Heracles

The dead scattered like startled birds, and Odysseus, standing at the lip of the blood pit with his sword out, saw a figure come through them black as night, an arrow already on the string, glaring around as though he was about to shoot. Across the man’s chest lay a belt of gold with marvellous things worked into it: bears, wild boars, lions with glittering eyes, battle and killing and slaughter. Odysseus looked at that belt and hoped, privately, that whichever craftsman made it had never made another and never would.

It was Heracles. Except that it was not. Homer breaks off the scene to explain that this is only the phantom of Heracles, since the man himself is elsewhere, feasting among the deathless gods with slim ankled Hebe for a wife. Then the phantom recognises Odysseus, weeps, and complains about his life. A son of Zeus, and he was made to serve a man far inferior to himself, who set him impossible tasks and once sent him down here for the hound of Hades. Then he walks back into the dark.

Greek myth never resolved that double image. It kept both. Herodotus went to Tyre to settle the question of Heracles’ age and came back with the observation that the Greeks who handle him best are the ones who build him two temples: they sacrifice to one Heracles as an immortal, using the title Olympian, and they make offerings to the other as a dead hero. Two altars. Two rites. The strongest man in the world was also the one the Greeks could not decide how to bury.

He began as a bookkeeping error. Zeus, wanting Alcmene of Argos, took the shape of her husband Amphitryon while the real Amphitryon was still at sea, and stretched the one night into three. Alcmene bore twins: Heracles, who was Zeus’ son, and Iphicles, who was Amphitryon’s, born a night apart. Zeus had announced to the gods that the descendant of Perseus born that day would rule Mycenae, and Hera, who missed nothing, had the birth goddesses hold Alcmene back while she hurried a seven month child called Eurystheus into the world ahead of him. That is the whole engine of the story. Everything Heracles suffers proceeds from a rival being pushed out early.

Hera sent two serpents into the cradle when he was eight months old and he strangled them, one in each fist. Pherecydes told it differently and said that Amphitryon put the snakes there himself, to see which of the two babies was his; Iphicles ran, Heracles did not, and the question was answered. The boy grew up with the best teachers in Greece and killed one of them. Linus, brother of Orpheus, corrected him at the lyre and Heracles hit him with it. He was acquitted at trial, on the grounds that a man may defend himself, and then hurried out to the cattle farm before he could do it again.

The Twelve Labours are not adventures. They are a sentence. After the war with the Minyans, Hera drove him mad and he threw his own children by Megara, and two of his brother’s children as well, into the fire. He exiled himself, was purified, and went to Delphi to ask where he should live. The Pythia told him to dwell at Tiryns, to serve Eurystheus for twelve years, and to perform the ten labours laid on him, and that when they were finished he would be immortal. She was also the first person to call him Heracles. Until that day his name had been Alcides.

Eurystheus, having been given the strongest creature alive as a servant, spent the next eight years terrified of him. When Heracles came back from Nemea with the lion across his shoulders, the king barred him from entering Mycenae, had a bronze jar sunk into the ground to hide in, and sent all further orders out through a herald.

Before Nemea there was a night at Cleonae, in the house of a day labourer called Molorchus, who wanted to kill a beast in his guest’s honour. Heracles told him to wait thirty days. If he came back alive, sacrifice to Zeus the Saviour; if he did not, sacrifice to Heracles as to a dead hero. He came back on the thirtieth day and found the old man about to make the offering for the dead. He had already arranged his own cult, on his way out, on the off chance.

The labours themselves come down to a man solving physical problems with unreasonable force. The Nemean lion could not be shot, so he blocked one mouth of its cave, walked in through the other, got an arm round its neck and held on until it stopped. The Hydra grew two heads for every one he smashed, so Iolaus burned the stumps with brands from a burning wood while a crab bit into his foot. He cut the immortal head off, buried it, and rolled a rock on top of it, then slit the body open and dipped his arrows in the gall. He would not understand what he had just done to himself for another thirty years.

The rest of it runs at the same pitch. He drove the Erymanthian boar into deep snow and carried it out trussed. He shifted a lifetime of cattle dung from the yards of Augeas in a day by breaking open the foundations and bending two rivers through the gap, and Eurystheus refused to count it, on the grounds that he had done it for a fee, exactly as he refused to count the Hydra because Iolaus had helped. Ten became twelve on those two technicalities. Crossing the Libyan desert for the cattle of Geryon, he grew so angry with the heat that he drew his bow on the Sun, and the Sun, admiring the sheer nerve of it, handed him a golden cup to sail the Ocean in. For Cerberus, Hades set one condition: no weapons. So Heracles put his arms around the three heads and squeezed, while the dragon in the dog’s tail bit into him, and did not let go until it yielded.

Rome took him whole. Livy’s Romulus offers sacrifice to only one foreign god by a foreign rite, and it is this one, at the Ara Maxima in the cattle market by the Tiber. The altar is there because Hercules, coming home with Geryon’s herd, slept off a meal on the riverbank and woke to find animals missing. A local strongman called Cacus had dragged the best of them backwards by their tails into his cave, so that every hoofprint pointed away. Hercules was already leading the rest of the herd off in confusion when the cows outside lowed for the bulls, and the bulls inside lowed back. He turned around. Cacus called for the shepherds and no one came, and the club came down. Then Evander of Arcadia arrived, looked at the size of the man, and told him that his prophetess mother had foretold this: an altar here, tended by the greatest nation on earth, called the Greatest Altar. Hercules said he accepted the omen. They killed a cow and ate. The Potitii, who turned up on time, got the entrails; the Pinarii, who were late, did not, and their descendants were barred from the entrails at that feast for as long as the family lasted.

The end is Deianira, and it is his own poison that comes back for him. Ferrying her across the river Evenus, the centaur Nessus assaulted her, and Heracles shot him through the heart from the bank. The dying centaur had just enough breath left to tell her that his blood was a love charm, and she believed him, and kept it for years. When Heracles sacked Oechalia and sent home the princess Iole, Deianira smeared the blood on a fine tunic and had it carried to him.

He put it on at Cape Cenaeum with twelve unblemished bulls waiting at the altar. He prayed with a serene mind, pleased with the look of himself. Then the flame took hold of the offerings, sweat came out on his skin, and the tunic glued itself to his sides at every joint, close as if a craftsman had fitted it. The Hydra’s venom went to work on his bones. He caught the herald Lichas by the ankle and hurled him at a rock in the sea, and the pain threw him at the ground and up into the air by turns while the cliffs of Locris and Euboea rang. When his son reached him he understood at last what his father had been told long ago: that no living thing would ever kill him, and that his death would come from one already dwelling with Hades. A centaur thirty years dead had done it, with his own arrow.

His powers were never subtle, and they were never really the point. Strength, endurance, an aim that did not miss, and a set of arrows carrying the venom of a monster he had personally killed. What he lacked was any defence at all against the thing that kept happening to him. He could not out wrestle Hera. He could not out wrestle his own temper: he killed his music teacher, he mutilated the heralds of Erginus, he threw his guest friend Iphitus off the walls of Tiryns, and he burned his children alive while under a madness that was sent, but which nobody in the stories ever quite calls foreign to him. The strongest man alive was the most dangerous object in his own house.

On Oeta they built the pyre and he climbed onto it and told them to light it. Nobody would. A passing shepherd called Poeas did it, and got the bow for his trouble. In Sophocles the play simply ends there, with the fire not yet lit and no god in sight. In other tellings a cloud comes up under him with a peal of thunder and carries him to heaven, where he is reconciled with Hera at last and marries her daughter Hebe. The Greeks went on making both offerings anyway, at both kinds of altar, in case.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Heracles in Greek mythology?

Heracles, called Hercules by the Romans, was the strongest hero of Greek myth, the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene of Argos. He is best known for the Twelve Labours, which he performed in servitude to King Eurystheus of Mycenae, and for being taken up to Olympus and made immortal after his death on a funeral pyre.

Why did Heracles have to perform the Twelve Labours?

The labours were a penance, not a quest. Hera drove Heracles mad and he killed his own children by his wife Megara, along with two children of his brother Iphicles. The oracle at Delphi told him to live at Tiryns and serve his cousin Eurystheus for twelve years, performing the tasks set for him, after which he would gain immortality.

How did Heracles die?

Heracles was killed by poison from a tunic his wife Deianira sent him, believing it was soaked in a love charm. The blood on it belonged to the centaur Nessus, who had lied to her as he died from one of Heracles’ arrows, and those arrows had been dipped in the venom of the Lernaean Hydra. An old oracle had said that no living creature would kill Heracles and that his death would come from one already dead, which is exactly what happened.

What weapons and clothing is Heracles known for?

Heracles is nearly always shown with a knotted wooden club, which he cut for himself at Nemea, a bow and a quiver of arrows poisoned with Hydra venom, and the pelt of the Nemean lion worn as a cloak with the lion’s scalp pulled over his head like a helmet. Greek vase painters usually gave him a beard and very large eyes.

Was Heracles a god or a hero?

He was worshipped as both, and the Greeks knew the contradiction was there. Herodotus wrote that the Greeks who get it right are those who keep two temples of Heracles, sacrificing at one to an immortal Olympian and making offerings at the other to a dead hero. Homer does the same thing in the Odyssey, showing Heracles’ phantom raging in the underworld while stating that the man himself is feasting among the gods.

Related Entries

Nemean Lion, Hydra, Erymanthian Boar, Cretan Bull, Mares of Diomedes, Geryon, Orthrus, Cerberus, Ladon, Hesperides, Antaeus, Cacus, Hera, Hebe, Atlas