0240NOTAtalanta

Catalin Ardelean, "Elysian Fields — Atalanta vs Peleus," lithograph, 2010. Shown at BYU-MOA in We Could Be Heroes exhibition W2013.

Atalanta wrestles with Peleus on 6th-cent. black-figure Chalcidian hydria, Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlung, no. 596 (image from Wikipedia Commons).

At the funeral games for Pelias (Jason's uncle who hatched the impulse for the Argonautica), Atalanta bests Peleus in a wrestle. She is the only female Argonaut; he famous for fathering Achilles with Thetis whom he met en route. The episode told in this pot gets little ink in extant literary accounts. — Apollodorus, Bibl. 3.9.2 does mention it; but the detail is always given late in biographies of Atalanta and of Peleus, as this is not a commonly told myth.

"The wrestling contest, however, poses more intriguing questions than one might at first suppose, due to the fact that while Peleus is always one of the wrestlers [at Pelias' funeral games], his opponent is frequently a woman." Gantz p. 193