Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Agrius.
The gallery
Oeneus, Atalanta and Meleager (Engraved Etruscan Mirror, Br 1749)
Unknown, 4th–3rd century BC
This engraved bronze hand-mirror, an Etruscan work of the 4th–3rd century BC now in the Louvre (Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Br 1749), assembles the royal house of Calydon around the great boar hunt: King Oeneus stands among Atalanta the huntress, the hero Meleager, and a son of Thestius. Agrius is himself a son of Porthaon and a brother of this very Oeneus — the king whose throne Agrius and his sons would later seize — so the mirror preserves the dynastic world of Calydon in which the usurper's drama unfolds. Surviving ancient art never portrays Agrius in isolation; he is glimpsed only through his family, the house pictured here in delicate Etruscan engraving.
Diana's Vengeance Against Oeneus, King of Calydon (La vengeance de Diane envers Oenée, roi de Calydon)
Abel de Pujol, before 1861
The French academic painter Abel de Pujol (1785–1861) staged the wrath of the goddess Diana (Artemis) descending upon Oeneus, king of Calydon, whose neglected sacrifice unleashed the Calydonian boar upon his land. The canvas dramatizes the misfortunes that beset the Calydonian throne — the same throne that Agrius, Oeneus's brother, and Agrius's sons would later wrest away while the old king lived. Because Agrius survives only as a name in the literary sources (Homer, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Pausanias) and was never given a face in art, this neoclassical scene of his brother's house stands among the few images that conjure the Calydonian dynasty to which the usurper belonged.