Mares of Diomedes

The mangers were bronze because wood would not have survived them, and the tethers were iron because nothing softer would hold. That is where the horror of the thing begins, not with the horses but with the ironmongery, with a Thracian king working out what metal you need to keep four animals from eating their way out of a stable. Diodorus records the fittings without comment, the way an inventory records anything. Brass troughs. Iron chains. On the coast of the Bistones, where the Hebrus runs cold to the sea and the wind comes off the water with salt in it, that was the arrangement, and it worked.

What went into the troughs was not barley.

Diomedes was a son of Ares, which is the first thing anyone says about him and the most useful. Apollodorus gives his mother as Cyrene and makes him king of the Bistones, a Thracian people he calls very warlike, as though that needed saying. A stray line in Hyginus makes him instead a son of Atlas by his own daughter Asteria, and the two accounts have never been reconciled. Nobody much cares. What everyone agrees on is the war-god father and the habit, and the habit was this: travellers who came to his hall were entertained, and then they were fed to the horses.

The oldest surviving treatment is not a monster story at all. In Euripides, staged in 438 BC, Heracles turns up at the house of Admetus in the middle of a funeral, cheerfully on his way to a job he has not thought about very hard. He says he is off to fetch the four-horse chariot of Diomedes the Thracian. The chorus asks whether he knows the man. He does not. He has never been to the land of the Bistones. They tell him he will not get the horses without a fight, and he shrugs that off, and then they start feeding him details. The animals tear men apart with their jaws. Heracles, still not listening properly, says that is the diet of wild mountain beasts, not of horses. And the chorus answers him flatly: you may see their mangers foul with blood. Only then does he ask whose son the breeder is, and only then does the play let the word Ares fall.

The horses themselves are strangely hard to see. Everyone who wrote about them wrote about what they ate, and almost nobody described them. Philostratus is the exception, describing a painting of the aftermath in which the mares lie broken around the stalls, one down, one gasping, their manes matted, shaggy all the way to the hoof, looking in every respect like wild animals rather than anything a groom had ever handled. Hyginus counts four and gives their names, Podargus, Lampon, Xanthus and Dinus, which are the ordinary names of Greek chariot horses, the sort you would find on any racing team. One of them, Deinos, simply means the terrible. The rest do not. That is somehow worse than a monster’s name would have been.

Eurystheus sent Heracles for them, and Heracles went in the way he usually went, with a boat and some volunteers and no plan more complicated than force. He came down on the grooms at the mangers, overpowered them, and drove the animals toward the shore. Then the Bistones came out in arms, and Heracles had to turn and fight, and he could not do that while holding four horses. So he handed them to the boy who had come with him.

Abderus was a son of Hermes out of Opus in Locris, young enough that Philostratus, looking at what was left of him, guessed him younger than Iphitus. The mares dragged him off and killed him. Heracles fought the Bistones, killed Diomedes, scattered the rest, and came back to find his companion in pieces on the ground. He founded a city over the grave and called it Abdera, and he held funeral games there in the boy’s honour, with boxing and wrestling and the pancratium and every other contest. There were no horse races.

Diodorus supplies the detail that everyone remembers, and it is the one that makes the whole story turn: Heracles threw Diomedes to his own animals. Once they had eaten the man who taught them to eat men, their hunger was satisfied and they became manageable, and he led them away without further trouble. Apollodorus says only that he killed him. The two versions sit side by side in the tradition and nobody has ever quite chosen.

Their power was never magical. They were not fire-breathing, whatever Heracles hoped in Euripides, and they had no enchantment on them. They were simply very large, very strong grass-eaters that had been taught to prefer meat, and the sources are consistent that this was learned rather than born. Ovid remembered the skulls nailed up in the houses of Thrace and the mares grown fat on the flesh of the killed. Seneca, dry as ever, noted that they had not been pastured on the grass of the Strymon, and that the last blood to redden their mouths was their driver’s.

And because the power was ordinary, so were the limits. A man strong enough could simply take hold of them, and one did. They could be sated, and once sated they were only horses again, bitted and led. Eurystheus, who had no idea what to do with them, turned them loose according to Apollodorus, and they wandered up to Mount Olympus and were torn apart by wild animals, which has a certain justice to it. Diodorus tells it otherwise, and better: Eurystheus dedicated them to Hera, and their bloodline ran on through the centuries, still being bred in Macedon in the days of Alexander.

There was always a school that refused the whole thing. Palaephatus, writing to strip the miracles out of Greek myth, called it a joke. Horses like hay and barley, he said, not human flesh. What actually happened, he decided, was that a man became so besotted with his stable that he sold everything he owned to keep it fed, and his friends said his horses had eaten him alive, and out of that piece of gossip the monster grew. It is a tidy explanation and it convinces nobody, but it is worth knowing that the ancients found the story hard to swallow too, and that the pediment sculptors at Olympia carved it anyway, up among the twelve labours over the door of the temple of Zeus, where every visitor to the games would look at it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the Mares of Diomedes?

The Mares of Diomedes were man-eating horses belonging to Diomedes, king of the Bistones in Thrace. They were kept chained with iron and fed from bronze mangers, and their master fed them on the flesh of travellers and strangers. Capturing them was the eighth of the twelve labours of Heracles.

How did Heracles capture the Mares of Diomedes?

Heracles sailed to Thrace with a band of volunteers, overpowered the grooms at the stables, and drove the horses down to the sea. When the Bistones attacked, he left the animals with his young companion Abderus and turned to fight, killing Diomedes and routing his people. In the version given by Diodorus Siculus, Heracles then threw Diomedes to the horses, and once they had eaten their own master they became docile enough to be led away.

Who was Abderus and what happened to him?

Abderus was a son of Hermes from Opus in Locris and a companion of Heracles. Heracles left the mares in his care during the battle with the Bistones, and the horses dragged him away and killed him. Heracles buried him and founded the city of Abdera beside his grave, holding funeral games in his honour that included every contest except horse-racing.

Were the Mares of Diomedes really mares?

The sources are inconsistent. Apollodorus and Diodorus call them mares, while Hyginus counts four and gives them the masculine names Podargus, Lampon, Xanthus and Dinus, and Euripides speaks of them as a four-horse chariot team. The tradition never settled the question, and the name Mares of Diomedes stuck regardless.

What happened to the Mares of Diomedes at the end?

The accounts disagree. Apollodorus says Eurystheus released them, whereupon they made their way to Mount Olympus and were killed by wild beasts. Diodorus says instead that Eurystheus consecrated them to Hera and that their descendants were still being bred as late as the reign of Alexander the Great.

Related Entries

Heracles (Hercules), Ares, Hermes, Cretan Bull, Nemean Lion, Hydra, Erymanthian Boar, Ceryneian Hind, Stymphalian Bird, Geryon, Cerberus, Xanthus, Arion, Kelpie, Each Uisge