Artemis who Artemis turns into a stag for a transgression and who is then killed by hunting dogs. Usually, the dogs are his own, who no longer recognize their master. Sometimes they are Artemis' hounds. According to the standard modern text on the work, Lamar Ronald Lacey's "The Myth of Aktaion: Literary and Iconographic Studies", the most likely original version of the myth is that Actaeon was the hunting companion of the goddess who, seeing her naked in her sacred spring, attempts to force himself on her. For this hubris, he is turned into a stag and devoured by his own
Diana and Actaeon the transformation still in progress; like many depictions the head is shown transformed, but most of the body remains human. Less often Actaeon is fully transformed when caught by his dogs. The story was popular on Italian Renaissance maiolica. The origins of the "Diana and Actaeon Pas de Deux," a "divertissement" created for a 1935 version of "La Esmeralda," lie in two earlier ballet productions. The first of these was "Tsar Kandavl" (aka "Le Roi Candaule"), premiered in 1868 by the Imperial Russian Ballet in Saint Petersburg. Based on a story told by Herodotus in his "Histories," this four-act ballet,