Statue of the Calydonian Boar at the visitor entrance, Osborne House, Isle of Wight. This is an early 20th century copy to replace the destroyed original.
The Calydonian boar hunt is one of the great heroic adventures in Greek legend. It occurred in the generation prior to that of the Trojan War, and stands along side the other great heroic adventure of that generation, the voyage of the Argonauts, which preceded it. The purpose of the hunt was to kill the Calydonian boar (also called the Aetolian boar), which had been sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in Aetolia, because its king Oeneus had failed to honour her in his rites to the gods. The hunters, led by the hero Meleager, included many of the foremost heroes of Greece. In most accounts, it also included a great heroine, Atalanta, who won its hide by first wounding it with an arrow. This outraged some of the men, with tragic results.