ABSTRACT
The story might well have ended happily at this point if Meleagros, as the slayer of the beast, had chosen to keep the prize of honour for himself; but he decided to award the hide and tusks to Atalanta instead, either out of admiration for her valour and skill93 or because he had fallen in love with her.94 By making this gesture, he inadvertently provoked a quarrel with his maternal uncles, the sons of Thestios, who protested that the prize should go to them by right of birth rather than to a woman and a foreigner if their nephew chose not to take it. When they advanced from words to action by seizing the hide from Atalanta, Meleagros flew into a rage and killed them, and so incurred his own destruction; for his mother Althaia was so furious to hear that he had killed her brothers that she rekindled the log on which his life depended, and he expired as soon as it was burnt away.95 His sisters wept for him so inconsolably that Artemis took pity on them and transformed them into guinea-fowl (meleagrides). Deianeira and Gorge were left unchanged, however, at the request of Dionysos, and so survived to marry Herakles and Andraimon respectively as ancient tradition demanded.96
