Atalanta and the Race

The race is a contract with a single term. A suitor who ran faster than Atalanta won her, and a suitor she overtook lost his life. Apollodorus tells it in a few lines. When her father tried to persuade her to marry, she went to a place that could serve as a racecourse and planted a stake three cubits high in the middle of it. She made the wooers race before her from that stake, and she ran behind them in arms. A wooer who was caught up was killed on the spot. One who was not caught up got marriage.

Ovid explains why she set the terms. In his Metamorphoses she once asked an oracle about marriage, and the god told her she would never need a husband, that a husband would be her harm, and that while still living she would lose herself. Frightened, she lived unwed in the shaded woods and drove off the crowd of suitors by making them race.

Ovid is blunt about the result. She was pitiless, he says, yet her beauty was so powerful that a rash crowd of men accepted the terms. The two ancient tellings picture the start differently. In Apollodorus the suitors run ahead of her and she pursues with a weapon. In Ovid the runners crouch at the trumpet and both spring away, and no weapon is mentioned.

Hippomenes comes to the racecourse as a spectator. Ovid says he sat down to watch a cruel contest and asked why anyone would seek a wife at such risk. Then he saw her stripped for running, and he apologised aloud to the men he had blamed. Ovid lets her ribbons, her streaming hair and the pink flush on her skin do the work of persuading him. She won the race he watched, was crowned with a festal wreath, and the beaten suitors paid the penalty they had agreed to.

Hippomenes was not deterred. He stood in the middle of the crowd and challenged her. His father was Megareus of Onchestus, he said, and Neptune was Megareus's grandfather, so he was a great-grandson of the king of the waters. If he lost, she would at least be beaten by a man of name. If he won, she would have the fame of being the only woman to lose to him.

Atalanta hesitates, and Ovid gives her a speech. She wonders which god envies this handsome youth enough to send him to his death. She tells herself that it is his age that moves her, and his fearless spirit, more than his looks. She tells him to leave while he can, then wishes he might prove the faster runner. Ovid says she was untouched by desire until then, and that she loves without knowing she is in love.

The story reaches us through Venus. In Ovid she tells it to Adonis as a warning, and she stops to complain in her own voice. The crowd and her father demand the usual race, and Hippomenes prays to her: be near, and smile on the love you have inspired. She says the prayer moved her.

Her help is a tree. In Ovid's Venus, there is a field on Cyprus that the islanders call Tamasus, the best land on the island, which old men once consecrated to her. A tree in its middle shines with gold leaves and crackling gold branches. She was coming from there with three apples she had picked, and she went to Hippomenes, visible to no one else, and taught him how to use them.

The apples change the race. Hippomenes runs and the crowd shouts him on. Ovid says Atalanta often slowed when she could have passed him, and left his face reluctantly. When he tires, with the goal still far off, he throws the first apple. She is amazed, turns out of her course and picks up the rolling gold. He passes her. She makes up the lost time and passes him again.

The second apple works the same way. She is delayed, then catches him and overtakes him. Only the last stretch remains when he calls on the goddess and throws the third apple, in Ovid's words, from the side and at an angle, so that she would have to run wide to fetch it. She seems to hesitate. Venus says she forced her to pick it up, and made the apple heavy, so the girl was held back by its weight as well as by the delay. Venus does not linger over the finish. The girl was beaten, and Hippomenes led away his prize.

Apollodorus keeps only the outline. Melanion, a son of Amphidamas, ran for love of her carrying golden apples from Aphrodite. While she chased him he threw them down, she picked up the fruit, and she lost the race. So Melanion married her. He gives no count of apples and no wayside speeches, and Aphrodite does not appear as a speaker.

The marriage does not last. In Apollodorus, once out hunting, the pair entered a precinct of Zeus, took their fill of love there and were changed into lions. He says no more about why.

Ovid supplies a reason. Hippomenes never thanked Venus or burned incense to her. She turned her anger on them and decided to make an example of them. On a long journey they passed a temple hidden in the woods, which Echion had built to the Mother of the gods in fulfilment of a vow. Venus filled Hippomenes with a sudden desire. Near the temple was a cave of pumice where a priest had stored wooden images of old gods, and the two lovers went in and profaned it. The images turned their eyes away.

The tower-crowned Mother, Cybele, first thought of sinking the guilty pair in the Stygian water, then judged that too light. Their necks grew tawny manes, their fingers curved into claws, and they swept the ground with tails. They growled instead of speaking and lived in the woods. Ovid ends with them as lions, fierce to every creature except Cybele, whose harness has tamed their jaws. Venus then warns Adonis to avoid any wild beast that offers its chest to a hunter rather than its back.