Interesting as the Arcadian huntress, Atalanta, is in herself, she is an intrusion, and not a very convenient intrusion, into the Homeric story of the Kalydônian boar-hunt, wherein another female Kleopatra, already occupied the foreground.[344] But the more recent version became accredited throughout Greece, and 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 successive centuries hung the identical hide and the gigantic tusks of three feet in length, in the temple of Athênê Alea at Tegea. Kallimachus mentions them as being there preserved, in the third century before the Christian æra;[345] 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 Athênê Alea, and conveyed them to Rome, to be there preserved among the public curiosities. Even a century and a half afterwards, 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 memento preserved at Tegea of the heroic enterprise. On the pediment of the temple of Athênê Alea, unparalleled in Peloponnêsus for beauty and grandeur, the illustrious statuary Skopas had executed one of his most finished reliefs, representing the Kalydônian hunt. Atalanta and Meleager were placed in the front rank of the assailants, and Ankæus, one of the Tegean heroes, to whom the tusks of the boar had proved fatal,[346] 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 Xerxês, and the battle of Dipæ against Sparta—might fairly claim to themselves, through Ankæus and Atalanta, that they alone amongst all Arcadians had participated in the glory of the Kalydônian boar-hunt.[347] So entire and unsuspecting is the faith both of the Tegeans and of Pausanias in the past historical reality of this romantic adventure. Strabo indeed tries to transform the romance into something which has the outward semblance of history, by remarking that the quarrel respecting the boar’s head and hide cannot have been the real cause of war between the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians; the true ground of dispute (he contends) was probably the possession of a portion of territory.[348] His remarks on this head are analogous to those of Thucydidês and other critics, when they ascribe the Trojan war, not to the rape of Helen, but to views of conquest or political apprehensions. But he treats the general fact of the battle between the Kurêtes and the Ætôlians, mentioned in the Iliad, as something unquestionably real and historical—recapitulating at the same time a