Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Meleager was seven days old, the Fates (Moirae) appeared to Althaea and declared that the child would live only as long as a brand then burning on the hearth remained unconsumed. Althaea snatched the log from the fire, quenched it, and locked it in a chest, thinking she had secured her son’s life. Years later, after Meleager killed her brothers—the sons of Thestius—in the quarrel over the Calydonian hide, Althaea’s love for her brothers overcame her love for her son. She took out the brand and cast it into the fire. As the wood burned, Meleager’s strength wasted; when the brand was ash, he died. Althaea, stricken with remorse, hanged herself; Cleopatra, Meleager’s wife (daughter of Idas and Marpessa in Apollodorus), also perished of grief in some tellings. Bacchylides stages the aftermath in the underworld: Heracles, descending for Cerberus, meets Meleager’s shade, who recounts his mother’s deed and proposes Deianeira (his sister) as a bride for the visitor—linking the Calydonian tragedy to Heracles’ later marriage. The brand-myth is the classic folk-motif form of Meleager’s death: life bound to an external object, destroyed by a mother’s deliberate hand.