Actaeon accidentally seen Diana (Artemis) on Mount Cithaeron while she was bathing, he was changed by her into a stag, and pursued and killed by his fifty hounds. This version also appears in Callimachus' Fifth Hymn, as a mythical parallel to the blinding of Tiresias after he sees Athena bathing. The literary testimony of Actaeon's myth is largely lost, but Lamar Ronald Lacy, deconstructing the myth elements in what survives and supplementing it by iconographic evidence in late vase-painting, made a plausible reconstruction of an ancient Actaeon myth that Greek poets may have inherited and subjected to expansion and dismemberment. His
The Death of Actaeon Titian seems never to have resolved it to his satisfaction, and the painting apparently remained in his studio until his death in 1576. There has been considerable debate as to whether it is finished or not, as with other very late Titians, such as the "Flaying of Marsyas", which unlike this has a signature, perhaps an indication of completion. It is a sequel of Titian's work "Diana and Actaeon" showing the story's tragic conclusion, which approximately follows the Roman poet Ovid's account in the "Metamorphoses": after Actaeon surprised the goddess Diana bathing naked in the woods, she transformed him into