ActaeonANCIENT_Selinunte

ActaeonANCIENT_Selinunte

Ancient relief sculpture depicting the myth of Actaeon being attacked by his hounds while Artemis (Diana) watches

"[Classically] Artemis suddenly transformed the young man into a stag, how own hunting dogs turned on him and devoured him. In the earliest known versions of the myth, Artemis punished Aktaion for boasting that he was a better hunter than she: this version can be seen on the vase by the Pan Painter and the metope from Temple E at Selinunte [in Sicily], both ca. 470 - 460 BC, and also appears in Euripides' Bacchae; it is also presumably the story implied in Etruscan vase paintings showing a stag-headed Ataiun set upon by his dogs. A sexier Hellenistic retelling of the myth (by Callimachus) claimed that Aktaion incurred the wrath of the goddess when he spied her bathing with her nymphs. This version of the tale, with its dramatic tensions between male and female, human and animal, predictably caught the fancy of poets and artists alike and became the definitive version of the myth for the Romans, most memorably, and wittily, in Ovid's Metamorphoses (3.138-252)." IDR in Grafton and Most The Classical Tradition, p. 6.