Actaeon and the Hounds

The morning had gone well. Actaeon, grandson of Cadmus, had been hunting deer on Mount Cithaeron with a large party and a large pack, and by noon the nets were heavy and everyone was hot. He told his men to stop; they would come back at dawn. Then he wandered off, the way people do when the work is over, into a valley he did not know.

There was a grotto at the end of it that no craftsman had made, a natural arch of pumice and soft stone with a clear spring running out of it, and Artemis used it. She was in the water with her nymphs around her, her bow and quiver hung up and her hair down, and Actaeon came through the trees without any idea what he was walking into.

The nymphs saw him first and shrieked and crowded round her to hide her, but she was a head taller than any of them and the effort was useless. Ovid says she went the colour of clouds at sunrise. She reached for her arrows and they were not there, so she took what was there, which was water, and threw a handful into his face, and told him that now he could go and say he had seen Diana undressed, if he found he still had the words.

He turned to run and the ground looked further away than it had been. Antlers came up out of his forehead. His neck stretched, his arms went long and thin and ended in hooves, his skin roughened into dappled hide. Everything changed except his mind, which stayed exactly as it was. He came to a pool and saw the stag looking back at him and tried to say what had happened, and what came out was not speech.

His hounds found him. Ovid lists them by name for twenty lines, every one of them raised and fed by the man they were running down, and they did what they had been trained to do. The rest of the hunting party came up cheering, calling for Actaeon to hurry, saying he was missing the best kill of the day. He heard them. He tried to answer, and the sound he made only brought the pack in closer, and he died in the middle of his own hunt with his own friends shouting his name.