126 Serv ad Virg, Aen vi.448.
127 Ov, Met xi. 524ff.
128 Ap Rhod iv.1502–33.
129 Apollod, Ep 3.12, 6.1; amphora (London Brit Mus 1897.7-27.2); Callim, Aet iii. fr. 80–2; Hom, Il 620ff. et passim, Od iii.102–200; Paus iii.26.10, iv.3.1–2, iv.31.Il, v.25.8; Pind, Nem iii. 112, Pyth vi.33; Plat, Hipp Maj 286a–b, Hipp Min 364c–d, Laws 711E, Phaed 261b–c; Strab vi.1.15.
130 Strab viii.4.4, x.5.6.
131 Paus iii.26.8–10.
132 Whether as per Tiresias's prophecy (Hom, Od xi.135) or at the hands of his son Telegonus (Eugammon Cyrenicus cit. ap. Proc, Chrest s. v. Telegonia; Dict Cret vi.15; Hyg, Fab cxxvii; Hor, Ode iii.29.8) is unknown.
133 Although, ‘Swine are either cloven-or solid-footed; for there are in Illyria and Paeonia and elsewhere solid-hoofed swine. The cloven-footed animals have two clefts behind.’ (Aristot, Hist An 499b.12–14, cf. Aristot, Gen An 774b.21, pseudo-Aristot, Mirab Auscult 68.835a.35, Antig Car 66(72), Pliny, Nat Hist. ii.106, xi.44, Ael, Nat Anim v.27, xi.37).
134 Aristot, Hist An 595a.26–8, cf. Hom, Od x.242, Aristot, Hist An 603b.27, Varro, Re Rust iv.2.
135 Hom, Odxiii.409, xiv.533; Ael, Nat Anim v.45.
136 ‘Wild boars, though usually enfeebled at this time as the result of copulation, are now unusually fierce and fight with one another in an extraordinary way, clothing themselves with defensive armour, or in other words deliberately thickening their hide by rubbing against trees or by coating themselves repeatedly all over with mud and then drying themselves in the sun. They drive one another away from the swine pastures and fight with such fury that very often both combatants succumb’ (Aristot, Hist An 571b.13–21).
137 ‘Castrated wild boars grow to the largest size and become fiercest. . . . Wild boars become castrated owing to an itch befalling them in early life in the region of the testicles, and the castration is super-induced by their rubbing themselves against the trunks of trees’ (Aristot, Hist An 578a.25–578b.6).
138 Bacch xviii.23–5; Diod Sic iv.59.4; Plut, Thes ix; Paus ii.1.3; Strab viii.6.22.
139 Aristot, Hist An 595a.26–8, 580b.24, Hist An 621a.36–9, cf. Hom, Od x.242; Aristot, Hist An 603b.27; Varro, Re Rust iv.2.
140 Paus i.32.1, iii.20.4, v.6.6, vii.26.10, viii.23.9; Xen, Anab v.3.10.
141 Paus viii.17.3.
142 Cleomenes Rheginus cit. ap. A then ix.402a.
143 Hom, Il xi.415–16; Apollod ii.5.4.
144 ‘Nor could the rain pierce through it so thick it was; and fallen leaves were there in plenty’ (Hom, Od xix.439–44).
145 ‘Hemmed in with sheer cliffs and chasms and overshadowed by trees’ (Aristot, Hist An 578a.25–578b.6).
146 Hom, Od xiii.409.
147 Ael, Nat Anim vi.15.
148 Ael, Nat Anim ix.28, iv.23.
149 Op, Cyn ii.332, ii.457.
150 Aristot, Hist An 609b.28.
151 Aristot, Hist An 607a.17–20.
152 Ael, Var. Hist. i.7.
153 Aristot, Hist An 595b.1, although the passage is emended.
154 Aristot, Hist An 630a.1–3, but cf. Paus iii.14.7-10, where trained boars are said to have been set upon each other by Spartan youths at the Phobaeum. Vid. Eur, Ph 408ff., Suppl 132ff.; Zen, Cent i.30; Hyg, Fab lxviiii; Stat, Theb i.370ff.; Apollod iii.6.1; Hes, Sh 168–77.
155 Aristot, Hist An 488b.15; ‘µολοβριτεσ’: according to Hipponax cit. ap. Ael, Nat Anim vii.47, cf. Nat Anim vii.19, x.16; Plat, Lach 196e.
156 Hom, Il xvi.823–7, xii.42–50, xvii.282–5; Hes, Sh 387–93.
157 Atys, Adonis and Idmon, presumably: Hdt i.36.1–43.3; Paus vii.17.9–10; Diod Sic ix.29.1; Apollod iii.14.4 (cf. Bion I, Bionis Smyrnaei Adonidos Epitaphium, ed. Fantuzzi; Plut, Quaest Conviv iv.5.3–8; Athen ii.80b; Schol. ad Lyc, Alex 831; Prop iii.v.37–8; Ov, Met x.710ff.; Hyg, Fab ccxlviii; Anon (Anacreon?) ap. Heph, Ench xxxiii s.v. ‘Antispasticon'; Apollod i.9.23; Ap Rhod ii. 815ff.; Hyg, Fab xiv, xviii; Valerius Flaccus, Algonautica v.1ff.). Odysseus, although wounded while hunting boar on Mount Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus (Hom, Od xix.429–67), subsequently, and typically, turned the injury to his advantage (Hom, Od xix.385ff.; Anon Odyssey fr. 1 3–4 ap. P Ryl iii-487).
158 Ancaeus is first wounded (Paus viii.45.2, viii.45.71 in the groin (Lyc, Alex 479–93; Ov, Met viii.391–402) then ‘killed by the brute’, his fellow victim being Hyleus (Apollod i.8.2), or Meleager's brother Agelaus (Bacch v.117), or no one (Paus viii.4.10). It is moot whether Eurytion is the victim of Peleus or the boar (Apollod iii.13.2; schol. ad Aristoph, Nub 1063, who calls the victim ‘Eurytus'; compare Ant Lib xxxviii et Schol. ad Lyc, Alex 175, who specify a boar-hunt in general rather than the Kalydonian one in particular). Meleager's death is harder to assign. The death of the boar entails the division of the spoils, which, favouring Atalanta, entails the battle with the covetous sons of Thestius, thence their deaths, and Meleager's, too, either in the fighting (Hom, Il ix.529–99, cf. Paus x.31.3–4 and Apollod i.8.3; Hes, Cat fr. 98.4–13 ap. P Berlin 9777) or by the intervention of his mother, Thestius's daughter, Althaea (Bacch v.93–154; Aesch, Cho 602–11, cf. Diod Sic iv.34.6ff.; Ant Lib 2; Schol. ad Hom, Il ix.534; Ov, Met viii.445–525; Ibycus fr. 15 ap. Diomedes, Ars Grammatica i. 323, the last of whom chances on ‘Meleager’ and ‘Althaea’ to comment that the formation of a patronymic from the name of the mother is improper; Hyg, Fab clxxi, clxxiv). Surviving fragments of an ‘Oeneus’ (?Eur, P Hibeh i.4.21) and a ‘Meleager’ (?Eur, vid. D. L. Page CQ, xxxi, 178) are inconclusive on this point, although the latter mentions
159 the hide which the sons of Thestius claimed on the grounds that Iphiclus had been the first to wound the boar (Apollod i.8.3) but which Meleager presented to Atalanta, along with
160 the head (Hom, Il ix.548), according to the Homeric account. The diegesis to Callimachus’ 94th Aetion remarks: ‘A huntsman . . . upon killing a boar said that it was not fitting for those who surpass Artemis to dedicate [their trophies] to her; so he dedicated the boar's head to himself, hanging it on a black poplar. He lay down to sleep under the tree, and the head fell and killed him.’ A boar's head was not to be trifled with, even after the kill. The same may be remarked of
161 the tusks, which ‘become intensely hot whenever the boar is provoked’ and retain sufficient heat to singe hair even when the animal is dead (Xen, Cyn x.17, cf. Paus v.12.2). Tusks were highly prized as trophies (Hom, Il x.264) and yet the first recipient of this particular pair is unrecorded and unidentified. They
162 were later dedicated to Athena in her temple at Tegea, Callimachus (Hymn iii.215–22) states that ‘the tokens of victory came into Arcadia which still holds the tusks of the beast’. They were removed, many years later by the Emperor Augustus. One – broken was displayed in the Forum at Rome; the other – whole – in the sanctuary of Dionysus in Augustus's private garden. It was the size of a man's leg (Paus viii.46.1–5) and the boar proportionate to such a tusk would have stood taller than a giraffe at the shoulder. ‘It would seem that in the days of old the beasts were much more formidable to men,’ comments Pausanias (Paus i.27.9), citing the boar of Kalydon, among other monstrous beasts. The hide, ‘rotted by age and by now without bristles’, remained in the temple at Tegea (Paus viii.47.2).
163 But the scattering of the boar leaves no mark on the landscape: no ‘tracks in soft ground’ or ‘broken branches where the bushes are thick’ or ‘marks from his tusks wherever there are trees’ (Xen, Cyn x.5).
164 Hence the images commemorating him carved in the throne of Apollo at Amyclae (Paus iii.18.15), surrounded by his tormentors on the gable of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea (Paus viii.45.6), pierced by Atalanta's arrow on the shield of her son Parthenopaeus (Eur, Ph 1108–11), warning of the war that will follow his death on another shield (Callim fr. 621 ap. schol. ad Eur, Ph 134) whose ownership is unrecorded, which is itself lost, and perhaps never existed. Even the boar's ‘representations’ dissolve into a generalised iconography of enmity and rage (Eur, Ph 408ff., Suppl
132ff.; Hyg, Fab lxviiii; Stat, Theb i.370ff.; Apollod iii.6.1; Eur, Suppl 139–48), and thence the constituent stock epithets which compel his ‘foaming mouth’ (Hes, Sh 389; Eur, Ph 1381-2, cf. Eur, Bacch 1122–4) and the ‘gleaming points of his tusks’ (Hom, Il x.262–4, xi.416, Hymn iv.569; Ael, Nat Anim v.45; Eur, Ph 1380; Hes, Sh 388) as instances. They are the elements into which he disintegrates and
165 which thus dictate his later shapes: as winged (Artemon of Pergamon cit. ap. Ael, Nat Anim xii.38), or homed (Agatharcides cit. ap. Ael, Nat Anim v.27), or thundering down the slopes of Olympus in the form of a river (Paus ix.30.9-11), or stunted (Aristot, Hist An 573b.2–5; snb.27, cf. Aristot, Gen An 749a.1, 770.7) so that Achilles might prove his manhood at the tender age of six (Pind, Nem iii.44–50, cf. Aeschin, III Contra Ctesiphon 255ff.).
166 Op, Cyn i.309.
167 Ibid.
168 Op, Cyn i.76.
169 Pal, De Incred fr. xiii.
170 Apollod iii.9.2; Hyg, Fab clxxxv; Nonnus, Dionys xii.87–9; Serv ad Virg, Aen iii. 113.
171 Theog 1287–94.
172 Hellanicus 4F99; Apollod iii.9.2, cf. Xen, Cyn i.7; Prop, i.1.9–10; Ov, Ars Amat ii.185–92.
173 Paus iii.12.9.
174 Hyg, Fab lxx, clxxxxi, cclxx, cf. fr. 537N among the surviving fragments of Euripides's Meleager.
175 Hecataeus (FrGrHist I fr. 32); Antimachus (fr. 29 Wyss); Aristarchus and Philocles cit. ap. schol. ad Soph, Oed Col 1320; Paus ix.18.6 et vid. Theb, fr. 6 ibid.
176 Schol. ad Theocr iii.40.
177 Aesch, Sept 532–3, 547; Soph, Oed Col 1320–2; Eur, Ph 150.
178 ‘The footprints are reversed! Just look at them! They face backwards! What's this? What sort of order is it? The front marks have shifted to the rear; some again are entangled in two opposite directions! What a strange confusion!’ Soph, Ich 80–9 ap. P Oxy ix.1174.
179 Meleager's spear was said to have been preserved in the Sanctuary of Persuasion at Sicyon until destroyed by fire, along with the flutes of Marsyas, when the temple burned down (Paus ii.7.9). It was presumably the same spear which he threw across the River Anaurus to win the javelin contest at the Games for Pelias (Simonides fr. 61 ap. Athen iv.172e; Stesichorus fr. 3 ap. Athen iv.172d).
180 The fragment's provenance is uncertain. A ‘Meleager’ and an ‘Oeneus’ by Euripides are attested (among 62 others of his plays), as is an ‘Atalanta’ of Aeschylus (among another So), and a ‘Meleager’ of Sophocles (among a further 113). Mention might be made of Charemon's ‘Oeneus’ and the 26 books of Stesichorus's works, which included the epic poem ‘Suotherai’ or ‘The Boar-hunters’. Nicander may have addressed the broader contexts in his ‘Aetolica’ and ‘Cynegetica’, and Phrynichus the conventional aftermath in his ‘Pleuroniai’, or ‘Women of Pleuron’. Anyte of Tegea is most likely to have written the epitaph for the boar and Astydamas to have clarified the parentage of Parthenopaeus.
But these ‘titles’ stand as headstones over empty graves in the great cemeteries of antiquity: the ‘Etymologicum Magnum’, the ‘Onomasticon’ of Pollux, the ‘Bibliotheca’ of Photius, or the ‘Suda’. The bodies of their texts survive nowhere now but in works such as the ‘Agrapha’ of Phylarchus of Naucratis. The title means ‘The Unwritten Things’ and announces a compendium of stories never recorded elsewhere. Their existence now subsists in the title alone. Agrapha is lost.
In the Shape of a Boar Page 39