The Calydonian Boar dies quickly. In every version of the story, the animal is brought down in a few lines, and the poet moves on. Almost everything interesting happens afterwards. A great hunt gathers, a young woman draws first blood, the prize is awarded, and within a few pages a war has started, brothers are dead and a mother is holding a burning stick over a fire. This is a monster story in which the monster is the smallest part, and the way the story is built tells you what the Greeks thought it was really about.
The offering nobody remembered
The cause is the first thing to look at, because it is unusual. Most monsters in Greek myth are sent as punishment for an act: an insult, a boast, a broken oath. The Calydonian Boar is sent for an omission. King Oeneus of Calydon, in western Greece, held a harvest festival and gave the first fruits of the year to the gods, one after another, in the proper way. In the version in the Iliad, he forgot to make the offering to Artemis, or did not think of it, and Homer is careful to say that he might have done either.
Artemis was furious. She sent a wild boar with gleaming white tusks to ravage the orchards and farmland of Calydon, and it tore up trees by the roots, leaving them lying with their blossoms still on them. It is a striking image: the fruit trees that had been the occasion of the festival were pulled out of the ground by the animal sent because of the festival.
I find the small cause remarkable. No one defied the goddess. No one insulted her. The king simply forgot a name on a list. The Greeks understood that in a world full of gods, neglect could be as dangerous as defiance, and nobody who tends the shrines is safe from an oversight.
Why a boar
Of all the beasts a goddess might send, a boar was a natural choice for Artemis. It was a real animal of the Greek countryside, and hunting one was among the most respected tests of a young man's courage. Odysseus carries a boar's tusk scar on his leg from a hunt on Mount Parnassus as a boy, and it is how his old nurse recognises him in the Odyssey many years later.
The boar was also the wild animal that actually wrecked orchards and crops, so the story takes an ordinary farmer's nightmare and gives it a divine author. Artemis, mistress of wild things, sent what the wild sends anyway: a hungry animal in the fields. The only difference was that this one had a reason.
The oldest version
The earliest account is a story inside a story. In the ninth book of the Iliad, the old man Phoenix tells it to Achilles, who is sulking in his tent and refusing to fight, in an attempt to talk him round. Phoenix's version has no famous hunters and no love story. Meleager, the king's son, gathers a band of men and dogs from many cities and kills the boar. Then the trouble starts.
Artemis, still angry, stirs up a quarrel over the head and the shaggy hide of the dead animal. Two peoples, the Curetes and the Aetolians, fight over it, and the war goes on until the Curetes are pressing the Calydonians hard. Meleager, meanwhile, is sitting at home in a rage, because his mother has cursed him for killing her brother in the fighting. He refuses to go out, though the city's elders, the priests, his father, his sisters and his friends all beg him to come back. Only his wife Cleopatra finally moves him, and by then it is too late for the gifts he might have been given for returning.
Notice what Phoenix is doing. He is not telling a story about a boar. He is telling a story about anger and its cost, and he has picked a hero who nursed a grievance while his city burned. The boar is only the first domino, and by the end of the speech it has dropped out of sight.
The all-star hunt
Later writers, especially Apollodorus and Ovid, rebuilt the story on a bigger scale. In their versions Meleager issues a call to every hero in Greece, and they come: Theseus, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, the Dioscuri Castor and Polydeuces, the seer Amphiaraus, the Arcadian Ancaeus, Idas and Lynceus, and many more. It is the most crowded guest list in Greek myth, a sort of preview of the Argonaut expedition with the same men and a smaller goal.
The mythological interest of this is that the hunt goes badly. A pack of heroes, all trying to be the one who gets the credit, trips over itself. In Apollodorus, Ancaeus is gored and killed, and the hero Peleus, throwing his spear at the boar, hits his own comrade Eurytion by accident. Ovid piles on more comedy and disaster, with spears that miss, and men who climb trees to avoid the animal. A boar that would have been a one-man job for Heracles is a muddle for a crowd.
Who struck first
The most famous moment of the hunt is a woman's. Among the heroes was Atalanta, an Arcadian huntress, and some of the men did not want her there. In both Apollodorus and Ovid, she is the first to wound the boar, with an arrow in its back or behind its ear, before any of the men had drawn blood. The seer Amphiaraus hit the eye next, and then Meleager killed the animal with a spear.
Meleager had fallen for Atalanta. When the boar was dead, he gave her the hide, as the prize for the first strike. It sounds like a generous gesture and a fair judgement. It also started everything.
The prize and the quarrel
Meleager's mother, Althaea, had two brothers, the sons of Thestius, and they were among the hunters. They were angry that the prize had gone to a woman, and they took the hide from her, saying that it belonged to them as relatives of the king's family. Meleager lost his temper and killed them.
This is the point the older and later versions share, and I think it is the true centre of the story. The boar is dead, but the argument over its skin ends up killing two men and wrecking a family. Artemis in Homer does not need to do anything more. She sent a monster, and the heroes, left to themselves, did the rest.
The stick in the hearth
Here the later tradition adds its darkest touch. When Meleager was a week old, the three Fates visited the house and declared that he would die when a log burning on the hearth was burned up. Althaea snatched it from the fire, put it out, and hid it in a chest. For years, the baby's life was literally stored in a box.
When her son killed her brothers, she took it out. In grief and fury she threw the log on the fire, and as it burned, Meleager, far away, felt himself being consumed from inside. He died. Althaea then hanged herself, and Cleopatra, his wife, did the same.
Think about the structure of that. A cosmic sentence is carried out not by a god but by a mother with a kitchen fire. The great public spectacle, the hunt with all the heroes in Greece, is overshadowed by a private act in a domestic room. The Fates set the terms, and a woman who loved her son and her brothers could not hold both loyalties at once.
The sisters who became birds
The ending has a strange epilogue. Meleager's sisters would not stop weeping, and according to Apollodorus, Artemis changed them into guinea-hens, which the Greeks called meleagrides, after their brother. Two sisters were spared, and one was Deianeira, who would later become the wife of Heracles. That ties in with another episode in the underworld, where Meleager's ghost, meeting Heracles, asks him to marry his sister.
Where the hide ended up
The remains of the boar had a real afterlife. Pausanias says the hide and tusks were dedicated at the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in Arcadia, Atalanta's reputed home, and that the hide, rotted with age, was still being shown to visitors in his day. The tusks were gone by then. The emperor Augustus had carried them off to Rome after the battle of Actium, because Tegea had backed his rival. And the temple at Tegea, rebuilt in the fourth century BCE, had a sculpted pediment showing the boar hunt itself.
My reading: the boar kills nobody
This is my own interpretation. Count the dead. The boar itself, in the early versions, kills nobody at all; it destroys trees. The deaths come from what the humans do with its body. A man dies over a skin, two uncles die, a mother dies, a wife dies, a hero is burnt away. The monster's real function is not to threaten but to produce a trophy, an object that people can quarrel over.
That is a very clear-eyed way to describe human conflict. The danger arrives, and everyone unites. The danger is dealt with, and then the real trouble starts: who gets the credit, who deserves the prize, who was insulted. Homer's Phoenix understood it. He told the story to Achilles precisely because Achilles was a man who could win the war and lose everything over a prize.
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