Daughter of Thestius and queen of Calydon as the wife of Oeneus, mother of the hero Meleager.1
Apollodorus makes Althaea a daughter of Thestius and Eurythemis, sister to Leda and Hypermnestra and to the Thestiads Iphiclus, Evippus, Plexippus, and Eurypylus. She married Oeneus, who reigned over Calydon and was the first to receive the vine from Dionysus, and bore him Toxeus, whom his own father slew for leaping the boundary ditch, along with Thyreus, Clymenus, and the daughters Gorge and Deianira.2
Her son Meleager was begotten by Oeneus, though some say by the war-god. When he was born the Fates came and declared that he would live only so long as the brand burning on the hearth was unconsumed; hearing this, Althaea snatched up the brand and laid it away in a chest.3
After the great boar of Calydon was slain, Meleager gave its hide to the huntress Atalanta, but his mother's brothers wrested it away, and in his rage Meleager killed his uncles. Then, Apollodorus tells, in grief at the slaughter of her brothers Althaea kindled the brand, and Meleager at once expired. Ovid lingers on her torn heart as she bears offerings for her victorious son only to meet her dead brothers carried home, four times drawing the billet to the fire and four times back before vengeance for kin overmasters a mother's love and she casts it in.4
Homer knows a different death. In the embassy to Achilles, Phoenix recalls how Meleager, wroth against his mother Althaea, withdrew from the war against the Curetes who beset Calydon, for she had beaten upon the all-nurturing earth and called on Hades and dread Persephone to bring death upon her son, in grief for a brother he had slain; the Fury that walks in darkness heard her out of Erebus. Pausanias notes the divergence directly: Homer makes the curse of Althaea the cause of Meleager's death, while the Eoeae and the Minyad say he fell when Apollo helped the Curetes, and the tale of the brand was first dramatized only later by Phrynichus.5
Hyginus counts Althaea among the women who slew their own children—daughter of Thestius, she killed her son Meleager by Oeneus because he had killed his uncles—and lists her brand among the fatal firebrands of myth, the one that destroyed Meleager.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
