Actaeon

Actaeon was born inside the royal house of Thebes. His mother, Autonoe, was a daughter of Cadmus, the founder of the city, and of Harmonia; his father, Aristaeus, was a son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, and was credited with teaching men beekeeping, the curdling of cheese and the care of the olive. Through that line Actaeon was a great-grandson of Apollo and a nephew of Semele, the mother of Dionysus, and that matters more than it seems: all four daughters of Cadmus ended marked by a disaster, and hers was to lose this son.

Apollodorus says he was reared by the centaur Chiron, the same who trained Achilles, Jason and Asclepius, and that Chiron made a hunter of him. This is not genealogical decoration: the whole story depends on Actaeon being very good at his trade, because what destroys him is precisely that trade. He hunted on Cithaeron, the wooded mountain that divides Boeotia from Attica, with a pack the sources put at fifty hounds, every one of which he knew by name.

The version everyone knows is Ovid's (Metamorphoses III). At midday, the hunt over, Actaeon dismisses his companions and wanders aimlessly into a valley called Gargaphie; he comes upon a grotto with a spring where Artemis is bathing among her nymphs. The goddess does not shoot: her bow is out of reach, so she throws water in his face and tells him to go and say, if he can, that he has seen her naked. Then the antlers sprout, the neck lengthens, the ears sharpen and the hands turn into hooves. Only the mind stays what it was, and that is the exact cruelty of the punishment.

Pausanias places the scene elsewhere. On the road from Megara to Plataea, at the foot of Cithaeron, they used to point out a spring and, a little further on, a rock they called Actaeon's bed, because the hunter would sleep there when he came back exhausted; and it was into that spring that he had looked while the goddess was bathing.

What follows is told the same way by everyone. The hounds start him like game, and Actaeon cannot call them because no voice comes out. Apollodorus puts the number at fifty. Ovid names more than thirty of them one by one, and Hyginus gives an even longer list in his Fabulae. That insistence on names is not ornament: it turns the episode into a hunt in reverse, with the master in the part of the quarry and every hound identified as in a catalogue of warriors.

The question antiquity never settled is what exactly Actaeon did. Four incompatible answers circulated, and none prevailed.

The first is Ovid's: he did nothing. The poet says so outright as the episode opens, that this was the fault of fortune and no crime, since there is no guilt in taking the wrong path. The second is Euripides', in the Bacchae, where Cadmus reminds Pentheus how his cousin ended: the hounds he had reared himself tore him apart because he had boasted of hunting better than Artemis. The third is preserved by Apollodorus citing Acusilaus: the offended party was not the goddess but Zeus, angry because Actaeon was courting Semele, his own aunt, whom the god wanted for himself. And the fourth is that of Stesichorus of Himera, quoted by Pausanias: there was no metamorphosis at all, the goddess simply threw a deerskin over him so that the hounds would mistake him and kill him.

Pausanias himself adds the coldest reading of the lot. Without any god involved, he says, Actaeon's hounds had gone rabid, and in that state they would tear apart anyone they met. It is the scepticism of a second-century traveller faced with a myth a thousand years old, and it is worth recording, because it is part of what antiquity thought about itself.

Actaeon was not merely a character in a story: he had a tomb, a cult and a date in the calendar. Pausanias tells it in his ninth book. A spectre carrying a rock was ravaging the territory of Orchomenus in Boeotia, and the Orchomenians consulted the oracle at Delphi. The god ordered them to find Actaeon's remains and bury them, and further to make a bronze likeness of the ghost and fasten it to the rock with iron. Pausanias states that he saw that image, still chained, centuries later. And he adds the detail that changes the man's standing: the Orchomenians sacrificed to him every year as to a hero.

Chaining down the effigy of a dead man is not a metaphor or a picturesque anecdote: it is a procedure. It says, better than any moral, what Actaeon was to those who lived at the foot of Cithaeron; not a moral example, but a restless and dangerous dead man who had to be kept still and kept content.

And there is another image of him, earlier and of the opposite sign. Apollodorus relates that the hounds, after devouring him, searched the mountain for him howling until they reached Chiron's cave, and that the centaur modelled a figure of Actaeon to soothe their grief. Two statues, then: one made to console those who killed him, the other to stop him coming back.

In Rome the episode is told under another name: the bathing goddess is Diana, and the man who fixes it for good is Ovid, who writes a Greek myth in Latin and gives it the shape in which the West has read it ever since. But the Roman version did not live in books alone. The scene became a stock motif of wall painting, so much so that in Pompeii the house we now call the House of Sallust was excavated under the name House of Actaeon, after the painting of Diana bathing and the hunter torn apart that decorated one of its courts. That picture has not come down to us: the part of the house where it stood was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943.

The sarcophagi come from the same repertoire. The Louvre holds one of about 125 to 130 of our era with the whole cycle, and on it Actaeon appears with a man's body and antlers on his head. The reason is practical: a whole stag would be unrecognisable, and the viewer has to know who is being devoured. That solution came from Greek art, which was already showing him so in the fifth century before our era, for instance on a metope of temple E at Selinunte, where the goddess stands by while the hounds fall on him.

And the fact that the scene ended up on the lid of a coffin says something no moral says: the death of a young man who had done nothing served to speak about the dead man lying inside.