Alejandro
Active Member
There's this story about the young hunter Aktaion [Actæon], who owned a pack of fifty hunting-dogs, stumbling upon the hunting-goddess Artemis in a state of undress out deep in the woods and being immediately transformed into a stag which summarily got ripped to shreds by the hunter's own pack of dogs.
I've always found it curious that Aktaion's being a close relative of Artemis didn't help his case upon his innocently blundering into her outdoor [un]dressing-room. Artemis' reaction in this story is also so assertive that it makes it seem like she'd always expected that one day some dude might lose his way in the woods and surprise her before she puts her khakis back on, and that in the event that that should happen, he's sure gonna wish he had become a waiter in the restaurant where the venison he was hunting was going to be served instead of having taken up this perilous profession!
The Latin writer Hyginus tells us an interesting story, which I don't believe appears anywhere else, quoting the Greek historian Istros saying that Artemis actually once fell in love: with a handsome young giant hunter named Orion, no less. Artemis' twin brother Apollon [Apollo] didn't like where this was going, presumably because Artemis had sworn, thousands of years before then, to remain a virgin forever, and rebuked her severally for her intentions to soon update her Facebook info from Interested in: Nothing But Hunting, Fool! to "My boyfriend can hunt and walk on water, too. (Pretty neat, huh?)" (Oh, by the way, yeah, Orion could walk on water as though on terra firma [according to Hesiodos and Apollodoros].) His rebukes seemingly falling upon deaf ears, Apollon resorted to tricking Artemis into shooting Orion dead, ostensibly in an attempt to prove that she was as good an archer as was claimed.
Based on the chronology we can calculate from related events, Aktaion and Orion should have been each other's contemporaries. Aktaion's aunts Semele (mother of the wine-god Dionysos) and Ino lived about one generation before the time of Herakles [Hercules] and the Argonauts; and Herakles' squire Hylas, who himself was an Argonaut, was a maternal grandson of Orion.
Well, what d'you think? Aktaion being a grandson of Apollon means that he was Artemis' own great-nephew. Couldn't they have quietly discussed this mishap and come to a less brutal understanding, or did Artemis possibly intend revenge upon this poor mortal hunter's grandfather (assuming that Apollon cared about Aktaion at all) for Orion's death? Or did Artemis somehow know that Aktaion couldn't be discreet about this incident? Or is it that such an occurrence required such grievous consequences in that culture at that time?
Or maybe it was the other way around, depending on who between Aktaion or Orion died first. Apollon was bitter about his grandson's gruesome death and so he had to get even with his twin sis by gorily ending her potential illicit love affair?
(Granted that there are other versions of the deaths of both of the victims in question, but this is the only combination I can think of which provides fairly reasonable motives/motivations [in my assessment] for the behaviour of the twin deities in either story.)
I've always found it curious that Aktaion's being a close relative of Artemis didn't help his case upon his innocently blundering into her outdoor [un]dressing-room. Artemis' reaction in this story is also so assertive that it makes it seem like she'd always expected that one day some dude might lose his way in the woods and surprise her before she puts her khakis back on, and that in the event that that should happen, he's sure gonna wish he had become a waiter in the restaurant where the venison he was hunting was going to be served instead of having taken up this perilous profession!
The Latin writer Hyginus tells us an interesting story, which I don't believe appears anywhere else, quoting the Greek historian Istros saying that Artemis actually once fell in love: with a handsome young giant hunter named Orion, no less. Artemis' twin brother Apollon [Apollo] didn't like where this was going, presumably because Artemis had sworn, thousands of years before then, to remain a virgin forever, and rebuked her severally for her intentions to soon update her Facebook info from Interested in: Nothing But Hunting, Fool! to "My boyfriend can hunt and walk on water, too. (Pretty neat, huh?)" (Oh, by the way, yeah, Orion could walk on water as though on terra firma [according to Hesiodos and Apollodoros].) His rebukes seemingly falling upon deaf ears, Apollon resorted to tricking Artemis into shooting Orion dead, ostensibly in an attempt to prove that she was as good an archer as was claimed.
Based on the chronology we can calculate from related events, Aktaion and Orion should have been each other's contemporaries. Aktaion's aunts Semele (mother of the wine-god Dionysos) and Ino lived about one generation before the time of Herakles [Hercules] and the Argonauts; and Herakles' squire Hylas, who himself was an Argonaut, was a maternal grandson of Orion.
Well, what d'you think? Aktaion being a grandson of Apollon means that he was Artemis' own great-nephew. Couldn't they have quietly discussed this mishap and come to a less brutal understanding, or did Artemis possibly intend revenge upon this poor mortal hunter's grandfather (assuming that Apollon cared about Aktaion at all) for Orion's death? Or did Artemis somehow know that Aktaion couldn't be discreet about this incident? Or is it that such an occurrence required such grievous consequences in that culture at that time?
Or maybe it was the other way around, depending on who between Aktaion or Orion died first. Apollon was bitter about his grandson's gruesome death and so he had to get even with his twin sis by gorily ending her potential illicit love affair?
(Granted that there are other versions of the deaths of both of the victims in question, but this is the only combination I can think of which provides fairly reasonable motives/motivations [in my assessment] for the behaviour of the twin deities in either story.)