotian. Euripides named Maenalus. Apollodorus gives Iasus in one book, then lists her among the boar hunters as the daughter of Schoeneus from Arcadia, contradicting himself within the same work. Pausanias tried to make peace between the versions. Near a place in Arcadia called Schoenus, said to be named after a Boeotian Schoeneus, lay the racecourses of Atalanta, so perhaps, he reasoned, the father had simply moved.

Aelian is the one ancient writer who stops to look at her. Her gaze was fierce and mannish, from being nursed by an animal and from hard exercise in the mountains. The sun had reddened her face until it looked like a permanent blush. Her hair was golden, and he insists it owed nothing to dyes or a woman’s art. She dressed plainly, modelling herself on Artemis, whom she also followed in refusing marriage. Ovid, describing her arrival at a great hunt, adds the details of a working outfit: a robe held at the top by a polished buckle, the hair pulled back in a single knot, an ivory quiver rattling on her left shoulder and a bow in her left hand. Her face, he says, was the kind that would look girlish on a boy and boyish on a girl.

Two centaurs, Rhoecus and Hylaeus, once tried to rape her in the woods. She shot them both down. The poet Callimachus, in his hymn to Artemis, says that even in Hades the pair have nothing slighting to say about her archery, which is about as close to an apology as a dead centaur gets.

When Oeneus of Calydon forgot Artemis at the harvest sacrifice and the goddess sent a monstrous boar to wreck his fields, his son Meleager gathered the best men in Greece to kill it, and Atalanta came. Apollodorus says some of them, Cepheus and Ancaeus among them, refused to hunt alongside a woman, and Meleager made them, because he wanted a child by her even though he already had a wife. In the thicket the boar was winning. Then the bowstring twanged, the feathered shaft quivered under the animal’s ear, and red blood ran into its stiff bristles. Meleager was the first to see it. “Give honour to the courage of a maid!” he shouted, in Ovid’s telling, and Ancaeus, unwilling to be outdone by a girl, charged with his double axe raised and was gored to death for it. Amphiaraus hit the boar in the eye, Meleager finished it with a spear, and he handed the hide and the head to Atalanta for drawing first blood. His mother’s brothers took the prize away from her, and Meleager killed them, which led directly to his own death. The trophy outlived everyone. Pausanias saw the hide hanging in the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, rotted with age and bald of bristles, under a marble pediment by Scopas that showed Atalanta among the hunters around the boar. The tusks had gone to Rome with the emperor Augustus, where one had broken and the other, about half a fathom long, was kept in an imperial garden. Long before any of that, around 570 BC, the painter Kleitias put the hunt on the neck of the great Athenian krater now called the François Vase, and Atalanta is there among the named hunters, with Melanion in the same company.

She is remembered at the edges of other adventures too. Apollodorus counts her among the Argonauts. Apollonius of Rhodes, who wrote the fullest account of that voyage, disagreed: Jason carried a spear that Atalanta had given him as a guest-gift in Maenalus, and she longed to sail with him, but he kept her off the ship because he feared bitter quarrels over love. At the funeral games for Pelias she wrestled Peleus, the future father of Achilles, and won.

Marriage was the trap she could not shoot her way out of. Ovid has an oracle tell her that a husband would be her ruin, and that she would lose herself while still alive. Apollodorus says that when she found her parents again her father pressed her to wed, so she set terms. A stake three cubits high was planted in the middle of a racecourse. Each suitor ran first, and Atalanta ran after him in armour. If she caught him he died on the spot. If he reached the end ahead of her he married her. Many men died. In a papyrus fragment of Hesiod, the crowd falls silent as she rises against her challenger, the west wind stirring the bright cloth over her breast, while her father promises the winner his daughter and a team of swift horses.

The man who beat her is Hippomenes in Hesiod, Euripides and Ovid, and Melanion in Apollodorus. Either way he had help. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples, which Ovid says she had picked from a tree with gleaming golden leaves in the Tamasus field on Cyprus. The first one fell and Atalanta, quick as a Harpy in Hesiod’s phrase, swung back to snatch it and still caught him. She caught him again after the second. Near the end he threw the last apple out to the side, and Ovid’s goddess made her turn for it and then made the fruit heavier in her hands. The apples worked.

The marriage did not last long in human form. Apollodorus says that while out hunting the couple went into a precinct of Zeus and made love there, and were changed into lions. Ovid tells it at greater length and lays the blame on ingratitude. Hippomenes never thanked Venus for the apples, so she filled him with desire beside a shadowy, cave-like shrine of the Mother of the Gods, where old wooden images of the gods turned their eyes away from what the two of them did. Cybele covered their smooth necks in tawny manes, bent their fingers into claws, and put them in harness to pull her chariot.

Atalanta had one child, Parthenopaeus, fathered by Melanion or by the god Ares according to Apollodorus. Hyginus says she exposed him on Mount Parthenius, as her own father had exposed her, and that the mountain gave him his name. He grew up to march with the Seven against Thebes.

Her powers were all things a body could be trained to do. She was faster than any man who raced her, she was the first to wound the boar that had beaten a whole company of heroes, and she put a wrestler like Peleus on his back. Her vow of virginity, kept in imitation of Artemis, was a protection she enforced herself, with a bow and a lethal footrace. Her weaknesses came from outside the training. A goddess decided the race, and three pieces of gold were enough to break her stride. Every telling that brings her to marriage ends with her losing her human shape.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Atalanta in Greek mythology?

Atalanta was a mortal huntress and runner in Greek mythology, famous as the only woman among the heroes of the Calydonian boar hunt. Abandoned as a baby by a father who wanted sons, she was suckled by a she-bear and raised by hunters. She also beat Peleus at wrestling and challenged her suitors to a deadly footrace.

How did Hippomenes beat Atalanta in the race?

Hippomenes beat Atalanta by dropping three golden apples given to him by Aphrodite, and she stopped to pick each one up. In Ovid’s version the goddess made her chase the third apple and made it heavier once she held it. Apollodorus gives the winner’s name as Melanion instead of Hippomenes.

What happened to Atalanta’s suitors?

Atalanta raced every suitor who wanted to marry her, and any man she caught before the finish was killed on the spot. Apollodorus says the suitor ran first while she followed him in armour. Many men died this way before Hippomenes, or Melanion, won with Aphrodite’s golden apples.

Why were Atalanta and Hippomenes turned into lions?

Atalanta and her husband were turned into lions for making love inside a sanctuary. Apollodorus says it was a precinct of Zeus, while Ovid says it was a shrine of Cybele and that Venus caused their desire because Hippomenes never thanked her for the apples. In Ovid’s telling Cybele then harnessed the two lions to her chariot.

What did Atalanta do in the Calydonian boar hunt?

Atalanta was the first hunter to wound the Calydonian boar, hitting it with an arrow before Meleager killed it. Meleager gave her the boar’s hide and head as the prize, and the quarrel this caused with his uncles led to their deaths and then his own. Pausanias saw the hide, rotted with age, still displayed in the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea.