Greek Mythology, page 14
Four generations later, Tiryns was the fiefdom of one of Perseus’ grandsons, the cowardly Eurystheus. He was the polar opposite of his distant cousin, Heracles. While Heracles performed deeds of daring in his native Thebes, Eurystheus achieved nothing. So it was a devastating slight when, to atone for killing his wife and children (in a fit madness sent by Hera, as described), Heracles was sentenced to serve Eurystheus for ten years, performing whatever tasks the king might set him.
Even now the gods (with the exception of Hera) could not stop loving Heracles. To assist him in the approaching danger they gave him armour and weaponry, reflecting their own special attributes. Thus Poseidon provided a team of horses, Apollo a bow, Hermes a sword, Hephaestus a well-forged breastplate and Athene a woven robe, while his father Zeus gave a shield, intricately embossed with scenes from earlier mythology, from which projected twelve snakes’ heads, which snapped their jaws as he advanced to battle. So, Heracles presented himself in Tiryns and bowed to his cousin’s command.
Early accounts differed as to the number and identity of the ‘Labours of Heracles’, but by Hellenistic times there was an accepted canon of twelve. These took the hero increasingly further from Tiryns into ever more fantastical and dangerous lands.
1. The Nemean Lion
The first labour was to kill and strip the pelt from a monstrous lion, the offspring of the moon-goddess Selene, which lived in a mountain cave and was plaguing the land around Nemea (between Tiryns and Corinth). With a hide invulnerable to javelins or arrows, it had already wiped out villages and flocks. Surely, Eurystheus considered with a lazy smile, it would be more than a match for Heracles.
Following a trail of bloody devastation, Heracles tracked the lion to its lair and fired off a salvo of arrows. But even Apollo’s shafts bounced harmlessly off the monster’s hide and served only to anger it. Roaring, it sprang on Heracles, its sharp claws clanging on his breastplate. With no room now for subtlety, it was a trial of strength. Discarding his weapons, Heracles locked arms around the lion’s neck, mercilessly tightening his iron grip until the creature slumped lifeless to the ground.
Clad in the skin of the Nemean Lion and wielding a knotty club, Heracles is shown on this fragment of an Athenian cup, 500–470 BC.
Then he heaved the carcass home to Tiryns, where he flayed it with one of its own claws. With the lion’s gaping jaws set on his head like a helmet, he draped the impenetrable skin around his shoulders, snatched up an olive-wood club and sought out Eurystheus. The king was terrified. Trembling, he ordered his blacksmiths to fashion a bronze amphora and set it in the earth, where he might take refuge whenever Heracles approached; and from now on he issued orders only through his herald.
2. The Hydra
Close by to the west, at marshy Lerna lived the terrifying Hydra. With a dog’s body and nine snaky heads (including one which was immortal), its breath was so toxic that anything that came close died. To kill it was Heracles’ next task, so seemingly impossible that he called for help on his young nephew, Iolaus, and together they struck out along the coast. Reaching the swamp, Heracles fired burning arrows at the Hydra – to no effect. Then, taking a deep breath, he splashed into the mud, slashing at the coiling necks and slicing off its heads. But as he did so, new heads grew immediately, multiplying, jaws snapping, throats belching forth a deadly stench. Horrified and stunned, Heracles withdrew, uncertain what to do.
It was then that Athene, the goddess who most favoured him, came near and whispered her advice. Only by cauterizing the still-bleeding necks could Heracles stop new heads from growing. Again he waded out into the fetid marsh, this time with Iolaus holding blazing torches by his side. As Heracles with his golden sword lopped off each head, Iolaus plunged the firebrand into the raw, steaming neck. At last only the immortal head remained. With one final sword-stroke Heracles detached it, and swiftly buried it beneath a rock where it could do no harm. Next he dipped each of his arrowheads into the Hydra’s suppurating bile, a poison he knew none might survive. Triumphant he returned to Tiryns.
3. The Ceryneian Hind
Heracles’ third labour was to trap a magical wild deer, which lived in the mountains of Ceryneia to the west of Corinth. With bronze hooves and golden horns, this was the swiftest of all hinds, the only member of the herd that had escaped when Artemis harnessed its sisters to her chariot. But it was still sacred to the goddess, so Heracles dared not harm it.
To capture it became a test of stamina. For a year, Heracles chased the creature on a journey that took him north through Istria and Thrace to the Land of the Hyperboreans, where only the sun’s faint glint on the galloping deer’s golden horns reassured him he was still on the right track. At last even the deer tired and, exhausted too, Heracles discovered it collapsed beneath a tree. Summoning his last reserves of energy, he threw a net around it, heaved it across his shoulders and began the long trek back to Tiryns. Reporting his arrival to the cowering Eurystheus, Heracles allowed the horned hind to run free. Sparks flew from its bronze hooves as it bounded off into the mountains.
4. The Erymanthian Boar & the Tragedy of the Centaurs
Heracles’ next task was comparatively easy: to capture another rampaging creature, a huge ferocious boar which lived on Mount Erymanthus in northwest Arcadia. Heracles simply pursued it into a snowdrift, where it became stuck fast. Then, in time-honoured fashion, he shouldered the snorting beast and carried it back to Tiryns.
Watched by Athene (right), Heracles presents the Erymanthian Boar to a terrified Eurystheus, who cowers in his bronze amphora. (Sixth-century BC Athenian vase painting.)
However, this success was tinged with tragedy. On his way to Erymanthus, Heracles was entertained by a Centaur, Pholus. Years earlier Dionysus, foretelling this very meeting, had given Pholus a wineskin, to be opened only when Heracles came visiting. But the honeyed bouquet attracted other Centaurs from far and near. Maddened by its scent and desperate to taste it, they armed themselves with trees and boulders and rushed on Pholus’ cave. Heracles had no choice but to retaliate. He unleashed a volley of poisoned arrows. Soon many of the Centaurs lay twitching in torment. Many more took to their hooves and galloped off to safety. Among those struck was wise old Cheiron. Immortal as he was, the arrows’ toxins condemned him to eternal pain. At last, knowing he could not escape his fate, he persuaded Zeus to let him change places with Prometheus, the Titan whose punishment for giving fire to men was to have his liver pecked out every morning by an eagle, only for it to grow again before the next sunrise. Even Pholus did not survive the massacre. Intrigued by the arrows’ effect, he was examining one closely when he dropped it. It grazed his leg, and immediately he collapsed, dead, to the ground.
5. The Augean Stables
For his fifth labour, Heracles returned to the northeast Peloponnese, this time to cleanse the stables – or more properly the byres – of Augeas, the cattle-rancher king of Elis. Augeas possessed so many beasts, including five hundred stud bulls and a further twelve which guarded the herd, that the amount of excrement they produced was monumental. Try as he might (and he did not try hard), nothing Augeas did could get rid of the morass of dung clogging his fields and farmyard, whose stench polluted the air for miles around.
Accompanied again by Iolaus, Heracles (wearing his trademark lionskin) had just agreed terms with Augeas – whereby the king would give him a tenth of his herd if Heracles achieved the task within a day – when one of the guard-bulls charged him, believing him to be a lion. Immediately, Heracles wrestled it to the ground, twisting its horns until it submitted.
Then the two men set to work. Rather than muck out the byres, they hit on a less unsavoury solution: they diverted two local rivers, the Alpheus and the Peneius, which flooded the fields and farmyard, removing all the ordure and rendering them clean and fragrant. However, Augeas called this cheating and, hearing that Heracles had been commanded to undertake the task by Eurystheus, he refused to make the agreed payment. So Heracles went to war, and it was to mark his victory over Augeas (some said) that he celebrated the first games at Olympia.
Heracles takes aim (here with a sling, not his usual bow) as the Stymphalian Birds rise flapping from the swamp. (Attic black figure vase, c. 560–530 BC.)
6. The Stymphalian Birds
Heracles went next to Stymphalia, a little north of Nemea. Here in a great swamp lived a flock of noxious birds with bronze beaks and feathers. The birds could detach these razor-sharp plumes and aim them at predators, upon whom, too, they voided themselves of acidic faeces. Heracles’ mission was to drive them from the swamp, an awkward problem since it was so marshy that anyone trying to wade out became stuck fast, while its waters were so choked with weeds that no boat could navigate them.
Again, Heracles resorted to guile. Taking a rattle in his hand, he made such a din that the birds rose as one, squawking from the middle of the lake, flapping overhead in great confusion. At once, Heracles strung his bow and soon the birds were falling from the sky. The survivors wheeled in a great flock and flew off northeast, until they came to the Black Sea, where they roosted on an island sacred to Ares. Today Stymphalia still resounds to rasping squawks, not from birds but from myriad frogs, which share their murky home with writhing water-snakes.
7. The Cretan Bull
The first half of Heracles’ labours were located relatively close to Tiryns; the second took him much further afield. In fact the next task necessitated a sea voyage: Heracles had to sail to Crete to fetch the white bull that Minos, king of Knossos, had vowed – then refused – to sacrifice to Poseidon and which was wreaking havoc throughout the island. After a mighty struggle, Heracles wrestled the bull to the ground, trussed it up and shipped it back to Tiryns. Eurystheus dedicated it to Hera at her shrine near Argos, but the beast escaped, rampaged through Greece and finally made its home at Marathon near Athens, where it was at last subdued by Theseus.
8. Diomedes’ Mares
Next, Eurystheus sent Heracles far north to Thrace to steal the famous mares of savage Diomedes. A team of four fire-breathing horses, these were tethered in bronze stables and lived off human flesh. With him Heracles took a small band of companions – a sensible precaution as, when he did capture the mares, the Thracians pursued them.
Leaving the horses with Abderus, his groom, Heracles turned to face the enemy. But it was clear that his force was grossly outnumbered. Any battle would be costly. So instead Heracles repeated the ruse by which he had cleansed Augeas’ stables. He cut a channel from the sea, through which the roiling waters inundated the low plain where Diomedes’ army was assembled. The Thracians retreated. Heracles sought out Diomedes, dealt him a stunning blow and dragged him back to where he had tethered the horses.
But Abderus was nowhere to be seen. The mares’ bloodied mouths revealed the truth. They had eaten him. And they still had hungry eyes. Distraught, Heracles threw Diomedes down in front of them and soon the horses were replete. Seizing his chance, Heracles muzzled the beasts and drove them back to Tiryns. Sensibly, Eurystheus removed them far away to Mount Olympus before he set them free.
9. Hippolyta’s Girdle
Eurystheus now dispatched Heracles northeast towards the furthest reaches of the known world: the Black Sea coast, home to the female warriors, the Amazons. His mission was to steal the battle-belt (or girdle) of their queen Hippolyta. It meant a long sea voyage, and Heracles assembled an heroic crew, whose number included the Athenian Theseus and Peleus, the father of Achilles.
The journey was fraught with danger, but at last they reached the River Thermodon, on whose banks the Amazons lived. According to some accounts, Hippolyta graced Heracles with an audience and was so taken with his muscly manhood that she willingly removed her battle-belt and gave it to him.
Others describe a tragic sequel. Believing that Hippolyta had been abducted, the Amazons donned their armour, mounted their horses and attacked Heracles and his ship. The Greeks fought back, and in the melée Hippolyta and many Amazons were killed. In a different version the Amazons gave the battle-belt to Heracles as ransom when he captured their princess, Melanippe. In yet another, it was Theseus who captured Hippolyta, gave the battle-belt to Heracles, and in return for the queen’s freedom took as his slave the Amazon princess Antiope (with whom he had fallen in love). So rich in amorous potential, it is no wonder that the episode excited the imagination of many a Classical mythographer.
Back in Tiryns, Heracles presented the battle-belt to Eurystheus who gave it to his daughter Admete – although one late version has her accompanying Heracles to the Black Sea. She was certainly feisty. A priestess at Hera’s sanctuary at Argos, she later ran away to Samos with the goddess’ statue. When a ship was sent to fetch it back, Hera made the statue so heavy that the vessel could not sail. Both it and Admete remained on the island.
10. The Cattle of Geryon
For his next labour, Heracles headed west towards the setting sun to distant lands, associated with death. Beyond the fringes of the continent close to Ocean lay the red island of Erythreia. Here lived Geryon (a fearsome creature with three heads, three fused bodies and six hands), the owner of a fine herd of cattle, which Heracles was to steal and bring back to Tiryns.
Where the Mediterranean debouches into the Atlantic he set two mighty rocks, named in antiquity ‘The Pillars of Heracles’. Today we know them as Ceuta (on the African side) and Gibraltar (on the European). There, as Heracles gazed out across the rolling sea wondering how he could cross it, Helios gave him as a ship a large golden cup. So, running up his lion skin as a sail, Heracles was transported to his destination. He had already despatched both herdsman and guard dog (the two-headed Orthus), when Geryon stormed across the pastureland brandishing weapons in all six hands. Undaunted, Heracles strung his bow, and brought down the monster. Then he drove the herd inside the golden cup and sailed back to Europe.
The subsequent trek to Tiryns gave mythographers – and cities keen to forge a link with Heracles – a field day. Legends described his route through Spain, the south of France, across the Alps, down Italy’s west coast (including to the future site of Rome), across to Sicily, back up the east coast, through Epirus, Thrace and Scythia, before finally striking south for Tiryns.
11. The Apples of the Hesperides
Soon Heracles was heading out once more for the setting sun, this time to fetch golden apples sacred to Hera from a magical garden tended by the Hesperides (‘Daughters of Evening’) and guarded by the hundred-headed dragon, Ladon. Heracles was warned not to pick the apples himself, but to secure the aid of Atlas (the Titan who carried the skies on his shoulders as punishment for warring with the Olympian gods). After shooting Ladon from afar, Heracles easily persuaded Atlas to let him hold the skies while Atlas stole into the orchard and picked the golden fruit.
But Atlas was loath to resume his duties. Surprisingly, Heracles agreed to the suggestion that Atlas take the apples back to Tiryns – but first he asked Atlas to relieve him for a moment, while he placed a cushion on his shoulders to ease the burden. Atlas agreed – and immediately regretted it. Now liberated, Heracles swept up the golden apples and, leaving the helpless Titan behind, strode off in triumph.
Again his journey home was tortuous, taking him west along the coast to visit Zeus’ Egyptian oracle at Siwah (which later recognized Heracles’ descendant Alexander the Great as a god) and found Egyptian Thebes (named after Heracles’ Greek birthplace and now called Luxor), before returning to Tiryns and his final task.
Heracles presents Eurystheus (still cowering in his bronze amphora) with the three-headed dog Cerberus. (Black figure vase, c. 530 BC, from Cerveteri in Etruria, Italy.)
12. Capturing Cerberus
For Heracles’ last labour Eurystheus devised a truly deadly mission: to bring back to Tiryns the guardian of Hades – Cerberus, the three-headed dog with a snaky mane and serpent tail. Protected once more by Athene, Heracles descended through an underwater cave at Cape Taenarum, south of Sparta and crossed the River Styx (where he menaced Charon into conveying him on his ferry) to the court of Haides and Persephone. Here Heracles pleaded his case. With unusual sympathy, Haides agreed to part temporarily with Cerberus, on condition that Heracles subdued the creature without causing it lasting harm.
Heracles grappled with the hound. Cerberus fought back, viciously lashing his tail – to no avail. Nothing could penetrate Heracles’ lion skin. Exhausted, Cerberus allowed himself to be led meekly up into the sunlight, where he cringed, blinking at the unaccustomed brightness before trotting obediently at Heracles’ heels all the way back to Tiryns.
The labours were complete. Heracles’ enslavement was ended. But there were further traumas still to come.
A Murder & Further Enslavement
A young prince, Iphitus, was tricked into accusing Heracles of stealing his prize herd of horses. He came to Tiryns, where Heracles took Iphitus up to the highest tower, told him to scan the plain and asked if he could see the horses. He could not. But, despite his gracious apologies, Heracles was so furious that he picked up the youth and flung him to his death – an impious act, which demanded atonement.
