More about Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar

Contributor

Meet Atalanta: boar-conqueror, Argonaut, and all around feminist icon of the thousands BCE.

Did we mention she was weaned by a bear?

It wasn’t Rubens’ first time painting this worthy hero. Other depictions are featured in the Met and the Getty Center, but Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar features Atalanta in her most glorious moment. On a good day, slaughtering a boar on the hunt is probably a confidence booster. But how does it feel to bring down a divine wild beast topless, armed with one quiver of arrows? Free-the-nipple is indeed a tempting movement, but our heroine could use some body armor.

This hellish boar was sent to Calydon by the goddess Diana, who was enraged by a local king’s disrespect. You might know the capricious immortal from Jacques-Louis David’s work, in which she joins her vengeful twin to massacre an entire family. King Oeneus’ suffering was equally severe. The Calydonian boar wasn’t your average barnyard porker, destroying the king’s lands and mauling his subjects. Atalanta ignored male hunters’ complaints that she was offensively female and joined in the search to slay the beast.

Atalanta’s arrow was the first to hit its mark, allowing Meleager to finish the boar off. Meleager was entranced by the huntress, no doubt inspired by their shared love of carnage. When his uncles suggested that they deserved the spoils of the hunt, an honor previously bestowed on Atalanta, Meleager murdered them. His distraught mother, in turn, cursed her son to a painful death.

Atalanta’s talents went beyond the bloody. After Meleager’s grisly demise, the huntress promised to wed the first man to beat her in a footrace. Not one to squander an opportunity for bloodshed, Atalanta slaughtered the losing suitors. Hippomenes avoided being skewered by the object of his affections, slowing her down with a handful of god-given golden apples.

No mythological love story is complete without a heart wrenching ending. Hercules, cursed by the ever-spiteful Hera, was driven to a frenzy and killed his family. Eos was granted her greatest wish— immortality for her mortal lover, Tithonus— only to watch him waste away into an ever-aging cricket with a death wish. Hippomenes and Atalanta were no exception. The eager newlyweds had some R-rated fun in a shrine, a slight that would not go unnoticed by the gods. The ill-fated pair were transformed into lions, an especially sadistic punishment considering the widely-held belief that lions could solely couple with leopards, not with each other. Next time you complain about your SO, imagine making that relationship work as an eternally sexually frustrated feline.

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