Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Thestius.
The gallery
Sarcophagus with the Calydonian Boar Hunt
Unknown (Roman), c. 2nd–3rd century AD
This Roman marble sarcophagus relief, now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome (inv. MC 917), unfolds the great hunt of Calydon in a single crowded frieze. Around the cornered boar press the heroes whom King Oeneus summoned to deliver Aetolia, among them the sons of Thestius — Plexippus and Toxeus — who hunted at the side of their nephew Meleager. The hunt is the prologue to the family's ruin: the quarrel over the spoils in which Meleager slew his Thestiad uncles, and the vengeance of their sister Althaea, Thestius's daughter. The Calydonian chase was among the most popular subjects on Roman funerary monuments, its theme of heroic death and grief suited to the tomb.
Death of Meleager (Morte di Meleagro)
Domenico Fiasella (Il Sarzana), c. 1600–1650
Painted by the Genoese Baroque master Domenico Fiasella (1589–1669), this canvas in the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti in Genoa dramatizes the catastrophe that ends the house of Thestius. When Meleager killed Plexippus and Toxeus, the sons of Thestius, in the dispute over the boar's hide, their sister Althaea — Thestius's daughter and Meleager's own mother — avenged her brothers by casting upon the fire the fatal brand on which her son's life depended. Fiasella stages the hero's collapse in the heightened chiaroscuro of the seicento, the dying body the pivot of a tragedy set in motion by the slaughter of Thestius's blood.
The Death of Meleager (Death of Meleagros)
François Boucher, c. 1727
An early oil sketch by the French Rococo painter François Boucher (1703–1770), held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.2000.179.12). The composition gathers the final act of the Calydonian saga: Meleager wasting away as his mother Althaea, daughter of Thestius, returns to the flames the brand that holds his life, in retribution for his killing of her brothers Plexippus and Toxeus, the sons of Thestius. Boucher renders the death-chamber grief with the fluid line and pale, luminous palette that would make his name, transforming the grim vengeance of Thestius's daughter into a swirling theatrical tableau.