Artemis and Actaeon: The Hunter Turned Prey

Ovid's Metamorphoses tells the story of the huntsman Actaeon, out on Mount Cithaeron with his hounds, who stumbles by accident onto a hidden grotto where Artemis is bathing naked with her attendant nymphs. Artemis, the virgin goddess already recorded as guarding her own modesty fiercely, has no interest in Actaeon's innocence. Unable to reach for a weapon with the goddess unarmed before him, she flings water at his face instead, and where the drops land antlers begin to grow; Actaeon flees into the forest already becoming a stag, his human voice gone, unable to call out to the very hounds that are his own pride as a hunter. Those hounds catch his scent, not recognizing the animal ahead of them as their own master, and pull him down and tear him apart exactly as they have been trained to do to any stag they run to ground. Some tellings put the number of hounds at fifty, each one named in the text as it joins the kill. The myth turns Actaeon's own skill and his own pack into the instrument of his death, and it is told less as an account of Actaeon's fault, which the myth treats as an accident rather than a violation, than as a demonstration of exactly how absolute a claim Artemis makes on her own privacy.