Cercopes (Kerkopes)

Region/Culture: Greek (set in Anatolian Lydia and around the Bay of Naples)
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: A pair of trickster spirits, gnomish thieving brothers proverbial for cunning and deceit.
Mythical Attributes: They were liars and cheats without equal, roaming the world to rob and deceive anyone they met, gods included.
Role in Mythos: They serve as comic foils to Heracles and as a cautionary example of knavery that finally overreaches itself.
Relation to Humans: They preyed on travellers and householders, stealing while their victims slept and talking their way out of any trap. Their name became a Greek byword, so that calling someone a Cercops marked them as an incorrigible rogue.

The man slept in the open with his lion skin for a blanket and his club within reach, and two small shapes came down through the grass toward the gleam of his bow. They moved without sound. They had done this a hundred times in a hundred countries, lifting a purse here, a sword there, always gone before the waking. What they did not know, crouched over the weapons of the sleeping giant, was that this time the sleeper was only pretending.

The Cercopes were brothers, and almost everything else about them is told two ways. Even their names refuse to settle. One old poem calls them Passalos and Akmon, Peg and Anvil, names with the ring of a workshop joke. Other writers knew them as Olus and Eurybatus, or Sillus and Triballus, or Candolus and Atlantus. A few accounts let the pair swell into a whole tribe of them. The confusion suits the subject. They were creatures defined by slipperiness, and a slippery thing is hard to pin to a single label.

Their parentage points to something older and stranger than common bandits. They were called sons of Oceanus, the world-circling Titan river, and of Theia, named in one tradition as a daughter of Oceanus and in another as a child of the Ethiopian king Memnon. That makes them minor primordial spirits rather than men, which fits the way the stories treat them. They do not age in any tale, they turn up wherever there is mischief to be had, and they wander far over the earth deceiving people as a kind of vocation. The Greek word kerkops carries the sense of a tail, and behind the name lurks the monkey they would one day become.

For a while their haunt was Thermopylae, that narrow pass between mountain and sea, and the rock beside it carried a name the brothers themselves had coined. They lived also, by other tellings, at Oechalia on Euboea, and roamed into Lydia in the west of Anatolia, where the road to their best-known disaster was laid. Heracles was in Lydia at the time, serving out a term of penance as the slave of Queen Omphale, his strength leased to a foreign court. He lay down to rest and the brothers came for his arms.

He caught them. He bound their wrists and ankles, ran a long pole through the bonds, and hoisted the pole onto his shoulder so that the two of them swung head-downward at his back like a brace of hares. This is the one image of the Cercopes that classical art kept returning to, painted on black-figure vases with the brothers dangling and the hero striding off, and it is fixed there because of what they saw from that position. Hanging upside down, faces level with the back of his thighs, they had a long look at the hero’s buttocks, which were burned dark by the sun and thick with hair. They began to laugh. Heracles wanted to know the joke. Their mother, they explained between fits, had warned them long ago to keep clear of a man she called Blackbottom, Melampygos, a man whose dark backside would be the death of them. They had spent their lives watching for him and here he was, carrying them off, and the prophecy had walked up behind them while they were busy robbing it.

The laughter saved them. Heracles, who did not laugh easily, was so taken with the joke against himself that he cut them loose and let them go. The grim alternative endings survive too. In some versions he kills them, or hands the pair over to Omphale in chains, and the proverb about the market of the Cercopes at Ephesus remembers them bound and pleading while their mother begs for their lives.

Whatever happened in Lydia, the brothers did not learn. Their undoing came when they tried their tricks on Zeus himself, and there is no surviving someone who sees through every lie. One tradition, credited to the early writer Pherecydes, says he turned them to stone where they stood. The more famous ending belongs to Ovid, who sends them to a bare island in the Bay of Naples and changes them into beasts that look almost but not quite human. Their limbs shrank, their noses flattened and tilted, their cheeks furrowed into the wrinkles of old age, and a coat of yellow-brown fur closed over them. He left them the power to complain but took away speech, so that the tongues which had told so many lies were reduced to screeching. The place was called Pithecusae, the Ape Islands, and the Greeks who could find no monkeys there told this story to explain the name.

Their gifts were the small, durable ones. They were quick-handed, light on their feet, and quicker still with their mouths, able to flatter, distract, and reason their way out of a noose that was already around their necks. The laughter that talked them down from Heracles’ pole was their truest weapon. But the same nature that made them dangerous made them doomed. A trickster who cannot stop tricking will eventually try it on the wrong audience, and the Cercopes ran through gods until they reached the one who was watching. They could fool anyone except the one who could not be fooled, and that single exception was enough to turn them to stone, or to leave them chattering in the branches of an island that bears their name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Cercopes in Greek mythology?

The Cercopes were a pair of mischievous trickster brothers, sons of the Titan Oceanus and Theia, famous throughout the Greek world as liars, cheats, and thieves. They roamed widely robbing travellers and were eventually transformed into monkeys or stone for their crimes.

What did the Cercopes do to Heracles?

The Cercopes tried to steal the weapons of Heracles while he was serving as the slave of Queen Omphale in Lydia. He caught them, tied them upside down to a pole slung over his shoulder, and carried them off, but they made him laugh so hard with a joke about his dark, hairy backside that he set them free.

Why were the Cercopes turned into monkeys?

The Cercopes were transformed because they tried to deceive Zeus himself, and unlike their mortal victims he saw through them. In Ovid’s version Zeus changed them into monkeys and exiled them to the island of Pithecusae near Naples, while an older tradition says they were turned to stone instead.

What does the name Cercopes mean?

The name comes from the Greek word kerkops, connected to kerkos meaning “tail,” and it anticipates the monkey form the brothers eventually take. The Greeks used “Cercops” as an insult for an incorrigible rogue or knave.

What was the prophecy about Blackbottom?

The brothers’ mother warned them to beware a man she called Melampygos, or “Blackbottom,” whose dark backside would bring about their ruin. Hanging upside down behind Heracles, they recognized the sun-darkened, hairy buttocks of the very man they had been warned about, which set them laughing and unknowingly named the prophecy as it came true.