Erysichthon was the son of Triopas, a king of Thessaly, and in the fullest genealogical version his mother was Hiscilla, daughter of Myrmidon. Thessaly was horse country, a land of broad plains, sacred mountains and wealthy cattle herds. Its royal families traced themselves to figures such as Aeolus, Hellen and the primordial Pelasgians. Erysichthon's own name marked him as a violator of the ground: Erysichthon could be understood as the one who tears up the earth. The ancient stories did not always agree on his rank. Callimachus calls him a son of the Thessalian royal house, while Ovid gives him the gravity and wealth of a ruler, and Hyginus so thoroughly joins his crime to that of his father that their names became tangled together. In all the strongest versions, he belongs to a household wealthy enough to turn sacred timber into luxury.

Near his home lay a grove sacred to Demeter, goddess of grain, fertility and the cultivated earth. In Callimachus' telling the grove stood at Dotium, where the Pelasgians had once made a beautiful precinct for the goddess. Pine trees, elms, pear trees and sweet apple trees grew so thickly that an arrow could hardly pass through them. Water rose from the ditches bright as amber. Demeter loved the place as she loved Eleusis, Triopion and Enna. The trees were not decoration. They were her property, her shelter and the dwelling places of the nymphs who danced around them at noon.

Erysichthon entered the grove with twenty attendants, all chosen for strength and armed with double axes and hatchets. Their purpose was not firewood or shipbuilding. He wanted timber for a grand dwelling where he could hold continual banquets with his companions. Their first target was a tall black poplar, a tree that reached towards the sky and served as the midday dancing place of the nymphs. Erysichthon's axe struck it. The tree cried out in pain, and every tree around it heard the wound. Demeter felt the blow at once. She left Olympus, disguised herself as Nicippe, the priestess chosen by the city, and went to meet him. In her hand she carried the fillets and poppy of her office, and the key of her temple hung from her shoulder.

The goddess spoke gently. She called him the child of his parents' prayers and warned him not to strip away Demeter's holy place. Her words could have ended the crime, but Erysichthon answered as a man who recognised neither goddess, priestess nor sanctuary. He told her to stand back or he would drive his great axe into her flesh. The trees, he declared, would make his tight dwelling, where he would hold enough pleasing banquets for his companions. At that instant Nemesis, goddess of righteous retribution, heard his words. Demeter dropped her mortal disguise. Her feet touched the earth, her head reached Olympus, and the workers fled in terror, leaving their bronze axes behind. She left the servants alone, recognising that they had acted under compulsion, but turned her full anger upon Erysichthon. With a curse suited precisely to his plan, she promised that he would have his banquets from that day onward.

Demeter sent upon him Limos, Hunger, whom Callimachus calls Aithon, the burning one. It was a hunger strong, cruel and glowing like fire. What offended Demeter also offended Dionysus, god of wine, because the gifts of earth and vine belong together. Erysichthon became hungry as soon as he ate and thirsty as soon as he drank. Twenty servants prepared his food, and twelve poured his wine, yet every meal disappeared without satisfaction. At night the dreams of feasts and delicacies tormented him further. He would wake from imagined banquets to a hunger sharper than before.

The household tried to hide the shame. His mother wept and invented excuses whenever invitations arrived. If the sons of Ormenus invited Erysichthon to the games of Athena Itonia, she answered that he had gone to Crannon to collect a debt of a hundred oxen. If Polyxo invited father and son to a marriage feast, the queen answered with tears that a boar had wounded him on Mount Pindus. She told one host that he was abroad, another that a quoit had struck him, another that he had fallen from his chariot. In truth, the prince sat within the palace consuming everything. Food passed into him like water poured into the sea, giving no lasting fullness.

His appetite emptied the royal stores. He ate the mules still harnessed to the great wagons, the heifer his mother was raising for Hestia, goddess of the hearth, the racehorse, the warhorse and even the cat that kept vermin from the household. His father Triopas tore at his grey hair and prayed to Poseidon for help, for Triopas claimed descent from the sea god and expected a father's protection. No help came. The palace's folds emptied, its cattle vanished and the cooks finally told the king that nothing remained. Erysichthon left the ruined house and sat at a crossroads, begging for crusts and scraps thrown out from other men's feasts. Callimachus ends the story there, with a warning against transgression and a prayer that no neighbour hateful to Demeter should ever live beside the poet.

Ovid preserved the same crime but rebuilt it as Roman epic horror. His grove belonged to Ceres, the Roman Demeter. At its heart stood an ancient oak, a tree so large that it was itself a grove. Its trunk had a circumference of fifty feet, its crown rose above every other tree, and around it hung the garlands and votive tablets left by mortals whose prayers the goddess had answered. Dryads, the tree nymphs, danced beneath it hand in hand. When Erysichthon ordered his woodcutters to fell the grove, the men saw the oak's holiness and hesitated. Erysichthon seized an axe himself and swore that even if the tree were the goddess's own body, its crown would touch the ground that day.

The oak shuddered. Its leaves and acorns paled. When the axe cut into the bark, blood flowed from the wound as if from the neck of a bull at sacrifice. One of the woodcutters stepped forward to stop the sacrilege. Erysichthon struck him down with the same axe. Still he hacked at the trunk until ropes pulled the giant tree crashing to the earth. In the ruin of bark and branches, the voice of the dying dryad spoke from the oak. She had been Ceres' favourite nymph, she said, and her death would not go unavenged. The dryads came in black mourning and begged the goddess for punishment. Ceres answered with a plan suited to her domain. Hunger could not safely come among the fertile earth, so she sent a mountain nymph in a serpent-drawn chariot to distant Scythia. There, upon the Caucasus, the nymph found Fames, Hunger, in a stony field and delivered the goddess's command.

Fames entered Erysichthon's chamber while he slept. She wrapped him in her arms, breathed into his mouth, throat and lungs and sent her craving through his hollow veins. In his dreams he feasted, chewed imaginary meat and devoured empty air. When he woke, an all-devouring appetite had taken possession of him. Food became fuel to a flame. The more he swallowed, the emptier he became. Ovid compares him to the sea, which receives every river yet never fills, and to fire, which grows more ravenous as more wood is fed to it. His mouth demanded and consumed at the same time.

His wealth disappeared into his belly. He sold fields, houses, furnishings and treasures, but money still could not buy enough. At last he turned to his daughter Mestra, the one possession left after fortune itself had been swallowed. He sold her into slavery. Mestra had once been desired by Poseidon, the god of the sea, and now she stretched her hands towards the water and called upon him as the lover who had taken her virginity. Poseidon heard her. He gave her the power to change shape, and the master who had just purchased her suddenly found his slave transformed. She escaped as a fisherman, then as a mare, a cow, a bird and a deer. Each time her father watched her power, a new crime presented itself. He sold her again, took the price and let her escape, turning his daughter's body into a repeating source of food money.

Earlier Greek fragments had already joined Erysichthon's burning hunger to Mestra. In the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, her beauty attracted suitors and her father attempted to profit from repeated marriage arrangements. Poseidon carried her away and gave her a son on the island of Cos. Antoninus Liberalis tells a version in which Erysichthon sells her as if she were a cow and receives livestock in return, only for her prayer and transformation to save her. Ovid brings the stories together most brutally: the father who violated the living grove now violates his own daughter's freedom, using her transformations as an inexhaustible resource. Every sale repeats the first act of desecration, treating what is alive as material to be consumed.

No amount of food could stay ahead of the curse. Erysichthon's hunger emptied the world's provisions and then emptied the money gained through Mestra. With nothing left outside himself, he began to feed upon himself. Ovid gives the act only two lines, which makes it more terrible: the wretched man tore at his own limbs with his maiming bite and fed his body by making it smaller. He consumed himself bite by bite, turning every mouthful into a smaller body and an equal emptiness. When morning came, there was nothing left of Erysichthon but the completed warning of his name. The earth-tearer had torn up the ground, and in the end the ground's curse had torn him apart.

Other traditions carried the punishment into the stars. Hyginus confused Erysichthon with his father Triopas and told of a Thessalian king who tore down a temple of Ceres to obtain roofing timber for his own house. Hunger followed, and near the end of his life a serpent came to torment him. Ceres placed him among the stars, where Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Holder, still appears to struggle with the everlasting snake. On the great altar at Pergamon, where gods battle the monstrous Giants, a fragmentary figure named Erysichthon may once have confronted Demeter herself. Aelian remembers him simply as a son of Myrmidon whose monstrous appetite earned the name Aithon, Fiery. Lycophron folds his burning hunger into a compressed prophecy, and Palaephatus attempts to remove the miracle by explaining that Erysichthon was a rich man who became poor and lived from the marriage gifts won through his daughter's beauty.

Erysichthon's afterlife belongs to the groves he destroyed. Ancient sanctuaries protected their trees with sacred law, fines and ritual care, and his story shows what happened when such protection was violated. The myth also fixed a devastating picture of appetite: food that increases hunger, wealth that creates need and a ruler whose consumption devours the people and things under his power. Mestra makes the warning sharper still, because her father's endless appetite consumes not only goods but human freedom. Modern readers have turned him into an image of environmental destruction, consumer culture and self-consuming greed. His crime begins with a living tree. His punishment ends with a living body. Between the two lies the oldest lesson of the story: whatever treats the world as an endless meal eventually discovers that it has begun to eat itself.