Atalanta: The Huntress, the Boar and Three Golden Apples

She lost the race by stooping. Three times golden fruit rolled across the track in front of her, three times she checked her stride and bent to scoop it from the dust, and on the last the young man she had been about to overtake crossed the line ahead of her. Few scenes in Greek myth are so precisely staged, and few have been retold so often with so little agreement about the people in it.

A child left on the mountain

Apollodorus gives the fullest life. Atalanta was the daughter of Iasus, an Arcadian, and Clymene; her father wanted sons, and when a girl was born he had her exposed. A she-bear came and suckled her until hunters found the baby and brought her up among them. She grew into a huntress who refused marriage and lived under arms in the wilds, and when two centaurs, Rhoecus and Hylaeus, tried to force her, she shot them both.

The family tree was not settled even in antiquity. Apollodorus himself notes that Hesiod and others made her the daughter of Schoeneus, a Boeotian, and that Euripides gave her yet another father, Maenalus; the man who won her is Melanion in one line of tradition and Hippomenes in another. Modern scholars often speak of two Atalantas, an Arcadian huntress and a Boeotian runner, whose stories flowed together. The seams still show: we move from the forests of Arcadia to a racecourse with no clear sense of how the girl of one became the bride of the other.

She also stands at the edge of the Argonaut story. Apollodorus lists her among the crew of the Argo. Apollonius of Rhodes says the opposite: Atalanta gave Jason a spear as a token of friendship and longed to sail with him, but he refused her, afraid that a woman aboard would stir up quarrels of love – one of several ways the voyage, told in our folio on Jason, might have gone differently.

First blood at Calydon

Homer knows the Calydonian boar but not Atalanta. In the ninth book of the Iliad, old Phoenix tells how King Oeneus forgot Artemis when he offered the first fruits of his harvest, how the goddess sent a boar to uproot his orchards, and how his son Meleager gathered hunters from many cities to kill it – and how its head and bristling hide then set off a war. Later writers put Atalanta at the centre of that quarrel.

Apollodorus says that some of the heroes at first refused to hunt beside a woman, and that Meleager, who had a wife at home but wanted a child by Atalanta, made them accept her. She shot the boar first, Amphiaraus hit it next, and Meleager killed it, then gave the skin to her. Ovid, in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses, slows down to look at her: a polished brooch at her throat, her hair caught up in a single knot, an ivory quiver rattling on her left shoulder, and a face one could truly call girlish in a boy or boyish in a girl. Her arrow is the first to draw blood, grazing the beast below the ear, and Meleager is the first to point it out to his companions.

Giving her the prize was what killed him. His mother’s brothers, outraged that a woman should carry off the trophy, snatched it from her; Meleager killed them; and his mother Althaea, choosing her brothers over her son, threw into the fire the log on whose burning his life depended. The trophy had a long afterlife. Pausanias saw the hunt carved on the pediment of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, with Atalanta among the hunters, and was told that the boar’s hide had hung there until it rotted, while the emperor Augustus had carried its tusks off to Rome.

The race of golden apples

When Atalanta found her parents again, her father pressed her to marry. Apollodorus says she laid out a racecourse, planted a stake in the middle, and let each suitor start ahead while she ran after him armed; if she caught him, he died on the spot. Melanion, in love with her, came with golden apples given by Aphrodite and dropped them as she gained on him, and she stopped to gather them and lost.

Ovid tells the story through the mouth of Venus, who has every reason to enjoy it. An oracle has warned Atalanta against a husband, so she sets the deadly race; Hippomenes, who has come to scoff at the suitors’ folly, falls in love the moment he sees her run.

As she flew, the breeze caught the ribbons at her quick ankles and streamed her hair back over her ivory shoulders; a flush spread across her pale body, the way a crimson awning drawn over a white hall stains it with borrowed shadow.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Venus gives Hippomenes three golden apples from her own field at Tamasus on Cyprus. The race begins, and Ovid lets us hear the crowd shouting him on. Each time she draws level he rolls an apple aside. The first she recovers with ease; the second costs her more; the third, thrown at an angle across the field, she hesitates over, and Venus herself, by her own account, makes her pick it up and adds weight to the fruit in her hands. Hippomenes wins his bride.

What the apples bought

The marriage ends badly in both main versions, and the details differ again. In Ovid, Hippomenes forgets to thank Venus, and the goddess drives the couple to make love inside a shrine of Cybele, who turns them into lions to draw her chariot. Apollodorus puts the offence in a precinct of Zeus. Either way, the two runners finish yoked together, tamed for good.

A Greek reader would have understood the apples at once. Tossing an apple at someone was a gesture of courtship – an epigram attributed to Plato begins with exactly that offer – and golden apples were the fruit of the Hesperides, fetched by Heracles as one of his labours. Atalanta, the girl who would not be caught, is beaten not by a faster runner but by her own wish for a beautiful thing, and the race becomes a small model of her whole story. She wins every contest that rewards skill and nerve, and loses the one that turns her into the prize.

That is also why she has never quite settled into either half of her legend. The huntress at Calydon is given a trophy that men take away; the runner on the racecourse is herself the trophy. Her son Parthenopaeus, whose name recalls a maiden, rode with the Seven against Thebes and died there, and Aeschylus calls him the child of a mother who roamed the mountains. It is the hunting half of her story, outlasting the race.