Meleager, son of Oeneus of Calydon, gathered huntsmen and hounds from many cities and slew the monstrous boar that Artemis had loosed on Aetolia; over its spoils the Aetolians and Curetes fell to war, and he, wroth at heart against his mother Althaea, withdrew from the fighting.1
Homer's is the oldest version, told by Phoenix as a warning to Achilles. When Oeneus omitted Artemis from his harvest sacrifice, the goddess loosed a white-tusked boar that ravaged the orchards of Calydon; "the boar did Meleager, son of Oeneus, slay," but about the carcass Artemis raised strife and war between the Aetolians and the Curetes over the head and hide. Wroth at heart against his mother Althaea — whose curse a Fury heard out of Erebus — Meleager abode beside his wedded wife, the fair Cleopatra, daughter of Idas and Marpessa, and would not fight. Only when his wife besought him with wailing did his spirit stir, and he drove the Curetes back, but too late to claim the gifts the elders had promised.2
Apollonius numbers Meleager among the Argonauts: from Calydon came "the son of Oineus, strong Meleagrus," still a youth when he joined the bold band, and no man who came was reckoned his better save Heracles alone.3
Apollodorus preserves the other tradition, the brand. Althaea bore Meleager to Oeneus — "though they say that he was begotten by Ares" — and when he was seven days old the Fates declared he would die when the log then burning on the hearth was consumed; Althaea snatched it up, quenched it, and hid it away. Grown, Meleager led the hunt for the Calydonian boar and awarded the hide to Atalanta, who had drawn first blood — desiring, Apollodorus says, to get a child by her — and when his maternal uncles, the sons of Thestius, seized it from her, he slew them in his rage. Grieving for her brothers, Althaea kindled the hidden brand, and Meleager immediately expired.4
Ovid gives the fullest telling of the hunt and the brand together. Diana, slighted by Oeneus, sent a boar of immense size; the maiden Atalanta wounded it first, and Meleager, glad above the rest, cried "Give honor to the courage of a maid!" and granted her the spoils. When Plexippus and Toxeus, his mother's brothers, snatched the prize away, he ran them through. But Althaea, "sister of the slaughtered twain," brought out the billet she had long preserved and four times prepared to cast it in the flames and four times drew back, until at last grief for her kin overcame love for her son; as the fire ate the wood, Meleager, far off and ignorant, burned with an unseen flame and died.5
Hyginus makes the divine paternity literal: Oeneus and Mars both slept with Althaea in one night, and from them Meleager was born. When the Fates appeared and Atropos named the brand his measure of life, Althaea snatched and hid it; later, because he had killed his uncles over Atalanta, she burned it and so killed her own son. Hyginus' lists of the uncles slain vary — Plexippus and Agenor in one place, Ideus, Plexippus, and Lynceus in another — and he names Meleager's wife Alcyone rather than Homer's Cleopatra.6
Pausanias weighs the variants like a critic. Homer, he notes, says the Fury heard Althaea's curse and so Meleager died; but the poem Eoeae and the Minyad say instead that Apollo helped the Curetes against the Aetolians and that Apollo himself killed Meleager. The drama of the brand consumed on the hearth, Pausanias observes, he found first treated by the tragedian Phrynichus — so old is the war-and-curse death, so much later the famous billet.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
