Actaeon

He fell to the fatal wrath of Artemis (later his myth was attached to her Roman counterpart Diana), but the surviving details of his transgression vary: "the only certainty is in what Aktaion suffered, his pathos, and what Artemis did: the hunter became the hunted; he was transformed into a stag, and his raging hounds, struck with a 'wolf's frenzy' (Lyssa), tore him apart as they would a stag.

Among others, John Heath has observed, "The unalterable kernel of the tale was a hunter's transformation into a deer and his death in the jaws of his hunting dogs.

"[3] In the version that was offered by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus,[4] which has become the standard setting, Artemis was bathing in the woods[5] when the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked.

Once seen, Artemis got revenge on Actaeon: she forbade him speech – if he tried to speak, he would be changed into a stag – for the unlucky profanation of her virginity's mystery.

[8] There are various other versions of his transgression: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and pseudo-Apollodoran Bibliotheke state that his offense was that he was a rival of Zeus for Semele, his mother's sister,[9] whereas in Euripides' Bacchae he has boasted that he is a better hunter than Artemis:[10] Further materials, including fragments that belong with the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and at least four Attic tragedies, including a Toxotides of Aeschylus, have been lost.

A number of ancient Greek vases depicting the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon include the goddess Lyssa in the scene, infecting his dogs with rabies and setting them against him.

[12] According to the Latin version of the story told by the Roman Ovid[13] having accidentally seen Diana (Artemis) on Mount Cithaeron while she was bathing, he was changed by her into a stag, and pursued and killed by his fifty hounds.

Notes: In the second century AD, the traveller Pausanias was shown a spring on the road in Attica leading to Plataea from Eleutherae, just beyond Megara "and a little farther on a rock.