Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Plexippus.
The gallery
The Calydonian Boar Hunt (tondo of a Laconian black-figure cup)
Naucratis Painter (Hunt Painter), c. 555 BCE
On the interior tondo of this Laconian black-figure kylix, hunters and dogs converge on the great boar that Artemis loosed upon Calydon. The communal hunt is the event that frames Plexippus's myth: as a son of Thestius and a maternal uncle of Meleager, he was among the company of hunters drawn from across Greece. It was the immediate aftermath of this kill — the quarrel over who should receive the hide, which Meleager awarded to Atalanta — that led Meleager to slay Plexippus and his brother. The cup is held in the Louvre (Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, inv. E 670).
The Calydonian Boar Hunt on the François Vase
Kleitias (painter) and Ergotimos (potter), c. 570 BCE
One of the registers of the celebrated François Vase, a black-figure volute krater, depicts the Calydonian boar hunt with its many named hunters closing in on the beast. The vase is renowned for labelling its figures, making it one of the earliest visual rosters of the heroic company that gathered at Calydon — the same gathering of hunters in which Plexippus, son of Thestius, took part before he was killed by his nephew Meleager in the dispute over the spoils. The vase was found at Chiusi and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence.
Roman sarcophagus carved with the Calydonian Hunt
Unknown (Roman, from Vicovaro), 2nd century CE
This Roman marble sarcophagus from Vicovaro renders the Calydonian hunt as a dense relief of struggling hunters, hounds and the cornered boar, with Meleager and Artemis at the centre of the action. Sarcophagi of this type compressed the whole Meleager saga — the hunt, the awarding of the hide and the deadly quarrel that followed — into a single frieze, situating the death of the Thestiads within the celebrated chase. Plexippus belongs to that company of uncles whose claim on the trophy provoked Meleager to kill them. The piece is in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Musei Capitolini), Rome.
Frieze showing the hunt for the Calydonian Boar
Unknown (Roman), Roman period
A Roman carved frieze in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, depicts the assembled hunters and the boar in the chase at Calydon. As a relief of the full hunting party, it stands for the gathering in which Plexippus, a son of Thestius and brother of Althaea, joined his kin and the visiting heroes. The fatal quarrel over the boar's hide that immediately followed the kill — recorded by Ovid (Metamorphoses 8.440–444) and Hyginus (Fabulae 174, 244) — is the moment in which Meleager struck down Plexippus together with a second uncle.