In Greek mythology, the Erymanthian boar (Ancient Greek: ὁ Ἐρυμάνθιος κάπρος; Latin: aper Erymanthius) was a monstrous wild boar — described as shaggy, tameless, of vast weight, and with foaming jaws — that haunted Mount Erymanthus in Arcadia and ravaged the land of Psophis. Capturing it alive was the fourth labour of Heracles. Ancient authors also call the beast Tegeaean or Maenalusian. In Arcadian tradition such ravaging boars were instruments of Artemis, the Mistress of the Animals, when she turned a wrathful face on a country.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Erymanthian boar" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Description
Literary sources describe a shaggy, wild, tameless boar of vast weight with foaming jaws. It inhabited the glens of Lampeia beside the vast marsh of Erymanthus and sallied from the thick-wooded, cypress-bearing heights of the mountain to harry the groves of Arcady and abuse the land of Psophis.
In the primitive highlands of Arcadia the mountain remained a haunt of Artemis. When the goddess was displeased with a region she might send a raging boar to lay waste the farmers' fields — as also in the story of Meleager and the Calydonian boar — so the Erymanthian beast belongs to that older pattern of divine displeasure as well as to the cycle of Heracles' labours.
II.The Fourth Labour of Heracles
Eurystheus ordered Heracles to bring the Erymanthian boar alive to Mycenae. Apollodorus places the hospitality of the centaur Pholus immediately before the hunt: after burying Pholus, Heracles chased the boar with shouts from a thicket, drove the exhausted animal into deep snow, trapped and bound it, and brought it to Mycenae.
Apollonius of Rhodes pictures Heracles arriving at Mycenae with the boar bound in chains on his huge shoulders and casting it down at the entrance to the market-place. When Eurystheus saw the hero carrying the beast he was terrified and hid himself in a bronze vessel — the same jar that tradition associates with his fear of Heracles' later returns.
Pausanias reports that the inhabitants of Cumae claimed to possess the boar's tusks in the sanctuary of Apollo, but dismisses the assertion as without probability.
III.In art and literature
The delivery of the boar to Eurystheus is a favourite subject on Attic black-figure pottery; a well-known amphora by the Antimenes Painter (c. 525 BC) in the Louvre shows Heracles, Eurystheus, and the bound animal. Later painters and sculptors keep the snow-chase, the shoulder-borne carcass, and the king's flight into the jar.
Classical authors who mention the labour range from Sophocles' Trachiniae through Apollonius, Diodorus, Ovid, Seneca, Statius, Pausanias, and Pseudo-Apollodorus down to Byzantine compilers such as Tzetzes. Francisco de Zurbarán's Heracles and the Erymanthian Boar (1634, Museo del Prado) is a prominent early-modern treatment.