Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Epochus.
The gallery
Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea
Unknown (sculptural program of the front pediment attributed to Scopas of Paros), 4th century BCE (rebuilt c. 350–340 BCE)
The ruins of the Doric temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, the chief sanctuary of Arcadian Tegea and the very monument on which Epochus was portrayed. Pausanias (8.45.7) records that the front gable, carved under the direction of the sculptor Scopas, showed the hunting of the Calydonian boar, and that there 'on the other side of the boar is Epochus supporting Ancaeus who is now wounded and has dropped his axe.' Epochus, son of the Tegean king Lycurgus, is thus given pride of place in his own city's temple holding up his stricken brother. Though the pediment's marbles survive only in fragments, this photograph of the temple platform shows the architectural setting of the lost sculptural group that immortalised him.
The Calydonian Boar Hunt (detail of the François Vase)
Kleitias (painter) and Ergotimos (potter), c. 570–565 BCE
The upper frieze of the François Vase, an Attic black-figure volute-krater signed by the painter Kleitias and the potter Ergotimos, presents the earliest great pictorial narrative of the Calydonian boar hunt — the expedition in which Epochus and his brother Ancaeus took part. Every figure is labelled, and among the named hunters closing on the beast is the fallen Ancaeus, Epochus's brother, the warrior gored by the boar whom Epochus is shown supporting in the Tegean pediment. The vase, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, places the brothers' shared adventure at the very origin of Greek visual storytelling.
Sarcophagus with the Calydonian Boar Hunt
Unknown Roman workshop, 2nd century CE (Roman Imperial period)
A Roman marble sarcophagus relief (Capitoline Museums, inv. MC 917) carved with the Calydonian boar hunt, the myth that defined Epochus and his brother Ancaeus. Around the cornered boar surge the assembled heroes and hounds, with Meleager and Artemis among the central figures and one hunter already overthrown beneath the beast — the recurring motif of the gored Ancaeus whom Epochus, in the literary and Tegean tradition, rushes to hold up. Such sarcophagi made the deadly hunt a popular Roman funerary subject, preserving in stone the dramatic moment of the brothers' shared myth long after the Tegean pediment had crumbled.