Calydon lay in Aetolia, north of the Gulf of Patras and near the Euenus River, in a landscape of cultivated plains and surrounding hills. Its legendary genealogy begins with Aetolus, the son of Endymion, who leaves Elis and gives his name to Aetolia. Apollodorus names Aetolus and Pronoe as the parents of Pleuron and Calydon, the brothers after whom the two Aetolian cities were said to be named. The city therefore takes its mythic name from Calydon, son of Aetolus, rather than from a word meaning beautiful in honour of Endymion. Such an ancestral account explains a place through a family story. It does not identify an archaeologically established founder or date for the settlement.

One of Calydon's central royal figures is Oeneus. In Apollodorus, Dionysus gives him the vine, connecting his kingdom with wine and agricultural abundance. Oeneus marries Althaea, daughter of Thestius, and their family includes Meleager, Deianira and Gorge, alongside children whose names and parentage vary between sources. Meleager becomes the prince around whom the famous hunt and its disastrous aftermath revolve. Deianira belongs to the stories of Heracles and his final marriage, while Gorge is associated with Andraemon. These family links make Calydon part of a wider network of heroic households. The prosperity associated with the vine forms a sharp contrast with the destruction brought by the boar.

The crisis begins at the harvest offerings. Oeneus honours the gods with the first fruits but leaves out Artemis, goddess of the hunt. In response, she sends a boar of extraordinary size and strength into the countryside. The animal destroys crops, threatens people and livestock, and makes ordinary cultivation unsafe. Ovid gives it the scale and fury of a supernatural disaster, describing bristles, fearsome tusks and scorching breath. Oeneus calls for help, and a company of celebrated hunters gathers. The lists differ, but names such as Meleager, Jason, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Peleus, Telamon, Amphiaraus and Atalanta place the expedition among the major gatherings of Greek heroes. Their fame does not make the hunt safe, and the danger tests more than their strength.

Atalanta is the first to wound the boar in the familiar accounts of Apollodorus and Ovid. Apollodorus also credits Amphiaraus with a shot to its eye, before Meleager delivers the killing blow. Meleager awards the hide to Atalanta, recognising her first success and acting upon his attraction to her. The honour is contested by the sons of Thestius, his mother's brothers, who resent a woman receiving the prize ahead of them. In the version developed by Ovid, the quarrel centres on Plexippus and Toxeus. Meleager kills them, and the victory over a common enemy becomes a conflict within his own family. What should have ended the countryside's danger instead brings fresh grief into the palace.

In the story of the fatal brand, Althaea had learned that Meleager would live only while a particular piece of wood remained unconsumed by fire. She had taken it from the hearth and hidden it safely. After her son kills her brothers, she returns the brand to the flames, and Meleager dies as it burns. The Iliad preserves a different telling: the Curetes and the Calydonians fight over the boar's head and skin, Althaea curses Meleager after a relative's death, and he withdraws from the fighting until his wife Cleopatra persuades him to save the city. Homer does not narrate his death in that passage. Apollodorus separately records a version in which he dies fighting. These are alternative accounts, not a sequence in which Meleager first dies through the brand and then returns to battle.

Calydon also stands at the beginning of Deianira's marriage to Heracles. The river god Achelous competes for her, and the two suitors wrestle. The shape-changing river loses a horn in the struggle, and Heracles wins the marriage. Through Deianira, the Calydonian household becomes connected with Nessus and the fatal garment in the story of the hero's death. Beyond these legends, Calydon was a historical city with its own religious life. Archaeological work has identified evidence of worship at the sanctuary of Artemis Laphria and in other parts of the settlement, including miniature pottery offered in religious contexts. Those material remains support its classification as a historical location. They do not prove the boar hunt, nor should the city's later history be reduced to an unsupported chain of sackings ending immediately after its heroic stories.