Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Actaeon, son of Autonoe and Aristaeus, was trained as a hunter by Chiron. He met his death on Mount Cithaeron, torn by his own dogs. Classical authors disagree on the *cause*. According to Acusilaus, Zeus was angry because Actaeon sought Semele as a wife. Pausanias reports Stesichorus’s related version: Artemis cast a deer-skin about Actaeon so that his hounds would kill him and so prevent his marrying Semele. Pausanias himself points out a spring and rock near Plataea called Actaeon’s bed, where the hunter is said to have rested and looked into the water while Artemis bathed. The more general opinion, Apollodorus says, is that Actaeon saw Artemis bathing. The goddess at once transformed him into a deer and drove his fifty dogs mad; they tore him apart without knowing him. Afterward the hounds howled for their master until they came to Chiron’s cave; the centaur fashioned an image of Actaeon that soothed their grief. Callimachus, in the *Bath of Pallas*, already treats the bathing-and-transformation story as known, comparing Tiresias’s blinding for seeing Athena bathe with Actaeon’s worse fate for seeing Artemis. Ovid later elaborates the bathing scene at length (Diana’s grotto, the sprinkling of water, the taunt that Actaeon may now tell he saw her naked). Because that full scenic detail is Roman, this entry follows Apollodorus and Callimachus for the classical Greek core—sight of the bathing goddess, stag metamorphosis, death by own dogs—and labels Ovid as later transmission.