Atalanta

Atalanta was born to Iasus, the son of Lycurgus, king of Arcadia, and Clymene, the daughter of Minyas. Her father wanted a son, and when a daughter was born instead, he took the infant to Mount Parthenion, the Virgin Mountain, and exposed her to die. She was left beside a well at the mouth of a cave, naked and helpless. But a she-bear, one of the sacred animals of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, had recently lost her cubs to hunters. The bear found the infant and nursed her with her own milk, keeping her alive until the same hunters who had killed the bear's cubs discovered the child and raised her among themselves. Atalanta grew up in the wilderness, dressed in a short tunic like the goddess she served, hunting with bow and spear, and remaining always under arms. She kept her virginity as a sacred vow, devoted to Artemis and the wild places that had been her true home.

Her first test of skill came against the centaurs Rhoecus and Hylaeus, the half-man, half-horse creatures who roamed the mountains. They saw her beauty and tried to force themselves upon her. Atalanta did not run. She drew her bow and shot them both dead, the arrows finding their marks with the same precision she would later bring to the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. Her reputation spread, and when Jason assembled the greatest heroes of Greece to sail aboard the ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, Atalanta was invited to join. Some accounts say she sailed as the only woman among the Argonauts, her skill with weapons making her welcome where other women would have been turned away. In other versions, Jason himself prevented her from joining, not because she lacked courage or ability, but because he feared that a single woman among so many men would breed strife and jealousy. Either way, her name was counted among the heroes of that generation, a distinction no other woman could claim.

The defining episode of her life was the Calydonian Boar Hunt. King Oeneus of Calydon had forgotten to honor Artemis in his harvest sacrifices, and the goddess sent a monstrous boar to ravage his lands. The beast was the size of a bull, with tusks that could uproot trees and a hide that no normal weapon could pierce. Oeneus's son Meleager assembled the greatest hunters of Greece to destroy it. Among them were the hero Heracles, the hunter Peleus, the seer Amphiaraus, and many others. Atalanta was the only woman. When the hunters surrounded the boar in the forest, two men were killed by the beast's charge before anyone could strike. Atalanta was the first to draw blood, her arrow striking the boar in the back. Amphiaraus then shot it in the eye, and Meleager finally drove his spear into the beast's flank, killing it. Meleager, who had fallen in love with Atalanta, stripped the hide and presented it to her as the prize of first blood. His uncles, the sons of Thestius, were outraged that a woman should receive the trophy in the presence of men. They seized the hide from her. Meleager, in a rage, killed them both. His mother Althaea, who had kept a brand that controlled her son's life, burned it in grief for her brothers, and Meleager died on the spot. The boar's hide, the prize that had cost so many lives, remained with Atalanta, and the tusks were sent to Arcadia as tokens of her victory.

After the hunt, Atalanta's fame was so great that her father Iasus claimed her as his daughter and demanded that she marry. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi had warned her that marriage would be her undoing, so she set a condition that she knew no man could meet. She would marry only the suitor who could outrun her in a footrace, and any who failed would die by her spear. Many young men tried, and many died. Their heads were set on poles around the racecourse as a warning to the next. Then came Hippomenes, a young man who had watched her races and fallen in love with her despite the danger. He knew he could not win by speed alone, so he prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who was offended that Atalanta had rejected her domain. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, the tree of golden fruit that Heracles had fetched in one of his twelve labors. During the race, as Atalanta gained on him from behind, Hippomenes dropped the first apple. Its beauty was irresistible, and she stopped to pick it up. He gained ground. She caught him again, and he dropped the second. She stopped again. The third apple rolled off the course, and as she bent to retrieve it, Hippomenes crossed the finish line. Atalanta was beaten not by a faster runner but by her own curiosity, and she became his wife.

The marriage did not end happily. Hippomenes forgot to thank Aphrodite for the golden apples, and the goddess punished them both. While they were hunting together, she afflicted them with such overwhelming desire that they coupled in a sacred grove, either the precinct of Zeus or the temple of Cybele, the great mother goddess of the East. The sacrilege was absolute. They were transformed into lions, the very animals Atalanta had hunted all her life, and in that form they were yoked to Cybele's chariot. The ancient Greeks believed that lions could not mate with their own kind, only with leopards, so the transformation was also a sentence of eternal separation. In some accounts, Atalanta had already borne a son, Parthenopaeus, either by Hippomenes or by Ares, the god of war. Parthenopaeus grew up to be one of the Seven Against Thebes, the warriors who attacked the cursed city in the generation after Oedipus. He died at the seventh gate, and his name, which means "Virgin-Faced," was a memorial to the mother who had lost everything to a footrace and three golden apples.