Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ancaeus.
The gallery
The Calydonian Boar Hunt
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1611–1612
In this oil-on-panel by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), the heroes of the Calydonian hunt close in on the monstrous boar sent by Artemis. Amid the swirling, diagonal violence of dogs, spears and straining bodies, the Arcadian hero Ancaeus lies stricken on the ground at the centre of the composition—the casualty whom the boar gored after he boasted that a man's weapon would outdo a woman's. The painting distills the moment of the hunt at its most chaotic, with Ancaeus's fallen form serving as the price of his fatal pride.
Sarcophagus with the Calydonian Boar Hunt (from Vicovaro)
Unknown (Roman), Late 2nd–early 3rd century CE
This Roman marble sarcophagus, found at Vicovaro and now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Capitoline Museums in Rome (inv. MC 917), carves the entire Calydonian hunt across its front. Meleager and the assembled heroes—Atalanta, the Dioscuri and others—converge on the charging boar in a dense relief of overlapping figures. Among the hunters appears Ancaeus of Tegea, recognizable by his great double-axe, the weapon that defined him in literary tradition; such sarcophagi turned the hero's death in the hunt into a meditation on mortality fitting for a tomb.
Tondo of a Laconian black-figure cup: the Calydonian Hunt
The Naucratis Painter (Hunt Painter), c. 555 BCE
The interior tondo of this Laconian black-figure kylix (Louvre, inv. E 670), attributed to the Naucratis Painter, shows the Calydonian boar set upon by spearmen and hounds in tight circular composition. The cup is one of the earliest surviving depictions of the hunt in which the Arcadian Ancaeus took part as an Argonaut and boar-hunter; the anonymous attacking heroes embody the band of champions—Meleager, the sons of Lycurgus among them—who gathered from across Greece to bring down the beast.
The Calydonian Boar (woodcut for Ovid's Metamorphoses)
Unknown (Raphael Regius edition), c. 1518
This woodcut illustrates Book VIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Raphael Regius's Venetian edition (c. 1518), the very passage that gives the fullest account of Ancaeus. Ovid names the double-axe-bearing Arcadian who scorns Atalanta and is then gored in the groin by the boar's twin tusks (‘concidit Ancaeus’). The print renders the hunt as a crowded melee of heroes and hounds around the rampaging boar, visualizing the literary scene in which Ancaeus meets his death—the wounds the dying Meleager would later call ‘happy.’