Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/179

 AT AL ANT A. 147 was sustained by evidence which few persons in those days felt any inclination to controvert. For Atalanta carried away with her the spoils and head of the boar into Arcadia ; and there for sue cessive centuries hung the identical hide and the gigantic tusks of three feet in length, in the temple of Athene Alea at Tegea. Kallimachus mentions them as being there preserved, in the third century before the Christian aera ; l but the extraordinary value set upon them is best proved by the fact that the emperor Augustus took away the tusks from Tegea, along with the great statue of Athene Alea, and conveyed them to Rome, to be there preserved among the public curiosities. Even a century and a half after- wards, when Pausanias visited Greece, the skin worn out with age was shown to him, while the robbery of the tusks had not been forgotten. Nor were these relics of the boar the only me- mento preserved at Tegea of the heroic enterprise. On the pediment of the temple of Athene Alea, unparalleled in Pelo- ponnesus for beauty and grandeur, the illustrious statuary Skopas had executed one of his most finished reliefs, representing the Kalydonian hunt. Atalanta and Meleager were placed in the front rank of the assailants, and Ankseus, one of the Tegean heroes, to whom the tusks of the boar had proved fatal, 2 was represented as sinking under his death-wound into the arms of his brother Epochos. And Pausanias observes, that the Tegeans, while they had manifested the same honorable forwardness as other Arcadian communities in the conquest of Troy, the repulse of Xerxes, and the battle of Dipae against Sparta might fairly claim to themselves, through Ankaeus and Atalanta, that they alone amongst all Arcadians had participated in the glory of the Kalydonian boar-hunt. 3 So entire and unsuspecting is the faith 1 Kallimachus, Hymn, ad Dian. 217. Ov fiiv TTiK?i,r]Tol Kahvduvioi u-ypevrfipcf Me/nij)OVTai KUTrpoio ' ril yap arjfj.7]ta viKijf 2 See Pherekyd. Frag. 81, ed. Didot. 3 Pausan. viii. 45, 4; 46, 1-3; 47, 2. Lucian, adv. Indoctum, c. 14. t. iiL p. lll,Reiz. The officers placed in charge of the public curiosities or wonders at Roma lot tnl roif davuaaiv) affirmed that one of the tusks had been accidentally