Actaeon

Actaeon, sculpture group in the cascade at Caserta

In Greek mythology, Actaeon (pronounced /ækˈtiən/) (Greek: Ακταίων), son of the priestly herdsman Aristaeus and Autonoe in Boeotia, was a famous Theban hero,^[1] trained by the centaur Cheiron,^[2] who suffered the fatal wrath of Artemis; (later his myth was attached to her Roman counterpart Diana). The surviving details of his transgression vary: "the only certainty is in what Aktaion suffered, his πάθος, and what Artemis did: the hunter became the hunted; he was transformed into a stag, and his raging hounds, struck with a 'wolf's frenzy' (λύσσα), tore him apart as they would a stag."^[3] This is the iconic motif by which Actaeon is recognized, both in ancient art and in Renaissance and post-Renaissance depictions.

The plot

Among others, John Heath has observed, "The unalterable kernel of the tale was a hunter's transformation into a deer and his death in the jaws of his hunting dogs. But authors were free to suggest different motives for his death."^[4] In the version that was offered by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus (Hymn v), which has become the standard setting, Artemis was bathing in the woods^[5] when the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked. He stopped and stared, amazed at her ravishing beauty. Once seen, Actaeon was punished by Artemis: she forbade him speech — if he tried to speak, he would be changed into a stag — for the unlucky profanation of her virginity's mystery. Upon hearing the call of his hunting party, he cried out to them and immediately was changed into a stag. His own hounds then turned upon him and tore him to pieces, not recognizing him. An element of the earlier myth made Actaeon the familiar hunting companion of Artemis, no stranger. In an embroidered extension of the myth, the hounds were so upset with their master's death, that Chiron made a statue so lifelike that the hounds thought it was Actaeon.^[6]

Actaeon Surprising Diana (Artemis) in the bath, Titian, 1556-59, for Philip II (National Gallery of Scotland).

There are various other versions: Bibliotheke states that his offense was that he was a rival of Zeus for Semele, his mother's sister,^[7] whereas in Euripides' Bacchae he has boasted that he is a better hunter than Artemis:^[8]

Further materials, including fragments that belong with the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and at least four Attic tragedies, including a Toxotides of Aeschylus, have been lost.^[9] Diodorus Siculus (4.81.4), in a variant of Actaeon's hubris that has been largely ignored, has it that Actaeon wanted to marry Artemis. Other authors say the hounds were Artemis' own; some lost elaborations of the myth seem to have given them all names and narrated their wanderings after his loss.

In François Clouet's Bath of Diana (1558-59) Actaeon's passing on horseback at left and mauling as a stag at right is incidental to the three female nudes.

According to the Latin version of the story told by the Roman Ovid^[10] having accidentally seen Diana (Artemis) on Mount Cithaeron while she was bathing, he was changed by her into a stag, and pursued and killed by his fifty hounds. This version also appears in Callimachus' Fifth Hymn, as a mythical parallel to the blinding of Tiresias after he sees Athena bathing. The literary testimony of Actaeon's myth is largely lost, but Lamar Ronald Lacy,^[11] deconstructing the myth elements in what survives and supplementing it by iconographic evidence in late vase-painting, made a plausible reconstruction of an ancient Actaeon myth that Greek poets may have inherited and subjected to expansion and dismemberment. His reconstruction opposes a too-pat consensus that has an archaic Actaeon aspiring to Semele,^[12] a classical Actaeon boasting of his hunting prowess and a Hellenistic Actaeon glimpsing Artemis' bath.^[13] Lacy identifies the site of Actaeon's transgression as a spring sacred to Artemis at Plataea where Actaeon was a hero archegetes ("hero-founder")^[14] The righteous hunter, the companion of Artemis, seeing her bathing naked at the spring, was moved to try to make himself her consort, as Diodorus Siculus noted, and was punished, in part for transgressing the hunter's "ritually enforced deference to Artemis" (Lacy 1990:42).

The "bed of Actaeon"

In the second century CE, the traveller Pausanias was shown a spring on the road in Attica leading to Plataea from Eleutherae, just beyond Megara "and a little farther on a rock. It is called the bed of Actaeon, for it is said that he slept thereon when weary with hunting, and that into this spring he looked while Artemis was bathing in it.^[15]

Actaeon by Titian

Parallels in Akkadian and Ugarit poems

In the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (tablet vi) there is a parallel, in the series of examples Gilgamesh gives Ishtar of her mistreatment of her serial lovers:

You loved the herdsman, shepherd and chief shepherd
Who was always heaping up the glowing ashes for you,
And cooked ewe-lambs for you every day.
But you hit him and turned him into a wolf,
His own herd-boys hunt him down
And his dogs tear at his haunches.^[16]

Actaeon, torn apart by dogs incited by Artemis, finds another Near Eastern parallel in the Ugaritic hero Aqht, torn apart by eagles incited by Anath who wanted his huntings bow.^[17]

The virginal Artemis of classical times is not directly comparable to Ishtar of the many lovers, but the mytheme of Artemis shooting Orion, was linked to her punishment of Actaeon by T.C.W. Stinton;^[18] the Greek context of the mortal's reproach to the amorous goddess is translated to the episode of Anchises and Aphrodite.^[19] Daphnis too was a herdsman loved by a goddess and punished by her: see Theocritus' First Idyll.^[20]

Actaeon in art

• Aeschylus and other tragic poets made use of the story, which was a favourite subject in ancient works of art.
• There is a well-known small marble group in the British Museum illustrative of the story, in gallery 83/84.^[21]
• Two paintings by the 16th century painter Titian (right; and Diana and Actaeon).
• Actéon, an operatic pastorale by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
• the aria "Oft she visits this lone mountain" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, first performed in 1689 or earlier.
• Giordano Bruno, "Gli Eroici Furori".
• In canto V of G. B Marino's poem "Adone" the protagonist goes to theater to see a tragedy representing Actaeon's myth. This episode is relevant because it is a foreshadowing of the protagonist's violent death at the end of the book.
• A composition for Brass Band by Gareth Wood and premiered by Cory Band at the Royal Northern College of Music Festival of Brass 2008
• Actaeon's Fall (Against The Hounds), the opening track in the 2009 album Luminous Night by Six Organs of Admittance

Notes

Sources

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• The Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. "Actaeon".
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.138ff.
• Euripides, Bacchae, 337–340.
• Diodorus Siculus, 4.81.4.
• Lamar Ronald Lacy, "Aktaion and a Lost 'Bath of Artemis'" The Journal of Hellenic Studies 110 (1990), pp. 26–42.

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