 In Greek literature he first appears as a great hunter in Homer 's epic the Odyssey , where Odysseus sees his shade in the underworld . The bare bones of his story are told by the Hellenistic and Roman collectors of myths , but there is no extant literary version of his adventures comparable , for example , to that of Jason in Apollonius of Rhodes ' Argonautica or Euripides ' Medea ; the entry in Ovid 's Fasti for May 11 is a poem on the birth of Orion , but that is one version of a single story . The surviving fragments of legend have provided a fertile field for speculation about Greek prehistory and myth . 
