The Theogony sets the marriage of his parents among Harmonia's children: alongside Ino, Semele, and Agave, Cadmus' daughter Autonoe is wedded by long-haired Aristaeus. The poem names the union but not the son who would spring from it.2Hesiod — Theogony 977

Apollodorus and Hyginus name him plainly the son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, daughter of Cadmus, and so a grandson of Cadmus, kin to the doomed line of Thebes. He was bred to the chase and to the mountain, and the mountain undid him.3Pseudo-Apollodorus · Hyginus — Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.4.4 (cf. 3.4.2); Hyginus, Fabulae 180–181

Apollodorus adds that Chiron reared him to be a hunter, and sets out the offense that doomed him three ways without settling which: according to Acusilaus, Zeus was angry at Actaeon for wooing Semele; according to the more general opinion it was because he saw Artemis bathing; and others say it was because he boasted himself a better hunter than the goddess.4Pseudo-Apollodorus — Bibliotheca 3.4.4

Ovid tells the bathing version in full: in the vale of Gargaphie the grandson of Cadmus, wandering from the hunt, stumbled on Diana at her spring; the angry goddess flung water upon him, antlers sprang from his brow, and he fled as a stag until his own fifty hounds, blind to their master, ran him down and tore him apart.5Ovid — Metamorphoses 3.138–252

Hyginus gives the harsher charge — that Actaeon saw Diana bathing and desired to ravish her, whereupon she set horns upon his head and his own dogs devoured him.6Hyginus — Fabulae 180

Pausanias preserves a regional turn from Stesichorus of Himera: that Artemis cast a deer-skin about Actaeon to make certain his hounds would tear him. At Orchomenus the dead hunter became a power: a rock-bearing ghost ravaged the land until Delphi bade the people find his remains and bury them, and fasten a bronze likeness of the ghost to a rock with iron — an image Pausanias says he saw — and thereafter they sacrificed to Actaeon every year as to a hero.7Pausanias — Description of Greece 9.2.3; 9.38.5