The major well-known figures in greek mythology are famous for all sorts of things. Heracles for
his strength, Odysseus for his cunning, Atalanta for her speed and kickass Tarzan origin story,
Tantalus and Sisyphys for their unique punishments in Hades, Clytemnestra for
axe-murdering her husband… the list goes on. Some are good, some are bad, some are pretty
cool and some are frankly kind of embarrassing. I mean, nobody wants to be remembered forever
as That Guy Who Got Squished By A Boat, Jason. But in the tumultuous annals of mytho-history,
surprisingly few heroes are remembered only for how they died. In fact,
I can only think of one - a particularly unlucky dude by the name of Actaeon.
Now, Actaeon is a little tricky to talk about. Instead of being referenced in only one story
or source, he’s one of those guys who seems to have been kind of a meme in Ancient Greece. He
gets referenced all over the place, but a lot of those references are pretty light on the details,
more of a “get a load of this guy” than a “let me tell you a tale”. The most complete version
of his story is recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it pops up in a lot of earlier literature as a
cautionary tale, typically framed as “Don’t disrespect the gods, or you’ll end up like
Actaeon!” Funnily enough, those early references don’t actually agree on what Actaeon did wrong.
In Euripides’s play the Bacchae, back in the 400s BCE, Actaeon is cited a hunter who boasts he’s a
better hunter than Artemis, and it’s a major no-no to do that in general, so he’s devoured by his
own hounds. But about a hundred years later, the poet Callimachus says in his Hymn #5 that Actaeon
accidentally sees Artemis bathing, and since it’s a major no-no to behold a deity naked, he’s
devoured by his own hounds. Then a little after the turn of the millennium, Pseudo-Apollodorus’s
Bibliotheca gives us a sprinkling of detail where it specifies that Actaeon is a hunter trained by
Chiron who makes the mistake of wooing Semele, girlfriend of Zeus and future mother of Dionysus.
This is, naturally, a bad idea, and at Zeus’s command, Actaeon is… devoured by his own hounds.
Pseud-Apollodorus does say, however, that this is an unusual telling and the more popular version of
the story is that, like in Callimachus’s version, Actaeon’s real offense is seeing Artemis bathing,
at which point she turns him into a deer… and then he’s devoured by his own hounds.
The hounds are then confused when they can’t find Actaeon and go to Chiron, who figures out
the sad story and carves a statue of Actaeon so the dogs feel better about the whole situation.
Now we’re starting to see the faintest hint of a pattern emerging, but these anecdotal references
don’t really paint the full picture just yet. For one thing, they don’t agree on literally anything
other than Actaeon’s death. Actaeon is a hunter who pisses off at least ONE god and is devoured
by his own hounds, either explicitly at the god’s orders or apparently because that’s just a thing
that happens. What did he do? Nobody can agree! Which god did he anger? Who’s to say?? How did
he die? Well, okay, that one we’ve got down. Now when discussing Actaeon, most people tend
to go with Ovid’s version, written in the same general first-century-CE timeframe as
Pseudo-Apollodorus’s telling, mostly because it is the only version longer than three sentences.
In Ovid’s version, Actaeon is - say it with me now - a hunter. He and his hunter bros have had
a long and productive day of hunting and they’re packing it in for the evening and heading home.
But unbeknownst to Actaeon, the goddess Artemis happens to have a private grotto nearby where she
likes to go and unwind after a long day’s hunting with the gals. And unfortunately for Actaeon,
he happens to stumble on said private grotto right after Artemis has popped into the water
for a nice refreshing no-clothes-needed bath. Now, as you may know, Artemis is distinguished
in the Olympian pantheon as one of the virgin goddesses whose single status was more than just
a personal choice, but also actively sacred, so a dude seeing her naked, accidentally or otherwise,
isn’t just uncool, it’s kinda also sacrilegious. Artemis’s nymphs freak out at the intrusion,
but Artemis quickly handles the situation by hucking a handful of water at Actaeon and
cursing him to silence so he can never tell anyone about this breach of her privacy. The way she does
this is by transforming him into a stag, which are famously known for not being able to talk. Actaeon
freaks out and bolts into the woods, but makes the rookie mistake of being shaped like a deer,
and every hunting dog in the zipcode perks up and bolts after him. Actaeon
is eventually run down and - ba dap bap ba-dap BAP - devoured by his own hounds. What a twist!
So this is one of those cases where the story has a lot of recurring elements but
not every telling has all of those elements - which sometimes indicates that there was an
“original version” that contained all of those elements, but sometimes indicates that the story
was always a cluster of other very different stories with only a central point as overlap.
To determine which of these things happened here, we need a broader look at the story - one we can’t
necessarily find in written works, which we’ve basically exhausted at this point. Luckily for us,
referencing Actaeon was just as popular with artists as it was with poets, and Actaeon
shows up in visual media all the time, which can give us a pretty good insight into what elements
of the story may have been popular at different times. For instance, earlier versions didn’t seem
to have Actaeon turning into a deer - in fact, visual representations from the four hundreds
BCE up to the turn of the millennium mostly show Actaeon fully human when he’s chased down by his
hounds. It’s only around the aughts CE that there starts to be an uptick in representations where
Actaeon appears to be partially transformed into a deer during the attack - there’s a
painting of him in pompeii from the first century BCE where he’s got little antlers,
but before that he’s almost always human. It’s not until the renaissance, a full thousand years
after Rome, that the artists start leaning on the “Actaeon as a deer” imagery super heavily,
which is also coincidentally when artists starting giving us an eyefull of Artemis bathing,
evidently missing the entire point of Ovid’s telling in the process. Most of the earlier art
only shows Actaeon as a lone figure being killed with no sign of which god he might’ve offended to
make that happen. A few pieces of the art from that early roman era feature a woman, probably
Artemis, looking pretty cranky but usually - though not always - fully clothed. In some
cases other gods appear to be present, generally disapproving of Actaeon’s vibes. In at least one,
it looks like Artemis is chasing him down with a spear while other women are bathing nearby.
So it seems like the reason we can’t find one specific linear retelling to treat as “the real
one” is because, as is so often the case, there never was one. The only consistent thing about
Actaeon was that he pissed off the gods and was devoured by his own hounds. What exactly he did,
which god or gods were responsible for his death, whether or not he was deer-shaped at the time -
changed. It was most commonly related to Artemis, and more commonly because of the bath, but
considering the variety of tellings it probably got locked into the cultural zeitgeist as “Actaeon
copped an eyeful of Artemis’s Secret Maidenhood and she decided not to be cool about it” because
Ovid’s version was the easiest to access and renaissance artists were weird like that.