Many Greek heroes were the mongrel offspring of humans, minor deities, demigods and even full Olympians. Some were born to prophetic curses that caused them to be outcast and raised by foster parents or even foster animals. A great many others would find their divine lineage a curse. Their heroism, perhaps, derived from their ability to bring their mix of the human and the divine to bear against the grinding pressures of fate. Well of course it did. That’s where all heroism comes from. I use the word ‘hero’ shorn of gender. Hero was a reasonably common female first name in the ancient worldfn1 and I hope we can agree that a division into heroes and heroines would be clumsy and unnecessary.
The great hero Atalanta had a most royal pedigree: her mother was CLYMENE of the royal Minyad clanfn2 and her father, depending on whether you believe Ovid or Apollodorus as a source, was called either IASUS or SCHOENEUSfn3. Whatever his name, he was an Arcadian king and the kind of ruler who had no use for female offspring. When his firstborn by Clymene proved to be a girl, he had the child taken from the palace and exposed on a mountainside to die. He was neither the first nor the last royal father to consign an infant to such a fate, as we shall see.
The baby was abondoned in a high cranny on Mount Parthenion where she would soon surely die. Indeed, only half an hour after the palace guard laid her down a bear, attracted by the cries or perhaps the unfamiliar human scent, lumbered up to investigate. As luck would have it – or MOROS, the deep fate that determines all – this was a she-bear, a she-bear, moreover, who had lost her newborn cub to wolves not twenty-four hours earlier. A maternal instinct still drove the bear, and instead of eating the infant she suckled her.
And so the human baby girl grew to be a shy, wild and swift forest creature. Whether she thought herself a bear or knew her difference at first we cannot know. She might have remained one of those legendary wild children of the woods adopted by animals and unsocialised by her own species – an ancient Greek Kaspar Hauser or Victor of Aveyron, a female Tarzan or Mowgli – were it not that, one day, she was seen and taken by a group of hunters. Luckily for her, they were well-disposed and kindly. They named her Atalantafn4 and taught her the secrets of trapping and killing, of shooting with arrows, spears and slings, coursing, hunting, tracking and all the arts of venery and the chase. She quickly equalled and surpassed their skill, combining as she did human subtlety with the ferocity and speed of the bear that brought her up. Her supreme swiftness and unmatched ability as a huntress made Atalanta a natural devotee of the goddess of Chastity and the Chase, Artemis, to whom she committed herself, heart and soul.
One day she found herself cornered by two centaurs, the half-human, half-horse hybrids famed for the accuracy and the speed of draw of their archery. Atalanta loosed two arrows that found their mark before either centaur had managed even to raise his bow. Her reputation spread and soon everyone in the Mediterranean world had heard stories of the beautiful girl, dedicated to Artemis, who ran faster and shot straighter than any man.
And when Artemis cursed a neighbouring kingdom with a monstrous boar that ravaged the people and their crops and livestock, it was to be Atalanta, the goddess’s most faithful servant and adherent, who would lift that curse.
Somehow the citizenry and rulers of the city state of Calydon, part of the kingdom of Aetolia, now called Thessaly, had become lax in their devotions to the goddess Artemis. This was still a time when it was foolish to neglect any jealous deity, least of all the chaste huntress of the moon. As punishment for so insulting a slight to her honour and dignity, Artemis sent to Calydon a monstrous boarfn5 with razor-sharp tusks the size of tree branches and an insatiable appetite for goats, sheep, cows, horses and infant humans. It trampled down the crops, ravaged the vineyards and barns and, like Robert Browning’s rats in Hamelin, bit the babies in their cradles and drank the soup from the cooks’ own ladles. And much worse. The people in the countryside fled in terror to within the city walls and soon famine threatened.
Oeneus, the King of Calydon – in his excessive worship of Dionysusfn6 over the other Olympians – had been the one most directly responsible for Artemis’s wrath, and so he took it upon himself to be the one to devise the means to rid the land of the rampaging boar. He sent out word out to all Greece and Asia Minor.
‘The Calydonian Hunt will gather in one month. Let only the bravest and best hunters come forward. The reward for whosoever makes the killing thrust will be the right to keep the trophies of the chase: the beast’s tusks and pelt. But, more importantly, eternal glory and honour in the annals of history will be theirs as the conqueror of the Calydonian Boar and as the greatest hero of the age.’
Many of those who answered Oeneus’s call were former Argonauts – including Jason himselffn7 – bored by the return to the placid dullness of domestic life after the camaraderie and excitement of the quest for the Golden Fleece. The band of hunters would be led by Oeneus’s son Prince Meleager, himself a distinguished member of the Argo’s crew.
Though he did not know it, Meleager lived under a strange curse, and it is worth going back to the time of his birth to hear about it. I have said that Meleager was the son of Oeneus, but it seems likely that Ares, the god of war, had some part in his paternity too. As we have already heard, this is a feature of the heroes of the age. It is certain, though, that his mother was Oeneus’s queen ALTHAEA, who came from a most distinguished royal line herself, sometimes known, on account of its patriarch THESTIOS, as the THESTIADES. She had four brothers, an obscure sister called HYPERMNESTRA, whose name surely is due for a revival,fn8 and another called Leda, whose experience with Zeus in the form of a swan was to inspire many artists in ages yet unborn. Her story is for another time. Our attention for now is on Althaea, who lay with Oeneus (or possibly Ares) and nine months later gave birth to a boy, Meleager.
It was a difficult labour and the effort sent Althaea into a deep sleep. The baby lay babbling in its cot before the fire. The mother slept on.
Into this peaceful scene crept the three Fates, the Moirai. This baby, who could well be a son of Ares, might have an important future and it was for the Fates to tell it in their usual manner.
Clotho spun the thread of Meleager’s life and declared the boy would be noble. Lachesis measured it by drawing it out from Clotho’s spindle. She foretold that Meleager would be accounted brave by all who knew him. Atropos snipped the length of the yarn and announced that for all her sisters’ prognostications she knew that the child would only live as long as the central log in the fireplace remained unconsumed by fire.
‘What can you mean?’ asked Lachesis and Clotho.
‘When that log burns up and is no more,’ said Atropos, ‘so will Meleager, son of Ares, Oeneus and Althaea, be no more!’
All three gave a cackle of delight and vanished into the night air chanting:
Meleager’s life will end in a flash
When his log of fate is turned to ash
Althaea opened her eyes wide. Could she really have heard that right, or was it some mad dream? She got out of bed and went to the fire. There was indeed a great log in the centre of the hearth. Flames were flickering around it, but it had not yet fully caught light. In her fevered imagination it resembled, in size and form, a newborn baby. Her own infant Meleager! She pulled the log out and dropped it hastily into a copper vat of water that stood warming by the fire. The flames went out with a sizzle. The baby gurgled happily in its cradle.
What should she do now? She wrapped the log in a swaddling blanket and hurried down to one of the unvisited and unused basement rooms in the palace, a room with an earthen floor where she could bury the log deep. Her son might have died in five minutes if she had done nothing. Now he might live for eternity!
So we have a picture of the Calydonian palace of King Oeneus and Queen Althaea, outside the walls of which rampages a marauding boar. Their heir, the tall, strong, noble and brave Prince Meleager – now fully grown – lives with them, of course, as do his six sisters – GORGE, MELANIPPE, EURYMEDE, Deianirafn9, MOTHONE and PERIMEDE – and his uncles, Althaea’s four brothers, the Thestiades – TOXEUS, EVIPPUS, PLEXIPPUS and EURYPYLUS. The Thestiades are fine huntsmen, but fully aware that in order to corner and catch a prey as huge and monstrous as the Calydonian Boar they will need every member of the great hunting party that has answered Oeneus’s summons.
But – what can this be? – the uncles burst out laughing when a tall woman, dressed in animal skins, a hunting bow over her shoulder and hounds at her feet, enters the palace and hurls a spear into the wall to stake her claim to join the hunting party.
Meleager has taken one look at this slim, fierce, tanned, toned and beautiful girl and fallen instantly in love.fn10
‘If she wants to join us, I have no objection.’
Meleager’s uncles hoot with derision.
‘Girls can’t throw,’ jeers Toxeus.
‘Girls can’t run in a straight line without bumping into trees or tripping over,’ snorts Evippus.
‘Girls can’t shoot arrows without the bowstring snapping back and stinging them in the face,’ smirks Plexippus.
‘Girls don’t have the stomach to kill,’ sneers Eurypylus.
‘Let us see,’ says Atalanta, and at the sound of her dark, throbbing, yet commanding voice Meleager falls even more deeply in love.
She has gone to the window. ‘Those three trees. Which of us can put an arrow in each trunk first?’
The uncles join her at the window and follow her gaze to a distant line of three aspens, shaking in the breeze.
‘You may give the signal,’ Atalanta tells Meleager.
Meleager raises an arm and drops it. ‘Fire at will!’ he cries.
The Thestiades scramble to pluck arrows from their quivers and draw back their bows but –
‘Wheep, wheep, wheep!’
Three arrows fly in an instant from Atalanta’s bow and now she is standing with her back to the window, her arms folded and a mocking smile playing on her face. Meleager and the uncles look over her shoulder and towards the trees. In each of the aspen trunks is embedded an arrow, perfectly centred.
In his hectic rush to draw at speed, Plexippus has fumbled his bow, which falls with a clatter to the floor. He does not take kindly to being made to look like a clumsy child.
‘Ah, but strength,’ he growls. ‘I’ll grant you may have a reasonable eye and quick hands, but this boar is fierce and strong. A mere woman could never hope –’
No one will ever discover what he is going to say next. Speech and breath are robbed of him as he finds himself quite unexpectedly lifted off his feet. Atalanta has picked him up and raised him above her head as if he were no heavier than a kitten.
‘Where shall I throw him?’ she enquires of the others. ‘Out of the window or into the fire?’
Hastily they concede her right to join them in the hunt. But there is now disgruntlement in the ranks of the hunting party. The proud brothers cannot know, as we do, that Artemis not only sent the boar to Calydon, but also sent her most fanatical votary, Atalanta, to represent her in the hunt. Artemis intends, through Atalanta, to sow as much mischief in the ranks of the hunters as she can. How much Atalanta is a knowing proxy for the goddess and how much an unconscious vessel for her will has never quite been decided.
The smitten Meleager got nowhere with this wonderful girl who was, in the words of Edith Hamilton, ‘too boyish to be a maiden, too maidenly to be a boy.’ As a devoted follower of Artemis, Atalanta had, as a matter of course, turned her back on men and on love. Nonetheless, she welcomed Meleager as a companion, and for a young man so deeply in love, the thrilling propinquity of the beautiful huntress was better than nothing.
The classical sources name at least fifty members of the hunting party that gathers around Meleager and the four Thestiades. As with the manifest of the Argo there is much confusion and inconsistency in the sources and perhaps a deal of wishful thinking on the part of later grand Greek families who wanted to claim descent from these heroes.
Aside from Jason, the throng of former Argonauts present at the hunt includes Meleager’s cousins, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux; bold Pirithous, King of the Lapiths; wise Nestor of Pylos and the indefatigable brothers Peleus and Telamon; hospitable Admetus, the friend of Heracles and sometime lover of Apollo; and Asclepius, unrivalled master of the medical arts. Even the great Theseus is there, drawn as much by his bond with Pirithous as by the addiction to extreme peril that unites them all. Such a muster of heroes will not be seen in the world again until the Trojan War.
They are all men, save for Atalanta.
Oeneus held nine nights of feasting and revelry to welcome and thank the brave heroes, huntsmen and warriors who had answered his call. On the morning of the tenth day they gathered outside the palace, hounds streaming at their feet, pages buckling armour, grooms tightening girths, stewards offering up cups of hot wine. The cheers of the citizens safe within the walls of Calydon grew to a great roar of gratitude, encouragement, admiration and pride as the party made its way out through the main gate. Carts loaded with spare javelins, axes, maces and arrows brought up the rear of the train as it headed into the deserted and despoiled countryside.
No boar this gigantic had ever been seen or even rumoured of, let alone tracked down and killed. As the hunting party proceeded they witnessed ever fouler scenes of horror. Every field of corn was trampled, every vineyard uprooted, every chicken, cat, dog, calf, goat and sheep lay with its throat torn open and innards exposed to the sun – whether the poor creatures had been massacred for food or fun, the shocked huntsmen did not know. A hundred wild boars of natural size could never have created such destruction.
Meleager and his uncles had formed a plan. Some miles to the north there stood a ruined barn. If the party were to spread themselves into a line, shouting, stamping their feet and shaking burning torches, they could slowly funnel the boar in that direction and use nets, fire and clamour finally to trap it in the angle of the two remaining walls of the barn. That would be their killing ground.
‘It will be like a stage and the pig will be our doomed hero,’ said Meleager.
The uncles and senior huntsmen nodded their assent.
It took all morning and much of the afternoon to encircle the boar and flush it from cover. They made as much noise as they could – a great hullaballoo and smashing of spears onto shields – but no one there felt that the boar, forced though it was in the direction of the barn, was in any way frightened. From time to time it would turn, break cover and charge at one part of the line, scaring everyone in it half to death, and then canter back towards the barn, tusks down, squealing out what seemed like a laugh of triumph and derision.
‘Whenever it does that, it is vital that the line holds!’ commanded Oeneus.
‘Simple for him to say, up on a horse and well behind the line,’ Atalanta said to herself. She watched with disdain as the king swigged from a horn of wine. Meleager, by her side, seemed to guess what she was thinking.
‘The old man is no warrior, but he is a fine administrator,’ he said. ‘He has brought this region peace and prosperity.’
‘Until he forgot the great goddess Artemis,’ said Atalanta.
‘Well, yes … Look, up ahead! It’s working, the plan is working!’
Sure enough, the boar seemed to be edging in fits and starts slowly backwards towards the ruined barn. They could hear its trotters scrape and slide as they met the stone flags of its floor. The front row of hounds, growing in confidence, thrust their snarling heads at it, teeth bared and slavering. It was a sound and sight to put the fear of Hades into anyone, but in the boar it seemed merely to awaken it to its situation. With sudden and unimagined speed it rushed forward with its head down. It jerked up under the jaw of the lead hound and its left tusk went straight through the throat and out of the dog’s skull.
Down went the boar’s head again. And up, ripping open the sides of the second hound.
The third, fourth and all the other hounds in the pack needed no further invitation to set up a great howl of fright and flee in panic to hide, quivering, between the legs of their masters.
The hunters now braced themselves to face the boar. Flesh and fur hung from the points of the boar’s tusks and blood soaked its bristles. Its eyes, everyone swore afterwards, burned like bright coals. The fierce orange and red light of them was trained in turn on every man, and the one woman, who crowded in on it.
‘Now, now is the time!’ cried Meleager, throwing a hunting net over the boar.
It was half enmeshed but angered enough to roll over and thrash its feet and jerk its head to free itself. This was the first time it had shown any vulnerability and the sight pricked the courage of the hunters. With great whoops and hollers, one hero after another hurled himself with axe, sword, spear and dagger at the enraged beast. Its instinct was to gore at groin and belly. Gonads and guts were torn open to the air. Blood was everywhere. Piteous were the screams of the brave heroes who threw themselves to their deaths.
None were more fearless than PELAGON, HYLEUS, HIPPASUS and ENAESIMUS, the first to engage and be instantly ripped to pieces for their troubles. Peleus flung a javelin from his cover in a thicket only for it to find and fatally wound EURYTION, King of Phthia, one of the most loyal of the Argonauts.
It was, in both the literal as well as the more common sense, a shambles.
Already disheartened by the sight of so many good men killed, the huntsmen saw the accidental death of Eurytion as an ill omen and began to think of turning tail. The boar, sensing victory, raised its head, sniffed the air and charged at Nestor, King of Pylos, who even in his middle age was reputed to be the wisest man in the known world. Certainly he was wise enough to know that wailing and screaming would achieve nothing and so he stood still and raised his eyes to the heavens.
Atalanta stepped forward from behind him and called out, ‘Drop down, Nestor! Down – now!’
Nestor threw himself to the ground at the same time as an arrow flew from Atalanta’s bow, passed through the place where Nestor’s heart had been but a moment earlier, and pierced the throat of the charging boar.
ALCON, a hot-headed son of both King Hippocoön of Amykles and Ares, the god of war, rose to his feet and waved his spear. Facing his comrades he yelled, ‘For shame, brothers. This is no work for a woman. Let’s show the world what a man can do!’ He turned back in time to see the boar, Atalanta’s arrow dangling from its neck, lowering its head for a charge. By the time Alcon had set his spear, the beast was on him. Both tusks entered his stomach. Now the boar raised its head and performed a kind of gruesome dance, pulling Alcon round and round, the tusks tearing open more and more of his guts until all the poor young man’s bowels and innards had fallen out to make a red and slimy circle on the stone floor of the barn.
Only Meleager stood firm as the monstrous animal tossed Alcon’s corpse from its tusks and scraped at the ground ready for another charge. As the boar hurtled forward, Meleager slid down onto his left side; lying back, he took aim with his right arm. The boar saw the movement and gave a roar of fury. Meleager launched his javelin sideways and upwards – straight into the boar’s open mouth. The tip of the spear pierced the upper skull, bursting its way out again coated in gore and brain matter. The great beast shuddered and fell dead to the ground, slipping and skidding on the blood and entrails of its victims.
Oeneus clambered down half drunk from his horse and embraced his son.
‘Meleager, my boy. What honour you have done our house! Yours is the kill, yours the trophy. Come, skin the creature, take its tusks, then bring it back to the palace and we will feast and toast your triumph in wine!’
Meleager turned to face the surviving huntsmen who even now were cupping and drinking the blood that gushed from the boar’s wounds. ‘The hide and tusks are to go to Atalanta!’ he declared. ‘It was she who struck the first blow. Without her true aim the monster would still be at large and we would be carrion for the crows and foxes. The trophies are hers.’
Meleager’s uncles came forward. The Thestiades had not been conspicuously in the forefront of the hunt, but their sense of family honour and male pride now spurred them on.
‘That witch is an outsider,’ said Toxeus.
‘A deranged virgin who took one lucky shot,’ said Eurypylus.
‘The honour of the kill must go to the house of Thestios,’ said Evippus.
‘A woman’s place is the hearth, harem or home, not the hunt,’ said Plexippus.
‘I tell you, the prize is Atalanta’s,’ said Meleager. ‘It is my decision to make, not yours.’
Plexippus approached the body of the boar. He took out a knife and began to gouge his way to the root of the tusk.
‘Leave it!’ shouted Meleager.
Toxeus raised his bow.fn11 ‘Stand aside, nephew. If you do not present the trophy to the family, the family will take the trophy.’
With a roar of anger Meleager flicked a knife from his belt. It flew straight into Toxeus’s eye.
Before Toxeus was dead on the ground, Meleager had thrust a sword into the side of Plexippus and slit the throat of Eurypylus. Only Evippus was now left alive.
At the sight of the blood-maddened fire in Meleager’s eyes, Evippus dropped the sword he had been struggling to draw. ‘Spare me, dear nephew!’ he pleaded. ‘Think of your mother. My sister. You cannot deprive her of four –’
Meleager, crazed by his love for Atalanta and crazed by the killing, had no time for mercy. He brought up his knee into the older man’s groin. Evippus doubled up in pain, as Meleager took his head and twisted it once, twice, three times before the sound of the neck cracking assured him that the last of his uncles was dead.
Atalanta sighed in sorrow and turned away.
The women, children, priests, cowards, merchants and older men from the city and the palace were streaming out to view the body of the boar. Queen Althaea arrived in time to see her son Meleager standing in dazed triumph over the bodies of her four brothers.
Demented with sorrow and raging for revenge, Althaea ran back to the palace. Down to the cellars she went until she came at last to the deserted chamber in whose floor she had buried the log on the day her son was born. Meleager would live, Atropos and her fellow Moirai had proclaimed, for as long as that log was not consumed by fire. But Althaea was now inexorable: after killing her beloved brothers, Meleager had forfeited the right to live one moment longer.
She scrabbled at the earth and brought out the log, still wrapped in what was left of the woollen blanket she had swaddled it in all those years ago.
Meleager’s life will end in a flash
When his log of fate is turned to ash
Althaea hurried into the kitchens, where a great open fire roared all day and all night. She looked up and saw that across the opening in the floor of the feasting room above a great spit had been suspended directly over the flames. On this the skinned and gutted carcass of the boar would be transfixed and slowly roasted for the evening’s banquet.
Still engulfed by her fury, Althaea unwrapped the log and hurled it into the heart of the fire.
The instant she saw the old log spark and bloom into flames Althaea regretted what she had done. She tried to find a way to pull it out, but the heat was too intense. She could not reclaim the log without burning up herself.
But perhaps, she told herself, she had only dreamed the whispered conversation between the three Fates all those years ago. She had long convinced herself that this was probably so. The proclamations of the Moirai were not for mortal ears. They would never have talked to each other if there had been a chance of being overheard. It had all been imagination.
Surely!
She stroked her cheek with the tattered blanket.
Surely?
Althaea turned and ran outside, drawn by a sense of deep and terrible foreboding towards the shouts of horror that came from the ruined barn where lay the corpses of the Calydonian Boar and so many heroes, including her brothers.
She arrived in time to see her son Meleager running, jumping and screaming in pain, his voice sounding horribly like the squealing of the monstrous boar.
‘I’m burning! I’m burning!’ he screeched. ‘Help me, mother! Help me!’
Everyone pulled back in confusion and apprehension to see this brave young man so suddenly overtaken by madness. No flames leapt from him, yet he howled and writhed back and forth, falling to the ground and rolling over and over as if he were being consumed by living, scorching flame. Finally his screams turned to sobs, his sobs to a great shuddering sigh and he fell silent, quite dead. His body, as the soul left it, blackened, charred and disintegrated into grey ashes that were whipped away by the wind, leaving behind nothing but a memory of the proud and handsome Meleager’s mortal remains.
With a grief-stricken wail Althaea ran blindly into the woods.
They found her some hours later, suspended from the branch of a tree, remnants of an old blanket clutched in her hands. Before she hanged herself she had torn out her own cheeks in the wild throes of her anguish.
This whole sorry train of events came about, you may recall, because King Oeneus had failed properly to worship Artemis. Her punishment was first to send a boar that ravaged the countryside and nearly brought ruin to Oeneus’s kingdom, then to despatch Atalanta to sow discord amongst his family and the warriors who gathered to his aid. The hunt itself resulted in the deaths of dozens of fine heroes before the outbreak of enmities that caused the slaughter of Oeneus’s brothers-in-law, the uncanny seizure and death of his son Meleager and the frightful suicide of his wife Althaea. But Artemis didn’t stop there. She transformed the Meleagrids – Meleager’s grieving sisters Melanippe, Eurymede, Mothone and Perimede – into guinea fowl, who clucked and mourned their brother for eternity.fn12
Two other daughters of Althaea and Oeneus were spared by Artemis, however. They were Gorge and Deianira, whom Moros, fate, had marked out for important contributions to the heroic years to come.fn13
Atalanta, her task complete, left the bitter and blighted kingdom of Calydon, never to return.
Atalanta’s triumphant role in the Calydonian Boar Hunt caused her name to be sounded far and wide. It came to the ears of her father King Schoeneus. He had cruelly left her to die exposed on a mountainside, but now he was only too keen to welcome her back to his palace. He may have been the first cruel, abusive and unfit parent to reclaim a child once they became famous or rich, but he would certainly not be the last.
‘My darling child,’ he said, spreading his arms wide to show the breadth of his kingdom, ‘this will all be yours.’
‘Really?’ said Atalanta.
‘Well, your husband’s, naturally,’ said Schoeneus.
Atalanta shook her head. ‘I will never marry.’
‘But consider! You are my only child. If you do not marry and have children, the kingdom will go to outsiders.’
Atalanta’s devotion to Artemis and her lifelong objection to marriage had not altered. ‘I will only a marry a man,’ she said, ‘who can …’
She considered. She was a superb shot with a bow, but it was conceivable that the man might live who was better. It was the same with her skill with javelin, discus and on horseback. What was there that no man could ever best her at? Ah! She had it.
‘I will only a marry man who can run faster than me.’
‘Very well. So let it be.’
Atalanta was safe. Her speed could never be matched.fn14
‘Oh, and any suitor who takes the challenge and fails must die,’ she added.
Schoeneus grunted his assent and arranged for the word to be put out.
Great was Atalanta’s fame and beauty, great the value of Schoeneus’s kingdom and great the conviction of many fine, fit and fast young fellows that no woman could ever best them. Many made the journey to Arcadia: all were defeated and all were killed. The crowds loved it.
In amongst the spectators one day was a young man called HIPPOMENES. He watched a prince from Thessaly run against Atalanta, lose and be taken off to be beheaded. The crowd cheered as his head rolled in the dust but all Hippomenes could think of was Atalanta. Her impossible swiftness. Those long striding legs. The hair streaming behind. The stern frown on that beautiful face.
He was in love and he meant to win her. But how could he do it? He was no runner – the prince who had just lost his head was much faster, and had been nowhere in sight when Atalanta crossed the finish line.
Hippomenes made his way to a temple of Aphrodite, knelt before the statue of the goddess and prayed his heart out.
The statue seemed to move and he heard a voice whisper in his ear. ‘Look behind the altar and take the things you see. Use them to win the race.’
Hippomenes opened his eyes. Fragrant incense was burning strongly. Had wreaths of its smoke snaked into his head and made him imagine Aphrodite’s voice? He was alone in the temple; surely there was no harm in looking behind the altar.
Something gleamed in the shadows. He reached out a hand and pulled out one, two, three golden apples.
‘Thank you, Aphrodite, thank you!’ he whispered.
The following day Atalanta looked at the next young man foolish enough to challenge her to a race, the next young lamb to the slaughter.
‘What a pity,’ she thought to himself, ‘he’s rather good-looking. A young Apollo. But he’s stupid enough to have a satchel slung over his shoulder. Doesn’t he know how much that will slow him down? Ah well …’ she crouched and waited for the starting signal.
Hippomenes set off after her as fast as he could. His running style was poor at best, but hampered by the bag of apples swinging from his shoulder it was preposterous enough to cause the crowd to hoot with laughter. They howled even louder when he started fumbling with the bag.
‘He’s decided to have his lunch, now!’
Hippomenes took out one of the apples and rolled it along the ground ahead of him. It shot along the track and overtook Atalanta, who sprinted after it and picked it up.
How beautiful, she thought, turning it round in her hand. A golden apple! Like the apples Gaia gave Zeus and Hera as a wedding gift. The apples in the Garden of the Hesperides. Or perhaps this one came from Aphrodite’s sacred apple tree in Cyprus? She glanced up to see Hippomenes flailing past her. ‘I’ll soon reel him in,’ she muttered to herself, shooting off again.
Indeed, it wasn’t long before she had passed him. She was just feeling the heft of the apple in her hand when another one rolled past her. Once again she stopped to pick it up; once again Hippomenes overtook her; once again she regained her position ahead of him with ease.
The third apple Hippomenes deliberately rolled at an angle, so that as it shot past Atalanta it veered off the track. Atalanta saw it flash by and took off in hot pursuit. The damned thing was stuck in an acacia bush. Its thorns scratched her and caught in her hair as she plucked it out. She now had three golden apples. How marvellous. But there was that damned boy racing past her again. She turned and streaked after him.
It was too late! Unbelievable, but true. The crowd roared as the exhausted Hippomenes crossed the line arms aloft and staggered, doubled up, hands on hips, sobbing and panting from the exertion.
Atalanta came through in a creditable but shocked second place.
She was too honourable to go back on her word and she and Hippomenes were soon married. You can say it was the work of Aphrodite, you can say it was love – it amounts to the same thing – but Atalanta found herself growing fonder and fonder of Hippomenes until it could safely be said that she loved him with an ardour equal to his for her. They had a son, PARTHENOPAEUS, who grew up to be one of the Seven against Thebes.fn15 Their married life, though, was to end strangely.
It seems that Hippomenes neglected to thank Aphrodite properly for her aid in winning Atalanta. As a punishment, she visited great lust upon the couple while they were visiting a temple sacred to the goddess CYBELE fn16. Unable to resist the urge, they made furious love on the floor of her temple. The outraged Cybele transformed the pair into lions. This might not seem so terrible a punishment, lions being kings of the jungle and high up the food chain; but to the Greeks it was the worst fate that could befall lovers, for they believed that lions and lionesses were unable to mate with each other. Lion cubs, they thought, came exclusively from the union of lions and leopards. And so Atalanta and Hippomenes were doomed to live out their lives drawing Cybele’s chariot, closely harnessed to each other but eternally denied the pleasure of sex.