meaning as the god's struggle with the Chaos-dragon and similarly represented the Hero's role in the preservation of humanity and of the natural order of the world through rebirth and reproduction: the tree, always depicted in leaf, symbolised the rebirth of Nature, and was a Thracian version of the Tree of Life the wild boar, on the contrary, was associated with life and death in ancient times in Asia Minor and the Balkans: in Greek myth, a boar dismembered the Cretan Zeus Heracles earned immortality by killing the boar of Erymanthus Meleager died because he gave up the head of the boar of Calydon he had killed) the boar was also an enemy of fertility in ancient religions: the boars of Calydon, Erymanthus and Mysia destroyed crops in the fields in Gaulish religion, the boar dug up the roots of the apple tree, which was the northern version of the Tree of Life The boar also held a special symbolic status by representing the Indo-European god of war since, like the wild warrior initiate, it was an undifferentiated animal, being both herbivorous and predatory, land-dwelling but preferring marshes and swamps, and therefore a borderline creature existing at the threshold of the wild and the domesticated. These qualities meant the wild boar was a symbol of death, as well as of Chaos where all attributes and qualities are undifferentiated, making it a fitting main rival of the Hero, and analogously, of a Thracian prince aspiring to be king (the theme of a mythical hero-king fighting a boar is also present among Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples). The role of the boar hunt as an initiatory trial also had genealogical implications: succeeding in the hunt assured the continuation of the royal dynasty, and failing it led to the end of the dynasty: in Greek myth, the dynasty of Calydon ended with the death of Meleager in Greek myth again, it was to prevent Zeus from founding a new dynasty that the boar, which was a symbol of Cronus, dismembered him historically, it was after the Lydian king Croesus's son Atys died in a boar hunt that his kingdom was conquered by the Persian Cyrus Thus, the struggle between the animal and the Hero represented the struggle to protect life itself, that is the life of the people, the prince, and the royal line: the hunt was therefore, for Thracian princes, not only a