Actaeon

Actaeon was born in Thebes, the great walled city in Boeotia, a region of central Greece, that had been founded by his grandfather Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who slew the dragon of Ares, the god of war, and sowed its teeth to create the first warriors of the land. His mother was Autonoë, one of the four daughters of Cadmus and Harmonia, the goddess of harmony, and his father was Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, the Olympian god of music, prophecy, and the sun, and the huntress Cyrene, the Thessalian nymph beloved by Apollo. As a boy, Actaeon was sent to the cave of the centaur Chiron, the immortal creature who was half-man and half-horse and who trained the greatest heroes of Greece, including the healer Asclepius, the god of medicine, and the mighty Achilles, the greatest warrior of the ten-year Trojan War. Chiron taught him to read the signs of the forest, and Actaeon grew into the finest hunter in Thebes. He bred a pack of dogs so fierce and loyal that their names were still remembered centuries later by the Roman mythographer Hyginus: Blackfoot, Swift, Tracker, and dozens more.

One midsummer day, Actaeon led his dogs and companions into the forest of Mount Cithaeron, the mountain on the border of Boeotia, to hunt deer. He pushed deeper than the others, following a trail to a shaded grotto called Gargaphia, a hidden spring where the water ran cold over mossy stones. There he found Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, whose silver bow never missed. She had come to bathe with her nymphs, the female nature spirits who attended the gods, their quivers and bows hung upon the branches. Actaeon stumbled upon them by accident, but the goddess did not care for accidents. She looked up and saw a mortal man staring at her naked body. Her face flushed with rage, and before he could speak a word of apology, she reached into the spring and splashed water across his face.

The water was divine punishment, and as it touched Actaeon's skin, his body began to change. Antlers sprouted from his forehead, his neck lengthened, his ears grew pointed, and his hands became hooves. His voice, when he tried to cry out, came out as the bellow of a stag. He turned and fled through the forest, but his own dogs caught his scent and gave chase. They did not recognise their master. They smelled only stag, and they were bred to bring down stags. They ran him down in a clearing, and though Actaeon tried to call them by name, no human words would come from his animal throat. They tore at his flanks and his throat, and his hunting companions arrived too late to find anything but a bloody stag and a pack of hounds who would not stop howling.

The death of Actaeon became one of the most famous cautionary tales in   Greek mythology. In Athens, the great city of Attica, the playwright   Aeschylus wrote a lost play about the hunter's fate. Vase painters showed the stag-man falling beneath his dogs, and the Roman poet Ovid described the horror of Actaeon's mind trapped inside the stag's body. After the death, the hounds wandered in grief until the centaur Chiron carved a statue of Actaeon so lifelike that the dogs recognised it and ceased their mourning. Some claimed that Actaeon had been punished for boasting that he was a better hunter than Artemis, but the most enduring version was simpler: a man saw what no mortal should see, and the gods do not forgive such trespass.