Infernal Hunts: Actaeon, Dante and Boccaccio

Besides the Bible, as might be expected, two of the most widely read books of Antiquity during the Middle Ages were Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To such an extent that both works were enjoyed almost like spicy, action-packed bestsellers by monks and courtiers. Both became models for countless medieval and later works, either in part or as a whole, in literature, painting and other artistic forms. Through chapbooks, which gathered influences from many different sources, and through the circulation of street performers and musicians, particularly the goliards —itinerant and impoverished clerics who made their living through music and performance— many ideas and scenes from classical literature also reached ordinary people, adapted and removed from their original contexts.

More specifically, in the Metamorphoses we find an important myth that connects with the legend of the Accursed Hunter, which we saw in the first article devoted to Lo somni: the human hunt of Actaeon. In it, the hunter-prince Actaeon sees the goddess Artemis while she is bathing, without her veil, and the goddess decides to kill him. In ancient religious practice, the gods could not be looked upon directly, not even inside their temples, where statues could be veiled, covered, placed behind partial walls or hidden in inner chambers. But this is a very late and poetic version, because, as with any orally transmitted myth, there were many variants (Burkert 1985; Rose and March 2015).

The original cause was probably not that he saw her naked, but rather the breaking of a taboo imposed by the goddess —for example, hunting or entering a sacred woodland dedicated to her— or Actaeon boasting that he was a better hunter than Artemis, as appears in the much earlier work of Euripides. There is also an old story of rivalry with Zeus over the princess Semele —the mother of Dionysus— which ultimately brings about his doom. In any case, what matters is not that he sees her naked, but simply that he sees her. Something similar occurred, among many other examples, in the cult of Wolf-Zeus on Mount Lykaion —the Mountain of the Wolf.

Ovid’s version, however, in a work such as the Metamorphoses, largely centred on erotic themes and seemingly endless scenes of violence, became far more influential, precisely because of these two central themes (Euripides, Bacchae, 337–340; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, III, 4, 4; Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 138–252; Burkert 1985; Rose and March 2015).

Below you can read a version I have adapted, with only minor changes, from Ovid (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 138–252).

Joachim Wtewael, Diana and Actaeon, 1607. Actaeon, transformed from hunter into prey, is attacked by his own hounds under the gaze of the goddess. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain.

The human hunt of Actaeon

The mountain was stained with blood from the slaughter of beasts of every kind. Midday had already shortened the shadows of things, and the sun stood equally distant from both ends of its course, when the young Actaeon addressed his companions in a calm voice. “The nets are soaked, my friends, and so is the iron, with the blood of beasts, and this day has brought us fortune enough. When another Aurora, carried upon her saffron-coloured wheels, brings back the light, we shall resume the task we had set ourselves. Now Phoebus, the Sun, stands equally far from both limits and splits the fields with his heat. Stop the work and gather up the nets.” The men obey and bring the hunt to an end.

There was a valley thick with firs and pointed cypresses, called Gargaphia, sacred to Diana [Artemis], Goddess of the Hunt. In its most secluded corner stood a wooded grotto untouched by any human hand. To the right sounded a pool of clear, delicate water, its broad opening surrounded by a border of grass. Here the wild Goddess of the woods, weary from hunting, would often bathe.

When she entered, the Goddess handed her weapons to one of her nymphs, the javelin, the quiver and the unstrung bow. Another nymph received the cloak she had removed. Two loosened the straps from her feet. Another gathered into a knot the hair that fell long upon her neck. And while the Goddess was bathing, Actaeon, who had left his companions far behind and wandered with uncertain steps through a forest he did not know, reached the sacred enclosure. As soon as he entered the grotto, the nymphs, naked as they were, saw a man and filled the forest with inhuman cries. They gathered around Diana and covered her with their bodies. But the goddess herself was taller than all of them and rose above them to the neck.

The Goddess, though surrounded by the multitude of her nymphs, turned sideways, tilted her face back and, wishing she had her arrows to hand, took what lay within reach, the sacred water, and cast it into the man’s face, adding these words that foretold the disaster to come: “Now tell, if you can tell it, that you have seen me without my veil.” And she caused the antlers of a stag to grow from his head, lengthened his neck and the tips of his ears, transformed his hands into hooves and his arms into legs, and covered his body with a mottled hide. And to all this she added fear.

The hero flees and, as he runs, is himself astonished by his speed. But when he saw in the water his face and his antlers, he said: “Alas, wretched me!” Yet no voice followed. Tears ran down a face that was no longer his own. Only his former mind remained. What was he to do? How could he survive? Return home and to the royal palace, or hide in the woods? Shame prevents the one, fear the other.

While he hesitates, the hounds see him. Eager for their prey, they pursue him over rocks and cliffs, across inaccessible stones, where the path is difficult and where there is no path at all. He flees through the very places where so often he had pursued other beasts. He longed to cry out: “I am Actaeon! Recognise your master!” But words do not obey his will. The air resounds with barking. The pack gathers around him and sinks its teeth into his body. There is no room left for another wound. He groans and produces a sound that, although it is not human, is not one a stag could make either, and fills the mountains he knew so well with his lament.

On his knees, like a suppliant and resembling someone begging for mercy, he silently turns his face and looks around him. But his companions, unaware of what is happening, urge on the savage pack with their familiar cries, search for Actaeon with their eyes and, as though he were absent, all call out at once: “Actaeon! Actaeon!” He turns his head when he hears his name. And they lament that he is not there and cannot witness the spectacle of the quarry. He would indeed wish to be absent. But he is there. And he would wish to see, rather than feel upon his own flesh, the brutal actions of his mastiffs. They surround him on every side and, sinking their muzzles into his body, tear apart their master beneath the appearance of a stag.

And it is said that the anger of Diana, the wild goddess of bow and quiver, was not satisfied until his life ended beneath innumerable wounds.

The bloody and claustrophobic scene in which neither his companions nor his mastiffs recognise Actaeon, while he is still able to think like a human being as they eat him alive, is one of Ovid’s great narrative achievements. A scene that, as we shall see below, left a strong mark on some of the leading authors of the Italian Renaissance.

Gustave Doré, The squanderers pursued by infernal hounds, illustration for Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno. Lano and Jacopo da Sant’Andrea are pursued by a black pack of hounds through the Wood of the Suicides. Public domain.

The human hunt in the Wood of the Suicides

Moving forward in time, two of the most brilliant and influential courtly versions of the Middle Ages were, first, the episode set in the Wood of the Suicides in the Inferno, from Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy, and, clearly influenced by Dante, the cruel tale of Nastagio degli Onesti in Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–1375) Decameron. Both works, as we shall see, lie behind the version by Bernat Metge discussed in the previous article on the Accursed Hunter and Lo somni, although his version is closer to popular sources than those of the two Italian poets. Dante and Boccaccio drew on an immense range of influences, from Latin literature to tales from oral tradition. As for the hunting episodes mentioned here, Dante drew ideas from the Aeneid, such as the blood-soaked wood of the Harpies, and above all from the hunt of Actaeon in the Metamorphoses, which you have read above (Dante, Inferno, XIII; Fiorilla 2024).

Dante writes:

“We were still attentive to the trunk [of the tree into which the condemned suicide has been fused], believing that he wished to tell us something more, when suddenly we were surprised by a great crashing sound.

Like someone who hears the boar and the hunt coming towards the place where he waits, and hears the beasts and branches trembling. And behold, from the left appeared two men, naked and scratched, fleeing with such force that they broke through every obstacle in the wood. The one in front cried: ‘Now come, come to me, death, kill me!’ And the other, who seemed to find him too slow, cried: ‘Lano, your legs were not so nimble at the jousts of Toppo!’ And then, perhaps because he was short of breath, he made of himself and a bush a single tangled mass.

Behind them, the wood was full of black bitches, ravenous and running, like greyhounds just released from the chain. They sank their teeth into the man who had hidden behind the bushes and tore him apart piece by piece. Then they carried away those suffering limbs.”

(Dante, Inferno, XIII, 109–129)

The scene recalls Actaeon, but Dante reverses motif E501 of the Wild Hunt. In the Divine Comedy, the poet and his guide Virgil hear what seems to be a boar hunt, only to discover that the quarry consists of condemned human souls and that the bitches or mastiffs pursuing them, eventually devouring and dismembering them, are infernal creatures. Through this, Dante expresses the idea that those who squandered their wealth in life treated themselves as prey, destroying themselves in a manner analogous to suicide. In other words, wasting one’s life and property becomes a kind of suicide.

He draws on several submotifs of the broader E501 complex, such as the crashing noise [E501.13.1, E501.4.1.10], the demonic hounds [E501.4.1] and the endlessly repeated torture as punishment [Q501], while removing the leader and other motifs that are usually central (Thompson 1955–1958). The scene by the Florentine poet, owing to the universal importance of his work, is one of the medieval depictions of the infernal hunt that has been most frequently reproduced and remembered throughout history, while others, such as those found in exempla or folktales, have fallen into oblivion. This is not the case with the following one, described by Boccaccio.

The cruel hunt in the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti

Boccaccio, in what is probably the most violent and explicit of all the narratives in this article, tells of how Nastagio degli Onesti is a young nobleman rejected by the woman he loves. Depressed, he leaves the city and settles near a wood. Here begins the tale, which you can read below in full (Boccaccio, Decameron, V, 8).

Later, Nastagio invites his beloved and her family to a banquet in the same place. When the young woman witnesses the hunt, she fears that she might suffer a similar punishment and agrees to marry him. The Decameron, and this tale in particular, would become very well known, although some of its stories or novellas circulated more widely than others. Later, the great Italian Renaissance master Botticelli would paint the episode, making it even more famous. The extraordinarily graphic violence of the scene was undoubtedly one of the reasons for its success, because blood has always sold to the right audience.

As for Boccaccio’s use of folklore, he draws on some of the most violent religious exempla —stories used to spread doctrine among ordinary people, which I have discussed at length in Rondalles de Difunts and Rondalles del Diable— and, above all, on the widespread folkloric motif of the dead person condemned to repeat the same journey over and over because of evil deeds committed in life. Something similar was often believed, as in the tales of Dante or Boccaccio, of suicides, who were thought to remain in an indeterminate space, unable ever fully to cross over either into Heaven or into Hell.

La belle dame sans merci and the hunter hunted

One very interesting reversal shared by the three narratives we have seen is that, like other unfortunate figures from Classical Antiquity —King Pentheus, the musician Orpheus, the nymph Callisto or the beautiful Adonis— the hunter becomes the hunted, the predator becomes prey. Actaeon, a great hunter, ends up being hunted by someone more powerful than himself, the wild Goddess. In Dante, those who were wealthy and squandered great fortunes become victims of their own wastefulness. After all, the Accursed Hunter, in his most widespread Christian and European form, also breaks a religious taboo by leaving to hunt at the moment of the elevation of the Host or the transubstantiation. In his eternal pursuit of the demonic hare, he too eventually becomes, in a sense, a victim, and the boundaries between who is really hunting whom become blurred. There is also a bond or identification between hunter and prey that reaches back into remote times and can still be found today in the traditions of many hunting peoples across the world (Eliade 1978).

In Boccaccio, the tale should be read in the light of the idea of the “lady without mercy”, an archetypal figure of courtly love who inspires love and then denies her own love to the suitor. In courtly literature she often appears rejecting or dominating the lover and, seen through the male code of love, may be presented as cold or cruel. Romantic rejection could become, in literary terms, a reversal of roles in which the lover who sought to conquer the lady ends up subjected to her. This happens, for example, when Lady Bertilak assumes the active role of seducer and presses Gawain inside a closed chamber, while the knight is placed in the passive position. This reversal of amorous roles appears frequently in medieval courtly literature (Heng 1992). In fact, it is one of the structures of the courtly game of love.

In some texts, this reversal can be taken to an extreme and turn the lady into a threatening or destructive figure for the lover. The woman who rejects, tempts or dominates may be described from the male point of view as cruel, manipulative or lacking in mercy, while the lover appears subjected to his desire and incapable of freeing himself from it. Here it no longer belongs to a courtly game, with the typical metaphor of a warrior laying siege to a fortress and eventually overcoming it, in which the lady —the Lord— plays the expected role of hardness and the knight —the Vassal— that of the tireless lover at her mercy. At this extreme, the motif enters a darker aspect of the relationship between domination and submission. This imaginary would eventually merge, after many transformations, with later figures such as the femme fatale. Yet medieval literature offered a vast range of different treatments of the theme and generated a heated debate around it.

Later, for example, in 1424, the poet Alain Chartier —who exerted considerable influence on Catalan literature— gave it the name by which it would enter literary history as a figure of poems and novels: La Belle Dame sans merci. Other texts produced by the ensuing controversy would even speak of La Cruelle femme en amour. In much of this debate, the lady’s “guilt” consists precisely in rejecting the man’s amorous advances. In Chartier’s poem, however, the lady is an intelligent figure who rationally and calmly refutes the lover’s arguments and, in practice, defends her right not to reciprocate his feelings. Her refusal generated an important literary controversy because some contemporary readers interpreted this freedom as a form of cruelty. Paradoxically, the expression belle dame sans merci, especially from its Romantic reception in the nineteenth century onwards, gradually became associated with the archetype of the beautiful and destructive woman rather than with that of a woman who simply wishes to exercise her freedom (Chartier 2004; Piaget 1901–1905; Cayley 2006).

Returning to Boccaccio, he tells us that the lady “had rejoiced enormously” at the death of Guido degli Anastagi. As in the previous examples, the huntress becomes the hunted, in a kind of sadomasochistic phantasmagoria that condemns lover and beloved to celebrate their bloody “wedding” for ever. Petrarch, in Song XXIII of his Canzoniere, combines this idea of the cruel lady with the hunt of Actaeon, turning the image of the hunt into a metaphor for his own passion and making himself the victim of his own desire.

“I followed my desire so far that one day, hunting as I used to do, I set out upon my way; and that beautiful and cruel wild creature was naked in a fountain when the sun burned most fiercely. I, because no other sight could satisfy me, remained there watching her. She was ashamed and, whether to avenge herself or conceal herself, threw water into my face with her hands. I shall tell the truth, though it may perhaps seem a lie: I felt myself torn from my own form and, swiftly transformed into a solitary wandering stag, I fled from wood to wood. And still I flee from the pack of my own hounds.”

(Petrarch, Canzoniere, XXIII)

But unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio introduces an anti-romantic note about love, one that is almost anti-Christian, concealed beneath the atrocious graphic violence and the explicit language of divine justice through which the poet frames the scene. At this point, the Italian poet moves away from gentler versions of Christian love and becomes severe, as in the exempla he takes as models. For if the love of Christ saves and redeems in Christianity, in the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti worldly, human and carnal love destroys and condemns. It is almost as if Boccaccio were pointing at the cruel scene and saying to us: “This is what love does to people.”

The example that probably influenced Boccaccio most directly was that of “The Lady Abducted by the Devil”, which appears in several collections of exempla and authors across Europe from at least the twelfth century onwards, and which itself draws on older mythical sources lost in time, belonging to the type of the abduction of Persephone or Feronia. In the specific case of the Italian poet, there is the version found in Iacopo Passavanti’s Specchio di vera penitenza, upon which Boccaccio appears to have superimposed visual and narrative elements drawn from Dante (Fiorilla 2024). But this tale, together with its other versions, will be discussed in the next article on the subject.