The statue depicts the legendary Greek hunter Meleager, who earned his fame by killing a ferocious boar that terrorized the people of Calydon. About forty Roman sculptural representations of Meleager survive, leading scholars to conclude that there was likely an earlier Greek statue on which they are based, presumably by the architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros, who incorporated a marble relief depicting the Calydonian boar hunt on one of his buildings. However, none of the ancient authors who wrote about Greek sculpture mention that Skopas created a large-scale, three-dimensional statue of Meleager, so the attribution to him is uncertain.