According to Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias, Polydora was the wife of Protesilas, the first soldier to leap ashore in Troy, and therefore the first to die in the Trojan War.
This angered Meleager's uncles, Plexippus and Agenor, as they found it insulting that a woman should receive the prize instead of a man.
[4] According to some accounts, his mother Althaea, angered by the deaths of her brothers, threw the piece of wood his life was tied to into a fire, killing him immediately.
[1] However, when Althaea curses at Meleager upon learning of the deaths of her brothers, he becomes so enraged that he refuses to fight in the war.
Instead, he returned to his home with Alcyone and ignored his family and closest friends when they came to his door begging him to help protect Calydon against the siege.