HOG HUNTING

The Labours of #Heracles
The Boar of #erymanthios

Erymanthios is a real mountain in the NW Peloponnese and its lower slopes did have Mid Helladic and Mycenaean settlements and those fertile slopes and farms were once ravaged by a enormous wild boar.

Heracles was ordered to bring the beast back alive not just kill it.

Now this wily porcine know all the hiding places and thickets and it was winter when Heracles finally cornered the beast forcing it into a deep drift of snow so he could could snare it and tie and bind it and carry it back to Mycenae.

His unfortunate cousin Eurystheus was so horrified he was said to have hidden himself inside a pithos or a bronze urn and refused to face him though the vase painter seems to have preferred a version of the story in which Heracles confronts him.

Perhaps this is a scene from an Attic satyr play?

Amphitrite in Art Two

Amphitrite in Art Two .
Here's two more vase paintings.
The first one features Theseus Athena and Amphitrite.

There is a story that Minos tested Theseus' claim to be a son of Poseidon by throwing a ring into the sea. Theseus dived in after it. Aided by dolphins he swam down to Amphitrite's underseas palace and retrieved not only the ring but also a golden crown.

Given the presence of dolphins and Triton supporting Theseus plus Athena appearing this suggests to me that there may have been another lost version of this story in which Athena sponsors and protects Theseus as he encounters his father's wife and given how mnay dramas did NOT survive even perhaps a play in which Athena argues for the need for wives to be kind to sons their husbands had by other women?

The other story we have about Poseidon and Amphitrite is that she was reluctant to marry him and this image seems to show Iris messenger of the gods acting as a matchmaker between the two gods?

Sometimes when written versions don't surivive as more than summaries in the mythographers vase paintings and other art give us more of the story.

But don't forget the ancients may have perceived these images differently!

A Brief History of Hermes in ART

How the Greeks and Romans depicted Hermes in ART.

The earliest images of Hermes show a mature adult with a beard.

but this changes about the beginning of the hellenistic era

Hermes loses his beard and appears younger

then we have the Roman version

finally here's a modern depiction ... ye sit is a page form a comic book EARTH2 but Nicola Scott does excellent art and I wanted to show you a modern use of a mythic image.