The Tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes

At a Glance

• Central figures: Atalanta, a swift-footed huntress who set a deadly footrace as the price of her hand; and Hippomenes (also called Melanion), the young suitor who won the race with divine help.
• Setting: Ancient Greece, in the tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and earlier Greek sources; the race takes place at a course where defeated suitors have already been put to death.
• The turn: Hippomenes, aided by Aphrodite, throws three golden apples during the race - each one catching Atalanta’s eye and drawing her off her pace long enough for him to pull ahead.
• The outcome: Hippomenes crosses the finish line first and wins Atalanta in marriage; but the couple neglects to honor Aphrodite, and she arranges their punishment.
• The legacy: Both Atalanta and Hippomenes are transformed into lions - condemned to live together yet, by the belief of the Greeks, unable to mate with one another, a permanent consequence of their failure to honor the goddess.

Atalanta was raised by a she-bear in the wild and then by hunters, and she grew up owing nothing to anyone. She could outrun every man in Hellas, and when her admirers pressed for marriage she made them a simple offer: race her and win, and she would be a wife; race her and lose, and she would be a widow before she was a bride. The losers died. Their bodies lined the course like a warning no one heeded, because she was beautiful and fast and somehow men kept believing they would be the exception.

They were not the exception. Until Hippomenes.

The Huntress and Her Terms

Before the suitors, before the race, there was the girl herself. Atalanta had sailed with the Argonauts, or so some accounts say, and she had drawn first blood at the Calydonian Boar Hunt, loosing her arrow into the boar’s flank before any of the heroes. Meleager, who loved her, pressed her trophy on her over the objections of his uncles, and the quarrel over that pelt ended in blood. She moved through the world of men leaving wreckage behind her and walked away clean.

Marriage, to her, meant the end of all that. So she attached a killing condition to it, and watched the suitors come anyway. She ran barefoot, or nearly so, her hair loose, and she still reached the far post before any of them, turned, and watched them panting and stumbling and then watched the executioners. It was not cruelty. It was the only language the suitors seemed to understand, and even that was not enough to stop them.

Hippomenes and Aphrodite’s Garden

Hippomenes came to watch and left unable to think of anything else. He had come as a spectator, meaning to shake his head at the fools who competed, and instead he stood at the edge of the course and watched Atalanta run and fell entirely and irreversibly in love. He was young. He was not, by any reckoning, faster than she was.

He went to Aphrodite.

The goddess of love kept a sacred garden, and in it grew a tree with golden apples - not metaphorically golden, not poetically golden, but fruit that shone like hammered metal and caught the light the way a jewel does. Aphrodite gave Hippomenes three of them. She told him when to throw them, and where, and how far off the path. The apples would do the rest.

Whether Hippomenes was grateful at the time, or simply terrified and nodding along, the myth does not say. He took the apples. He registered for the race.

The Three Apples

Atalanta pulled ahead immediately. She always did. The distance between her and any given man grew in the first hundred yards and kept growing, and the crowd watching would have known it was over before it had properly begun, except that Hippomenes had something in his hand.

He threw the first apple off to the side of the course. It landed in the grass and rolled, catching the sun as it turned, and Atalanta saw it. She was not a fool - she knew a distraction when she saw one. But the apple was extraordinary, genuinely extraordinary, and she was ahead by enough, and she angled off and scooped it up without breaking stride, or nearly without breaking stride, and Hippomenes had closed the gap to almost nothing by the time she returned to the path.

He threw the second apple. She slowed again. The third he threw farther, into deep grass, and she had to stop to find it - three heartbeats, maybe four - and when she straightened up, Hippomenes was at the post.

She had lost three races and she had only been running one. When the crowd realized what had happened there was a moment of strange silence before the noise came up. Hippomenes had crossed the line. He was still standing. By the terms she had set herself, he was her husband.

The Temple and the Punishment

What followed might have been ordinary happiness. Hippomenes had won something extraordinary and Atalanta, for all her resistance, seems to have honored the result. But Hippomenes forgot the debt. Aphrodite had given him three golden apples and the instructions to use them, and he had walked away from her garden with everything he needed and then - nothing. No sacrifice. No offering. No acknowledgment that the race had not been his to win alone.

Aphrodite noticed. Gods always notice this particular failure. It is, perhaps, the one that angers them most, because it is not ignorance but ingratitude, which is a choice.

Her revenge came in the form of desire. The two of them, passing a temple sacred to Zeus - or to Cybele, depending on the telling - were seized by sudden passion and went in. They consummated their marriage inside the temple walls, which was not something the gods permitted, and the temple’s occupant was not inclined to overlook it.

Lions

The transformation was swift. Their bodies lengthened and dropped to four legs. The tawny coats came over them like a tide. Atalanta, who had been the fastest woman in Hellas, was now a lioness, her husband a lion beside her, and they would never be anything else.

The Greeks believed, in those days, that lions could not mate with one another - that a lioness would only accept a leopard, that a lion required some other mate. Whether the belief was true hardly mattered in the story. What mattered was the punishment’s architecture: Hippomenes and Atalanta would live side by side, forever, and be forever denied the thing they had profaned the temple to take. They would be together and apart. The race was long over. Its consequences were not.