Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Althaea.
The gallery
Althaea Kills Meleager (side relief of a Roman sarcophagus)
Unknown (Roman), c. AD 170–180
Carved in white marble around AD 170–180, this side relief of an urban Roman sarcophagus stages the climactic act of Althaea, queen of Calydon: the destruction of her own son Meleager. The Fates had foretold at Meleager's birth that he would live only as long as a brand then burning on the hearth; Althaea snatched it from the flames and hid it for years. When Meleager killed her brothers in the bitter quarrel that followed the Calydonian Boar Hunt, the grieving mother retrieved the log and cast it back into the fire, consuming her son's life with it. The sarcophagus, now in the Florence Archaeological Museum, treats this myth of doomed kinship as a meditation on death fit for a tomb.
Althaea Killing Meleager (from The Metamorphoses of Ovid)
Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, 1602–1607
This early seventeenth-century engraving by the Dutch printmaker Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, made for a series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses, shows Althaea throwing the fateful brand into the fire and so killing her son Meleager. The composition follows Ovid closely: in the background Meleager's grieving sisters lament his death, the mourners whom the goddess Diana would transform into guinea-hens. Now held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the print belongs to the great age of Netherlandish reproductive engraving that carried the visual repertoire of classical myth across early modern Europe.
Althaea Casts the Brand of Meleager into the Fire
Johann Wilhelm Baur, 1659
An illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses by the German etcher Johann Wilhelm Baur, published in 1659, capturing the irreversible instant in which Althaea hurls the hidden firebrand back into the flames. By destroying the log on which Meleager's life secretly depended, she avenges the brothers her son had slain — and at the same moment dooms herself, for in most tellings she dies of grief once the deed is done. Baur, known for his finely detailed small-scale etchings, distils the whole tragic mechanism of the myth into a single domestic hearth scene.
The Furies Urge Althaea to Burn Meleager's Log (History of Meleager)
Bernard Picart, after Charles Le Brun, 1683–1710
Etched and engraved by Bernard Picart after a design by the French court painter Charles Le Brun, this print from a Meleager series shows two vengeful deities — the Furies — pressing the anguished Althaea to throw the wooden brand into the fire. The image dramatises the moral agony at the heart of the myth: the mother torn between love for her son and grief for the brothers he has killed, goaded by the powers of vengeance to destroy her own child. Picart produced the drawings and prints while overseeing the translation of Le Brun's Meleager tapestries into engravings; this impression is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.