Actaeon

Actaeon belongs to the generation of Cadmus's grandsons. Apollodorus's Library says he was the son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, and Euripides's Bacchae names the same parents. Autonoe was a daughter of Cadmus, and Ovid's Metamorphoses opens the story by calling Actaeon the first grandson to bring sorrow on Cadmus's good fortune. His cousins were Pentheus, son of Agave, and Dionysus, son of Semele. Apollodorus adds that the centaur Chiron raised him to be a hunter.

Ovid's Metamorphoses gives the fullest account. At noon, after a morning's hunting, Actaeon tells his companions to take down the nets and rest. Nearby lies Gargaphia, a valley sacred to Diana, the Roman name for Artemis. In a grotto there she bathes with her nymphs. Actaeon wanders in by chance, uncertain of his way. The nymphs shriek and crowd round to hide her, but she stands taller than all of them. Wishing for her arrows, she throws water in his face instead. Go and tell it, she says, if you can, that you saw me unclothed. Then she gives him a stag's horns, a long neck, long legs and a dappled hide.

Only his understanding stays as it was. Ovid says Actaeon sees his horns reflected in a stream and tries to cry out, but he can only groan. He cannot choose between the palace and the woods. Fear keeps him from one, and shame from the other. Then his hounds find him, and Ovid names more than thirty of them. Actaeon wants to shout that he is their master, but no words come. His companions urge the pack on and call for Actaeon, complaining that he is missing the sport. The dogs tear him apart. Ovid says the goddess's anger was satisfied only when he died.

Ovid then reports how people judged it. Some thought the goddess too harsh, while others praised her chastity. Only Juno kept silent. She rejoiced at every blow to the house of Cadmus, because her anger fell on all of Europa's kin. Her next target, in Ovid, is Semele. When Pentheus is later attacked by the maenads in Ovid's version, he begs his aunt Autonoe to spare him for the sake of Actaeon's ghost. She tears off his right arm.

Other writers give Actaeon a different offence. Apollodorus's Library records two causes. Acusilaus said Zeus was angry because Actaeon wooed Semele. The more general opinion, Apollodorus says, was that he saw Artemis bathing. Pausanias says Stesichorus of Himera also told the Semele version. In it the goddess threw a deer-skin around Actaeon so that his hounds would kill him, to stop him marrying Semele. In Euripides's Bacchae, Cadmus warns Pentheus with Actaeon's fate. He was torn apart in the meadows, Cadmus says, for boasting that he hunted better than Artemis. Diodorus Siculus names two causes. Some said Actaeon tried to consummate a marriage with Artemis at her temple, others that he claimed greater skill as a hunter. Diodorus thought either would justify her anger.

Apollodorus says the goddess drove mad Actaeon's fifty dogs, which devoured him without knowing him. Afterwards they searched for their master, howling, until they came to Chiron's cave. The centaur made an image of Actaeon, and it soothed their grief. Pausanias saw a spring and a rock on the road from Megara to Plataea. The rock was called the bed of Actaeon, where he was said to have slept when tired from hunting, and into this spring he looked while Artemis bathed. Pausanias himself thought the hounds went mad without any god's help.

At Delphi, Pausanias describes the underworld painted by Polygnotus in the Lesche of the Cnidians. Actaeon sits there with his mother on a deer's skin, holding a young deer, with a hunting dog stretched out beside them. Pausanias reads the details as allusions to his way of life and his death. Callimachus's fifth Hymn, on the bath of Pallas, sets Actaeon beside Tiresias. After Tiresias loses his sight for seeing Athena bathe, the goddess comforts his mother: one day Autonoe will pray to have her son back merely blind. Actaeon, a hunting companion of Artemis, will see the goddess bathing against his will. His own dogs will devour him, and his mother will gather his bones from the thickets.