Meleager

• 1. Introduction

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  Meleager was a Greek hero honored with his own sacred precinct, a temenos, at Calydon in Aetolia. According to the Fates, his life was bound to a single piece of wood burning in his family's hearth. Only when that wood was consumed by fire would he die. The story that follows asks who saved the wood, who finally put it back into the flames, and what became of a hero once he was dead.

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• 2. A Royal House

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  Meleager was a prince of Calydon, the son of Althaea and of King Oeneus, a man who made wine. Some tellers gave a different father, the war god Ares.

  The household was large. His brothers were Toxeus, Clymenus, Periphas, Agelaus, and Thyreus, and his sisters were Deianeira, Gorge, Eurymede and Melanippe. Sources vary the spellings, so Agelaus is also Ageleus, and Thyreus appears as Phereus or Pheres.

  Meleager's own family ties reached into other legends. With the huntress Atalanta he had a son, Parthenopeus, yet he married Cleopatra, daughter of Idas and Marpessa. Their daughter Polydora became the bride of Protesilaus, who left her bed on their wedding night to join the expedition to Troy.

  Atalanta, the mother of Parthenopeus, had her place in the great hunt that Oeneus ordered.

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• 3. The Boar of Calydon

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  At one festival King Oeneus honored every god except Artemis, and a boar soon began terrorizing his land. The beast rooted up the vines of Calydon.

  Oeneus sent his son out to gather heroes from all over Greece for a hunt. This hunt was a famous episode of the epic tradition, which Homer reworked. Meleager is also mentioned as one of the Argonauts.

  Among the hunters, Meleager chose Atalanta, a fierce huntress whom he loved. In one account, two centaurs named Hylaeus and Rhoecus tried to rape her, and Meleager killed both of them.

  Then Atalanta wounded the boar, and Meleager finished it. Because she had drawn the first blood, he gave her the hide. Not everyone at the hunt accepted that decision.

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• 4. The Burning Brand

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  Toxeus, whose name means the archer, and Plexippus were Meleager's uncles. Both were enraged that a woman had been given the prize. Meleager killed them in the argument that followed. He also killed Iphicles and Eurypylus, because they had insulted Atalanta.

  The dead uncles were Althaea's brothers. On the day Meleager was born she had overheard the Fates, snatched the burning wood from the hearth, doused it and hidden it away. Now, learning what her son had done, she took it out and laid it on the fire. As it burned away, Meleager died, killed by his own mother's choice.

  His sisters mourned him so excessively that they were turned into guineafowl. The Greeks called these birds meleagrides, and later writers would credit their weeping with a strange product.

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• 5. Among the Shades

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  When Heracles descended to the underworld to fetch Cerberus, every shade fled from him except Meleager. In Bacchylides' Ode V, Meleager still wears his shining armor. He looks so formidable that Heracles reaches for his bow to defend himself.

  Then Meleager tells his story, and Heracles weeps. Meleager explains that he left his sister Deianira unwedded in their father's house. He begs Heracles to take her as his bride.

  Bacchylides breaks off the poem at that point. He never remarks that Heracles, by agreeing, was choosing a disastrous wife.

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• 6. Echoes in Amber and Stone

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  Pliny the Elder, in Book 37, Chapter 11 of his Natural History, reports a belief of Sophocles about amber. Sophocles held that it forms in countries beyond India, from the tears shed for Meleager by the birds called meleagrides.

  Among the Romans, the heroes Meleager assembled for the Calydonian hunt became a favorite subject for sculptors. They offered a theme of many nudes in striking action, which could be carved like a frieze along the sides of sarcophagi.

  A Scandinavian text, Norna-Gests þáttr, has similarities with Meleager's story, and readers can still compare the two.

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