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Erymanthian Boar

 

 

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Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar presented to Eurystheus (A cousin of Hercules who was king of Mycenae and Tiryns) He ordered Hercules the 12 labors. Here Hercules brings him the boar alive and Eurystheus hides in a bronze vase. He has a, opposite to Hercules, weak character. Amphora, 5^th century BC, British Museum

We have the unavoidable reference to Hercules and the Erymanthian boar. The feat of Admetus in yoking a lion and boar to his chariot is alluded to; there is also a poem by Archias describing a bronze effigy of the Calydonian boar, that monster large as a bull and with tusks like those of an elephant, which ravaged the land till Meleager and a chosen company of heroes and heroines put an end to it. The tusks and skin were at first preserved, like any other precious relic, in the shrine of Artemis at Tegea; then Augustus, who had a weakness for such curiosities, caused one of the teeth—the other was broken—to be transported into a temple of Bacchus at Rome. Pausanias tells us that its length was half a fathom. The hide, meanwhile, remained in the museum-shrine at Tegea, where that traveller saw it in a sadly decayed condition and deprived of all its bristles, as it may well have been after a thousand years or more. Now had this skin been a saintly relic deposited in some Roman Catholic church, it would have been kept up to date and periodically renewed—a system which is more spectacular but less conformable to reason, and which therefore furnishes a microscopic illustration of the difference between the religion of Hellas and that of Saint Peter. Norman Douglas, Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology, 1928

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