Atalanta: Nursed by a Bear, Unbeaten on the Track

Picture a running woman picked out in a few hundred stones: a sweep of terracotta for her tunic, a pale line for her outstretched arm, and just at her feet one bright tile of gold glass, the apple that is about to cost her the race. Atalanta is a gift to any artist because her story is full of motion, but it begins with stillness, a baby left alone on a mountainside to die.

Left on the mountain

Like many figures of myth, Atalanta comes in two versions that never fully merge. In the Arcadian telling preserved by Apollodorus, she is the daughter of Iasus and Clymene. Her father wanted sons, and when a daughter was born he had her exposed, the ancient practice of leaving an unwanted infant in the wild. A she-bear came to the place and suckled her, until hunters found the child and took her in to raise as one of their own.

Aelian, writing in the early third century CE, gives the scene more texture: the bear had lost her own cubs and was heavy with milk, and she nursed the baby as if it were hers. Whatever the details, the bear is telling. In Greek imagination the bear belonged to Artemis, goddess of the wild and of girls not yet married, and Atalanta grows up to be very nearly a mortal Artemis: a virgin, a hunter, a creature of the mountains who wants nothing to do with a husband.

The other Atalanta comes from Boeotia. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, surviving only in fragments, makes her the daughter of Schoeneus, and so does Ovid. Apollodorus knows both traditions and records the disagreement, along with a third father offered by Euripides, Maenalus. Ancient readers seem to have been content to let the huntress of Arcadia and the runner of Boeotia share a single name and a single legend.

A huntress among heroes

The girl raised by hunters became the best of them. Apollodorus says two centaurs, Rhoecus and Hylaeus, tried to rape her, and she shot them both dead. She wrestled the hero Peleus at the funeral games for Pelias and beat him, a match that Athenian vase painters liked to show. Some lists even put her aboard the Argo, though Apollonius of Rhodes, in his epic of the voyage for the Golden Fleece, has Jason turn her away, fearing the quarrels that desire would stir among the crew.

Her great exploit was the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. King Oeneus of Calydon had forgotten Artemis when offering the first fruits of the harvest, and the goddess sent a monstrous boar to ravage his land. Homer tells the story in the Iliad, but without Atalanta; in his version the hunt leads to a war over the boar’s head and hide. Later writers fill the hunt with heroes from all over Greece and put Atalanta among them. Ovid, in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses, lets her draw first blood with an arrow that lodges under the beast’s ear. Meleager, son of Oeneus, makes the kill, and because he loves her he gives her the hide. His mother’s brothers, outraged that a woman should take the prize, snatch it away. Meleager kills them, and his mother Althaea, in her grief, burns the log on which his life depended.

The hunt became one of the favourite subjects of ancient art. It runs around the neck of the François Vase, painted in Athens around 570 BCE and now in Florence, where Atalanta and Melanion appear by name among the hunters. At Tegea in Arcadia, the temple of Athena Alea, designed by the sculptor Scopas, showed the hunt across its front pediment, with Atalanta close to the boar. Pausanias, who saw the temple, says the boar’s hide was kept there, rotted with age, and that the emperor Augustus carried its tusks off to Rome.

The race for her hand

The stories of her marriage belong mostly to the Boeotian Atalanta. When she was grown, her father pressed her to marry. Ovid gives her a reason to refuse: an oracle had warned her against taking a husband.

“A husband is nothing you need, Atalanta. Run from a husband’s bed. And yet you will not escape it: living, you will lose yourself.”

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

So she set terms. Any suitor could race her; if he won, she would be his wife, and if he lost, he would die. Apollodorus adds that she gave each man a head start and then ran after him armed, killing those she caught. Many tried. Their deaths did not discourage the next.

The man who finally won her is Melanion in Apollodorus and Hippomenes in Ovid and the Hesiodic fragments. Either way, he did not rely on his legs. Aphrodite gave him golden apples, which Ovid says came from a sacred field at Tamasus on Cyprus. During the race he rolled them one at a time across her path. Each time Atalanta stopped to pick one up, and the last apple cost her just enough. Theocritus, in his third Idyll, catches the moment from her side: she saw the gold and fell headlong into love. Ovid lets her waver, half wanting to lose.

The marriage did not end well. In Apollodorus, the couple made love in a sanctuary of Zeus and were turned into lions. In Ovid, Hippomenes forgot to thank Venus for her help, and the goddess drove the pair to desecrate a shrine of Cybele, who turned them into the lions that draw her chariot. Their son, Parthenopaeus, whom some made a son of Ares instead, went on to die as one of the Seven against Thebes.

A heroine in a hero’s floor

Atalanta is an awkward fit in the usual patterns, and that is her appeal. She does what male heroes do, hunting, wrestling and winning, while the stories keep trying to steer her back to the place myth usually reserved for women, a wedding. The golden apple is the tool that pulls her off course. Yet the sources never pretend she was slow. In every version she loses the race only because she stops for the gold.

Laid side by side, her panels make an unusual sequence: an infant in the wild, a bear, an arrow, a boar, a racetrack, a pair of lions. It is the life of someone shaped from the start by the wilderness, and it is worth setting beside the more familiar career told in the twelve labours of Heracles. The Calydonian Boar and the centaurs she shot both have cards in our Bestiary.