Crommyonian Sow (Phaea)

The road out of Crommyon ran close to the sea, and the people who used it learned to move fast. Somewhere in the scrub above the village lived a sow the size of a plough-ox, and she did not root for acorns like an honest pig. She hunted. Farmers came down at first light to find their fields torn open and a neighbour missing, and on the herd paths a smell of broken earth and blood.

She had a name, which is more than most monsters get. They called her Phaea, the grey one, after the old woman who had raised her. The crone kept the beast the way someone else might keep a dog, feeding it and sheltering it, and somewhere in that long keeping the animal learned to think of the people nearby as food. Crommyon sat on the Isthmus, the narrow neck of land that every traveller between the Peloponnese and Athens had to cross, which meant the sow was not a local nuisance. She was a toll on the only road.

Where she came from depends on who is telling it. The older accounts make her one of the children of Typhon and Echidna, the serpent-woman and the storm-giant whose union produced the worst things in the Greek world. That would set her among terrible company: the hound Cerberus, the fire-breathing Chimera, the many-headed Hydra, the two-headed dog Orthrus, the riddling Sphinx, the dragon Ladon. Among siblings bred to guard the underworld and strangle cities, a giant pig sounds almost modest, until you remember what she did with her days. Strabo adds another thread and names her the mother of the Calydonian Boar, the beast that would one day lay waste to Aetolia, so that her ferocity ran on into the next generation.

Into this came Theseus, young and newly told who his father was, walking the land route from Troezen to Athens when he could have sailed in safety. He had chosen the road precisely because it was dangerous. By the time he reached Crommyon he had already broken the club-wielding Periphetes and the pine-bending Sinis. He did not have to fight the sow. He went looking for her. The writers who admired him said he wanted it understood that he did not only fight when forced, and that a brave man should seek out the nobler beasts rather than wait to be cornered by them.

What happened on the hillside the sources do not draw out. They give it to us in a single line, the way you might report a storm that has already passed: he killed the man-killing sow in the glens of Crommyon. The earliest mention, from the poet Bacchylides, is exactly that brief. There would have been noise, the squeal and the thunder of a heavy body through dry brush, and then there would have been none. Diodorus, counting it as the third of Theseus’ road-deeds, says only that the animal surpassed others in ferocity and size and had killed many people. After it was done, the farmers came back. Ovid, writing centuries later, lets that be the whole point: thanks to Theseus the fields of Crommyon could be turned again in safety, with no watch set on the ridge.

For all the terror she caused, no one ever wrote down what she looked like. The texts call her huge, fierce, hard to master, and leave it there. The painters filled the silence the writers left. On Athenian cups from the fifth century she appears as a heavy bristled boar, head low and braced, cornered against rock while Theseus lunges with a spear and the old woman Phaea hovers at the edge of the scene, sometimes holding a pitcher, watching her pet die. It is as close to a portrait as she has, a grey-flanked animal with the weight of a beast that has stopped being afraid of anything on two legs.

Not everyone believed in the pig. Plutarch passes on a sourer version in which Phaea was no animal at all but a woman, a robber of murderous and ungoverned temper who lived at Crommyon and was called the Sow for the foulness of her life and manners. In that telling Theseus killed a human bandit and the legend grew a snout afterward. The philosophers found her useful in another way. In one of Plato’s dialogues Socrates reaches for the Crommyonian sow as a test case, asking whether so wild a beast could properly be called courageous, which is a strange retirement for a creature that began by eating farmhands.

Her power was simple and complete. She was enormous, she was fast for her bulk, and she had lost the one thing that keeps most animals away from people, which is fear. A frightened boar runs. This one came toward you. That fearlessness was also the flaw that finished her. A creature that will not flee can be sought, found, and met head-on, and Theseus was a man who went out of his way to do exactly that. She had spent her life refusing to give ground. On the day it mattered, she held it, and a hero with a spear was waiting in the place she would not leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Crommyonian Sow?

The Crommyonian Sow was a giant, man-killing wild pig in Greek mythology that ravaged the countryside around the village of Crommyon, on the Isthmus between Megara and Corinth. It was famed for its enormous size and ferocity and for killing many people before the hero Theseus destroyed it.

Who killed the Crommyonian Sow?

The hero Theseus killed the Crommyonian Sow while travelling overland from Troezen to Athens to meet his father. According to Diodorus Siculus it was the third of the road-deeds he performed on that journey, and he deliberately went out of his way to hunt the beast rather than wait to be attacked.

Why is the Crommyonian Sow called Phaea?

The sow was called Phaea, meaning “grey” or “dusky,” after the old woman who raised and kept it. The name was used both for the keeper and for the beast itself, and some ancient writers used “Phaea” as the creature’s own name.

Were the Crommyonian Sow’s parents Typhon and Echidna?

According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, some said the Crommyonian Sow was the offspring of the monsters Typhon and Echidna, which would make it a sibling of Cerberus, the Chimera, and the Hydra. Strabo gives a different connection, naming the sow as the mother of the Calydonian Boar.

Was Phaea a real woman instead of a pig?

Plutarch records an alternate, rationalized version in which Phaea was not an animal but a brutal female robber who lived at Crommyon and was nicknamed “the Sow” because of her vicious life and manners. In that telling Theseus killed a human bandit, and the monstrous pig is a later embellishment of the story.

Related Entries

Theseus, Minotaur, Echidna, Typhon, Cerberus, Chimera, Hydra, Orthrus, Sphinx, Ladon