Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Oeneus.
The gallery
Oeneus with coat and sceptre (Attic white-ground lekythos)
Attributed to the Edinburgh Painter, c. 500 BC
On this Attic white-ground lekythos, the aged king of Calydon stands robed in a heavy mantle and grasping a sceptre, his name inscribed beside him to leave no doubt of his identity. To the left the painter sets the related episode of Deianira and the centaur Nessus, binding Oeneus to his celebrated daughter and the chain of myth that flowed from his house. The work, now in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich, is among the rare ancient images to name and depict Oeneus himself rather than the more famous hunt he convened, presenting him with the gravity of an enthroned patriarch.
The Vengeance of Diana against Oeneus, King of Calydon (La vengeance de Diane envers Oenée, roi de Calydon)
Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, before 1861
The French Neoclassical painter Abel de Pujol dramatizes the offence that set the Calydonian disaster in motion: Oeneus, having rendered first-fruits to all the gods but neglecting Artemis (Diana), incurs the goddess's wrath. The composition turns on the king of Calydon and the divine huntress whose slighted honour will loose the monstrous boar upon his fields and people. As a museum piece it crystallizes the moral pivot of Oeneus's story, the pious king's single omission, that the ancient sources name as the cause of the hunt in which his son Meleager would win and lose his life.
Oeneus, Atalanta and Meleager (engraved Etruscan mirror, Louvre Br 1749)
Unknown (Etruscan), 4th–3rd century BC
This engraved bronze mirror from Etruria gathers Oeneus together with the central figures of the Calydonian hunt he hosted: his son Meleager, the huntress Atalanta, and another companion identified as a son of Thestius. The fine incised drawing names its protagonists in the Etruscan manner, attesting how thoroughly the Calydonian saga circulated beyond Greece into Italy. Held in the Louvre's Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities (inv. Br 1749), it preserves a rare ancient depiction in which Oeneus stands among the heroes of the hunt rather than apart from them.