The Greek Myths

by Robin Waterfield

  Alcmene was frightened now, and dared not suckle the baby in case she aroused Hera’s wrath. She took the baby out of the palace and abandoned it in the maquis, most likely to die. But Zeus sent Hermes to bring the infant secretly to Olympus and ensure that he sucked at the breast of Hera herself, so that, despite being mortal, Heracles should attain godhood. But the baby bit the great goddess’s nipple and she thrust him away in pain, and Hermes brought the baby back to Alcmene and persuaded her to raise him herself. “Be of good cheer,” he reassured her. “Your child shall know greatness.”

  When baby Heracles strangled Hera’s vipers, Alcmene knew he was Zeus’ son.[52]

  Heracles grew like a young sapling in an orchard. As a youth, he had the best teachers for everything: Linus for music, the son of Apollo and Psamathe; Eurytus for archery; Amphitryon for chariot-driving; and Autolycus, the father of Anticlea, for wrestling. But in a fit of anger Heracles killed Linus. The teacher struck the student, as teachers will, for a mistake—and Heracles picked up the stool on which he was sitting and struck him back. The young hero was banished from Thebes to the slopes and gorges of a nearby mountain, where he killed a lion that was preying on the cattle of Thespius, the king of Thespiae. In gratitude, Thespius let the young man sleep with all his daughters, and there were fifty of them, each more fair than her sisters. Thespius could recognize a hero when he saw one, and wanted his grandchildren to inherit something of that spirit.

  Heracles engineered his return to Thebes by offering to do Creon an immense favor. Thebes at the time was subject to Orchomenus, and paid the king of Orchomenus one hundred oxen every year, a heavy burden. But Heracles led the Theban army out into the field and inflicted a decisive defeat on the people of Orchomenus, though Amphitryon died in the battle. Creon gave Heracles his daughter Megara to wed, and she proved to be a loyal wife and sensible mother.

  The years passed in peace. Heracles grew in strength and Megara bore him fine children, who were the delight of their parents. But heroes are not destined for peace. Hera hadn’t finished persecuting the son of Zeus—she would never finish, until his death—and from high Olympus she sent a fit of madness down into the home of Heracles and Megara. Suddenly, the house seemed strange to Heracles, as though it were the home of some enemy. It was filled with foes, and he hunted them from room to room, slaughtering as he went.

  When Athena saw what was going on, she raced down from Olympus and hurled a stone at Heracles’ head. He dropped unconscious and sprawled on the floor, blood matting his thick-curled hair and beard. When he came to his senses, he found that the corpses that littered the rooms were not those of hostile strangers. Megara and his children lay on the floor, their lives ripped from them with appalling savagery.

  Horror-struck, Heracles went weeping to Delphi to seek the advice of Apollo. The god told him that he had to serve his cousin Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, for twelve years, and carry out whatever tasks he should set him. And the gods had Eurystheus set him hard labors, well nigh impossible, for Heracles was a man of great power and had to be tested greatly. But Apollo also declared, though not to Heracles himself, that at the end of this time Heracles should become immortal, not just for ridding the world of many evils, but especially for having aided the gods in their battle against the Giants.

  The Twelve Labors of Heracles

  The first batch of Heracles’ labors all took place in the Peloponnese. At the time, it was a wild and unruly place, as was much of the world, but Eurystheus seized the opportunity to make it safe, with Heracles as his heroic agent. For the first labor, Eurystheus demanded the skin of a lion that was ruining men’s livelihoods in the hills around nearby Nemea. Now, this lion, the offspring of the Chimera, had been raised by Hera specifically to be a trial for Heracles. Sword blades bent on its impenetrable hide, and clubs, such as the one Heracles carried, simply bounced off. When Heracles drew close to its lair, the lion sprang at him from a dark thicket. Its claws and fangs ripped Heracles’ flesh, but he flung aside his weapons, knowing how useless they were, and wrestled the creature with his bare hands. The fight was fierce, but brief, as Heracles locked his arms around the lion’s neck and strangled it to death.

  After staunching his wounds, he used the creature’s own razor-sharp claws to flay the otherwise uncuttable hide. And ever after Heracles wore the lionskin as his armor, with the jaws agape over his head as a helmet, the mane falling around his neck, and the rest of the pelt draping his powerful shoulders. He is known to all by his lionskin, his bow, and his club—a brigand’s attire. For Heracles tamed the world, but he was not tame himself.

  For the second labor, Heracles was sent to kill the Hydra, a serpentine water monster living in the marshes of Lerna, near Argos. Again, Hera had nurtured this vile offspring of Typhoeus, hoping that it would end the life of her husband’s bastard favorite. The creature writhed out of the turbid water to meet him, its nine heads hissing and snapping and spitting deadly poison. Eight of the heads were mortal, but one was immortal. Heracles confidently crushed one of the Hydra’s heads with his club, and slime and scum and blood sprayed in all directions—but then two heads, equally ghastly and dangerous, sprang up in place of the one he had crushed. And a gigantic crab emerged from the swamp, another of Hera’s pets, whose enormous, snapping claws threatened to disembowel the hero.

  Ducking beneath the Hydra’s hissing mouths as they snaked toward him, Heracles first smashed his club down onto the crab’s shell. No one but he could have even cracked the adamantine carapace, but one blow left the monster twitching feebly in the shallows, its dying claws snapping feebly at thin air. Hera was so fond of it that she translated it into the heavens as the constellation Cancer.

  Meanwhile, Heracles was struggling with the Hydra. Its body was entirely invulnerable, and its heads multiplied themselves if attacked. He clearly couldn’t manage alone, and he summoned his loyal companion Iolaus, the son of his twin brother Iphicles, from their camp. If Hera could cheat by sending two monsters at once, he was allowed an ally. Hera was desperate for the hero to fail: if he failed at any one of the labors set him by Eurystheus, even Zeus could not allow him to become immortal.

  Each time Heracles crushed one of the Hydra’s heads, two grew back in its place.[53]

  Heracles and Iolaus danced around the Hydra, nimbly dodging the gouts of poison that spewed from its mouths. Every time Heracles’ club struck off or crushed one of the Hydra’s heads, Iolaus immediately seared the stump with a blazing torch, to prevent another two heads from sprouting up.

  Finally, Heracles was left with only the immortal head. He struck it off with his club and buried it forever under an enormous rock. The monster’s corpse lay jerking spasmodically in the turbulent water, oozing deadly poison from the cauterized stumps of its necks, and as it died it seemed as though scores of snake-like vapors wriggled through the waters of the marsh away from the corpse. But with an eye to the future—an unseeing eye, as it turned out—Heracles dipped the heads of his arrows in the venom.

  For the third labor, Eurystheus asked Heracles to bring him a hind that lived on Mount Cerynea in Arcadia. This was a marvelous creature, with golden horns, despite being female. The hind was harmless, but the task was still peculiarly difficult, for the gentle animal was sacred to Artemis. Anyone who harmed it would incur the wrath of the goddess, and she had proved with Actaeon and others just how terrible her wrath could be. For month after month, Heracles chased the hind over hill and dale, looking for an opportunity to capture it.

  Many times he could have killed it from a distance with an arrow, but every time he crept up on it, the wary creature bounded away, and it was incredibly swift. In the end, he gave up trying to capture it with just his bare hands. It was impossible; he might as well try to make rope from sand. He took careful aim and barely grazed the hind with an arrow—just enough to slow it down—and then captured it and slung it across his shoulders to carry back to Tiryns. Artemis intercepted him and demanded to know what he was doing with her hin
d, but Heracles, thinking quickly, explained that he was on a mission for Eurystheus, as commanded by Artemis’ brother Apollo.

  For the fourth labor, Heracles had to round up an enormous boar that was devastating the land around Mount Erymanthus in northwest Arcadia. Not a root or blade of grass or ear of grain remained, and the monster was as big as a bull, but Heracles had to bring it back alive. He tracked the ferocious animal to its den and enticed it out. For days, they parried each other’s attacks, but the boar was always too swift and too strong for Heracles to trap in his nets. Eventually, high in the mountains of Arcadia, he found the solution. He drove the monstrous beast into a snowdrift, which halted it in its tracks long enough for Heracles to stun it with his club. Then he wrapped it in his nets, hauled it up onto his shoulders, and made his way back to Tiryns. The boar was so hideous and menacing, even when muffled in Heracles’ net, that when the hero entered Eurystheus’ palace, the king promptly scurried off and took refuge inside a large storage jar! Heracles despised him for his lack of spirit, and held the boar snout first above the mouth of the jar, so that the cowardly king got a good look at the fearsome beast. “And yet you are my master,” sneered the hero.

  On his way to Mount Erymanthus, Heracles happened upon another adventure—and a further sign that he was a man of destiny. He stopped for the night at the cave of the Centaur Pholus, and it turned out that this was a fated as well as a fateful visit. Dozens of years earlier, Dionysus himself had given Pholus a large jar of wine, with instructions that it was not to be opened until Heracles paid a visit. Pholus sank the jar into the ground for safe keeping and forgot about it; now, as a good host, he opened it. But the fragrant aroma attracted all the rest of the Centaurs from his tribe, and they stormed Pholus’ cave in their mad greed for the sweet wine. Heracles successfully defended the cave mouth and drove them off with flaming brands and arrows, and then set out in pursuit of the rest.

  Some of the Centaurs he tracked all the way to Thessaly, where they took refuge in the cave of their wise cousin Cheiron. Heracles attacked them there, and in the course of the siege Cheiron himself was wounded by one of Heracles’ poison-tipped arrows. This was the last thing Heracles wanted, and what made it worse was that Cheiron was immortal, the son of Philyra, one of the daughters of Ocean, and Cronus in the form of a horse. He could not die, only suffer unimaginable torment as the poison spread and seared his whole body from inside. In his agony, he appealed to Zeus for relief. Even Zeus couldn’t just cancel Cheiron’s immortality, but he banked it for Heracles in the future. So Cheiron could die and be free at last of pain.

  After attending sorrowfully to the Centaur’s burial, Heracles returned to Pholus’s cave in the Peloponnese, where further horror awaited him. While the hero was away, the Centaur had busied himself burying his slaughtered fellow tribesmen, consigning them to the worms and the gods. He then set about tidying the cave and collecting all Heracles’ spent arrows. He held one shaft lightly between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that, marveling that something so slight and slender could fell something as great as a Centaur. But in the course of his musing, he accidentally dropped the arrow, point first, onto the fleshy spot just above his hoof. Before long the Hydra’s venom had done its lethal work. The two Centaurs who were the best and noblest of their kind were dead, innocent victims of their race’s weakness for wine.

  For the fifth labor, Heracles traveled to Elis, in the northwest of the Peloponnese, where Augeas was king. Augeas was rich in cattle and owned huge numbers of them—but their stables had never been cleaned out and were deep in accumulated ordure. Heracles’ job was to muck out the stables within a single day. This was an impossible task, and Eurystheus fully expected Heracles to fail. But the canny hero found a solution to the messy problem: he diverted two rivers through the stables, and their rushing waters did the job for him with daylight to spare.

  Now, Augeas had also promised Heracles a tithe of all his cattle if he should succeed, but he reneged on his promise and drove out of Elis both Heracles and his own son Phyleus, who was ashamed by his father’s behavior and took Heracles’ side. They were received in the home of Dexamenus of Olympia, and in return Heracles did him a favor. His fair daughter was being harassed by the Centaur Eurytion’s unwanted attentions, but just one of Heracles’ arrows curbed the creature’s ardor forever. This was also the occasion when Heracles instituted the games at Olympia, by measuring out the length of the stadium where the footraces were to be held: he took a deep breath and sprinted until he had to draw breath again, and that was the length of the stadium.

  For the sixth labor, Eurystheus sent Heracles to Stymphalus, a town in northeast Arcadia. There was a beautiful lake there, overlooked by mountains and bordered by wooded shores—but the woods had been taken over by a flock of terrible birds, which could shoot their feathers like deadly arrows. Heracles could not expect just to enter the dark forest and shoot them from their lofty perches: the foliage was dense and their camouflaged plumage hid them well. But Athena gave him a bronze rattle, which Heracles dashed repeatedly against a mountain. The clamor spooked the birds and sent them soaring from their treetop roosts, squawking in alarm. And while they were circling in the open air, too frenzied to fire their feathers, Heracles shot them down with his trusty bow.

  The final six labors sent Heracles all over the world—and even under it. The seventh took him to Crete, where he had to bring back to Tiryns the gift of Poseidon that Minos had rejected: the perfect, lusty, white bull with which Pasiphae had mated. Heracles lassoed it, swam back to the Peloponnese with the bull in tow, and drove it with his club to Tiryns. After Eurystheus had seen the bull, to verify the completion of the labor, the sacred beast was set free to wander where it would. It ended up near Athens, on the plain of Marathon, where it wreaked havoc (as we have seen), until Theseus caught it, tamed it, and sacrificed it to Apollo.

  For the eighth labor, Heracles traveled to Thrace, to fetch the famous mares of King Diomedes, a warlike son of Ares. On the way he lodged as a guest with King Admetus of Pherae, and this was the famous occasion when he wrestled Death to restore to life Alcestis, the king’s wife. Then he continued on to Thrace.

  Heracles wrestled Death to win life for Alcestis, peerless wife of King Admetus of Pherae.[54]

  Despite appearances, Diomedes’ mares were scarcely ordinary horses: their preferred food was human flesh. There were four of them, so that Heracles stood no chance against them, but he had expressly been forbidden to take his nephew Iolaus or anyone else to help him. He had to manage by himself. But he had had plenty of time to think up a plan that was simplicity itself. As soon as he arrived, he picked up Diomedes himself and flung him into the mares’ paddock. While the creatures were gorging themselves on their erstwhile master, he crept up on them and bridled them. Since it was Diomedes who had trained them in their man-eating ways, his death released them from the spell.

  The horses allowed themselves to be harnessed to a chariot, but they were hardly tame, and they shot off in entirely the wrong direction, to the north instead of the south. In Scythia they encountered bitter weather. Heracles burrowed under his lionskin to rest, but while he was asleep the horses, which had been rooting around in the snow for something edible, were silently spirited away, leaving only the chariot yoke to which they had been harnessed.

  The next morning, Heracles went in search of his lost horses, and came upon a cave where there lived a curious creature. The elegant form of a beautiful woman ended not in legs, but in a viper’s tail. Echidna was her name, and she confessed to hiding Heracles’ horses, but refused to part with them until he had slept with her. She conceived three boys, and before he left Heracles made her a magnificent bow. Whichever of his sons, when they grew up, could draw the bow would be the ruler of the land—and it was the youngest, Scythes, who managed the feat, and became the first king of Scythia.

  Finally, Heracles drove the horses in triumph back to Tiryns, where Eurystheus dedicated them to queenly Hera
and set them free.

  Diomedes trained his mares as man-eaters; Heracles cured the habit by feeding them their master.[55]

  For the ninth labor, Eurystheus ordered Heracles to bring him back the golden war-belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, as proof that he had rid the world of the barbarous troublemakers. The belt had been made for Hippolyta by the war-god Ares himself, and rendered its wearer invincible. The Amazons, warrior women who live by themselves and take in men only for pleasure and procreation, make their home in Scythia, at the northern edge of the world, and are famed for their martial prowess.

  Heracles and his allies (including Peleus, Telamon, and the ever-loyal Iolaus) lay in ambush for the queen’s sister Melanippe, captured her, and then sent a message to Hippolyta, demanding the belt as ransom for their captive. Hippolyta sent the belt back with the messenger straight away, but she had no intention of giving it up, or of sacrificing her sister. The Greek heroes were about to re-embark, prize in hand, for the voyage back to Greece, when the Amazons attacked. The battle was fierce, but it was an utter defeat for the warrior women. Telamon slew Melanippe, while Heracles himself killed Hippolyta. He took the magic belt back to Tiryns, and even now it is displayed in the temple of Hera at Argos.

  On his way back from Scythia with the belt, Heracles stopped at Troy—and fell into another adventure. It so happened that he found Hesione, the daughter of the Trojan king Laomedon, helplessly bound to a rock, the unwilling victim of a sea monster. In retaliation for Laomedon’s failure to pay him his due for building the walls of Troy, Poseidon had commanded the sea to rise up and flood the farmland up to the city walls; and he had sent the foul, fanged beast to devastate the remaining land and bring the king to his knees. Laomedon consulted an oracle and was told that he would have to sacrifice Hesione, but he was not resigned to this course of action alone. He also announced that whoever could save his daughter from death and free the land from the monster would receive as his reward immortal horses. These were the noble steeds that Laomedon’s grandfather Tros had been given by Zeus in compensation for the loss of his son Ganymede, whom Zeus loved and took up to Olympus.