c. Still others say that, at Hera’s desire, Selene created the lion from sea foam enclosed in a large ark; and that Iris, binding it with her girdle, carried it to the Nemean mountains. These were named after a daughter of Asopus, or of Zeus and Selene; and the lion’s cave is still shown about two miles from the city of Nemea.3
d. Arriving at Cleonae, between Corinth and Argos, Heracles lodged in the house of a day-labourer, or shepherd, named Molorchus, whose son the lion had killed. When Molorchus was about to offer a ram in propitiation of Hera, Heracles restrained him. ‘Wait thirty days,’ he said. ‘If I return safely, sacrifice to Saviour Zeus; if I do not, sacrifice to me as a hero!’
e. Heracles reached Nemea at midday, but since the lion had depopulated the neighbourhood, he found no one to direct him; nor were any tracks to be seen. Having first searched Mount Apesas – so called after Apesantus, a shepherd whom the lion had killed; though some say that Apesantus was a son of Acrisius, who died of a snake-bite in his heel – Heracles visited Mount Tretus, and presently descried the lion coming back to its lair, bespattered with blood from the day’s slaughter.4 He shot a flight of arrows at it, but they rebounded harmlessly from the thick pelt, and the lion licked its chops, yawning. Next, he used his sword, which bent as though made of lead; finally he heaved up his club and dealt the lion such a blow on the muzzle that it entered its double-mouthed cave, shaking its head – not for pain, however, but because of the singing in its ears. Heracles, with a rueful glance at his shattered club, then netted one entrance of the cave, and went in by the other. Aware now that the monster was proof against all weapons, he began to wrestle with it. The lion bit off one of his fingers; but, holding its head in chancery, Heracles squeezed hard until it choked to death.5
f. Carrying the carcass on his shoulders, Heracles returned to Cleonae, where he arrived on the thirtieth day, and found Molorchus on the point of offering him a heroic sacrifice; instead, they sacrificed together to Saviour Zeus. When this had been done, Heracles cut himself a new club and, after making several alterations in the Nemean Games hitherto celebrated in honour of Opheltes, and rededicating them to Zeus, took the lion’s carcass to Mycenae. Eurystheus, amazed and terrified, forbade him ever again to enter the city; in future he was to display the fruits of his Labours outside the gates.6
g. For a while, Heracles was at a loss how to flay the lion, until, by divine inspiration, he thought of employing its own razor-sharp claws, and soon could wear the invulnerable pelt as armour, and the head as a helmet. Meanwhile, Eurystheus ordered his smiths to forge him a brazen urn, which he buried beneath the earth. Henceforth, whenever the approach of Heracles was signalled, he took refuge in it and sent his orders by a herald – a son of Pelops, named Copreus, whom he had purified for murder.7
h. The honours received by Heracles from the city of Nemea in recognition of this feat, he later ceded to his devoted allies of Cleonae, who fought at his side in the Elean War, and fell to the number of three hundred and sixty. As for Molorchus, he founded the near-by city of Molorchia, and planted the Nemean Wood, where the Nemean Games are now held.8
i. Heracles was not the only man to strangle a lion in those days. The same feat was accomplished by his friend Phylius as the first of three love-tasks imposed on him by Cycnus, a son of Apollo by Hyria. Phylius had also to catch alive several monstrous man-eating birds, not unlike vultures, and after wrestling with a fierce bull, lead it to the altar of Zeus. When all three tasks had been accomplished, Cycnus further demanded an ox which Phylius had won as a prize at certain funeral games. Heracles advised Phylius to refuse this and press for a settlement of his claim with Cycnus who, in desperation, leaped into a lake; thereafter called the Cycnean lake. His mother Hyria followed him to his death, and both were transformed into swans.9
1. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 1; Valerius Flaccus: i. 34; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 11.
2. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hesiod: Theogony 326 ff.; Epimenides: Fragment 5, quoted by Aelian: Nature of Animals xii. 7; Plutarch: On the Face Appearing in the Orb of the Moon 24; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 295; Hyginus: Fabula 30; Theocritus: Idyll xxv. 200 ff.
3. Demodocus: History of Heracles i, quoted by Plutarch: On Rivers 18; Pausanias: ii. 15. 2–3; Scholiast on the Hypothesis of Pindar’s Nemean Odes.
4. Strabo: viii. 6. 19; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 1; Servius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 19; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebaid iv. 161; Plutarch: loc. cit.; Theocritus: Idyll xxv. 211 ff.
5. Bacchylides: xiii. 53; Theocritus: loc. cit.; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: ii., quoted by Photius p. 474; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 11; Euripides: Heracles 153.
6. Apollodorus: loc. cit. and ii. 4. 11; Scholiast on the Hypothesis of Pindar’s Nemean Odes.
7. Theocritus: Idyll xxv. 272 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 11; Euripides: Heracles 359 ff.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
8. Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Molorchia; Virgil: Georgics iii. 19; Servius: ad loc.
9. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 12; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 371 ff.
1. The sacred king’s ritual combat with wild beasts formed a regular part of the coronation ritual in Greece, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and Syria; each beast representing one season of the year. Their number varied with the calendar: in a three-seasoned year, they consisted, like the Chimaera, of lion, goat, and serpent (see 75. 2) – hence the statement that the lion of Cithaeron was the Chimaera’s child by Orthrus the Dog-star (see 34. 3); or of bull, lion, and serpent, which were Dionysus’s seasonal changes (see 27.4), according to Euripides’s Bacchae; or of lion, horse, and dog, like Hecate’s heads (see 31. 7). But in a four-seasoned year, they will have been bull, ram, lion, and serpent, like the heads of Phanes (see 2. b) described in Orphic Fragment 63; or bull, lion, eagle, and seraph, as in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel i); or, more simply, bull, lion, scorpion, and water-snake, the four Signs of the Zodiac which fell at the equinoxes and solstices. These last four appear, from the First, Fourth, Seventh, and Eleventh Labours, to be the beasts which Heracles fought; though the boar has displaced the scorpion – the scorpion being retained only in the story of Orion, another Heracles, who was offered a princess in marriage if he killed certain wild beasts (see 41. a–d). The same situation recurs in the story of Cycnus and Phylius – with its unusual substitution of vultures for the serpent – though Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis have given it a homosexual twist. Theoretically, by taming these beasts, the king obtained dominion over the seasons of the year ruled by them. At Thebes, Heracles’s native city, the Sphinx-goddess ruled a two-seasoned year; she was a winged lioness with a serpent’s tail (see 105. 3); hence, he wore a lion pelt and mask, rather than a bull mask like Minos (see 98. 2). The lion was shown with the other calendar beasts in the new-moon ark, an icon which, it seems, gave rise both to the story of Noah and the Flood, and to that of Dionysus and the pirates (see 27. 5); hence Selene (‘the Moon’) is said to have created it.
2. Photius denies that Heracles lost his finger in fighting the lion; Ptolemy Hephaestionos says (Nova Historia ii), that he was poisoned by a sting–ray (see 171. 3). But it is more probable that he bit it off to placate the ghosts of his children – as Orestes did when pursued by his mother’s Erinnyes. Another two-mouthed cave is mentioned incidentally in Odyssey xiii. 103 ff., as one near which Odysseus first slept on his return to Ithaca at the head of the Bay of Phorcys. Its northern entrance was for men, the southern for gods; and it contained two-handled jars used as hives, stone basins, and plentiful spring-water. There were also stone looms – stalactites? – on which the Naiads wove purple garments. If Porphyry (On the Cave of the Nymphs) was right in making this a cave where rites of death and divine rebirth were practised, the basins served for blood and the springs for lustration. The jars would then be burial urns over which souls hovered like bees (see 90. 3), and the Naiads (daughters of the Death-god Phorcys, or Orcus) would be Fates weaving garments with royal clan-marks for the reborn to wear (see 10. 1). The Nemean
Lion’s cave is two-mouthed because this First Labour initiated Heracles’s passage towards his ritual death, after which he becomes immortal and marries the goddess Hebe.
3. The death of three hundred and sixty Cleonaeans suggests a calendar mystery – this being the number of days in the sacred Egyptian year, exclusive of the five set apart in honour of Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Set, and Horus. Heracles’s modifications of the Nemean Games may have involved a change in the local calendar.
4. If the King of Mycenae, like Orion’s enemy Oenopion of Hyria (see 41. c), took refuge in a bronze urn underground and emerged only after the danger had passed, he will have made an annual pretence at dying, while his surrogate reigned for a day, and then reappeared. Heracles’s children were among such surrogates (see 122. 1).
5. Apesantus was one of several early heroes bitten in the heel by a viper (see 177. 1). He may be identified with Opheltes (see 106. g) of Nemea, though what part of Opheltes’s body the serpent bit is not related.
124
THE SECOND LABOUR: THE LERNAEAN HYDRA
THE Second Labour ordered by Eurystheus was the destruction of the Lernaean Hydra, a monster born to Typhon and Echidne, and reared by Hera as a menace to Heracles.1
b. Lerna stands beside the sea, some five miles from the city of Argos. To the west rises Mount Pontinus, with its sacred grove of plane-trees stretching down to the sea. In this grove, bounded on one flank by the river Pontinus – beside which Danaus dedicated a shrine to Athene – and on the other by the river Amymone, stand images of Demeter, Dionysus the Saviour, and Prosymne, one of Hera’s nurses; and, on the shore, a stone image of Aphrodite, dedicated by the Danaids. Every year, secret nocturnal rites are held at Lerna in honour of Dionysus, who descended to Tartarus at this point when he went to fetch Semele; and, not far off, the Mysteries of Lernaean Demeter are celebrated in an enclosure which marks the place where Hades and Persephone also descended to Tartarus.2
c. This fertile and holy district was once terrorized by the Hydra, which had its lair beneath a plane-tree at the sevenfold source of the river Amymone and haunted the unfathomable Lernaean swamp near by – the Emperor Nero recently tried to sound it, and failed – the grave of many an incautious traveller.3 The Hydra had a prodigious dog-like body, and eight or nine snaky heads, one of them immortal; but some credit it with fifty, or one hundred, or even ten thousand heads. At all events, it was so venomous that its very breath, or the smell of its tracks, could destroy life.4
d. Athene had pondered how Heracles might best kill this monster and, when he reached Lerna, driven there in his chariot by Iolaus, she pointed out the Hydra’s lair to him. On her advice, he forced the Hydra to emerge by pelting it with burning arrows, and then held his breath while he caught hold of it. But the monster twined around his feet, in an endeavour to trip him up. In vain did he batter at its heads with his club: no sooner was one crushed, than two or three more grew in its place.5
e. An enormous crab scuttered from the swamp to aid the Hydra, and nipped Heracles’s foot; furiously crushing its shell, he shouted to Iolaus for assistance. Iolaus set one corner of the grove alight and then, to prevent the Hydra from sprouting new heads, seared their roots with blazing branches; thus the flow of blood was checked.6
f. Now using a sword, or a golden falchion, Heracles severed the immortal head, part of which was of gold, and buried it, still hissing, under a heavy rock beside the road to Elaeus. The carcass he disembowelled, and dipped his arrows in the gall. Henceforth, the least wound from one of them was invariably fatal.
g. In reward for the crab’s services, Hera set its image among the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and Eurystheus would not count this Labour as duly accomplished, because Iolaus had supplied the firebrands.7
1. Hesiod: Theogony 313 ff.
2. Pausanias: ii. 37. 1–3 and 5; ii. 36. 6–8.
3. Pausanias: ii. 37.4; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 2; Strabo: viii. 6. 8.
4. Euripides: Heracles 419–20; Zenobius: Proverbs vi. 26; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Simonides, quoted by scholiast on Hesiod’s Theogony p. 257, ed. Heinsius; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 11; Hyginus: Fabula 30.
5. Hesiod: Theogony 313 ff.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 287.
6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: loc. cit. and Poetic Astronomy ii. 23; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 11.
7. Euripides: Ion 192; Hesiod: Theogony 313 ff.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Alexander Myndius, quoted by Photius p. 475.
1. The Lernaean Hydra puzzled the Classical mythographers. Pausanias held that it might well have been a huge and venomous water-snake; but that ‘Pisander had first called it many-headed, wishing to make it seem more terrifying and, at the same time, add to the dignity of his own verses’ (Pausanias: ii. 37.4). According to the euhemeristic Servius (on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 287), the Hydra was a source of underground rivers which used to burst out and inundate the land: if one of its numerous channels were blocked, the water broke through elsewhere, therefore Heracles first used fire to dry the ground, and then closed the channels.
2. In the earliest version of this myth, Heracles, as the aspirant for kingship, is likely to have wrestled in turn with a bull, a lion, a boar, or scorpion, and then dived into a lake to win gold from the water-monster living in its depth. Jason was set much the same tasks, and the helpful part played by Medea is here given to Athene – as Heracles’s bride-to-be. Though the Hydra recalls the sea-serpent which Perseus killed with a golden falchion, or new-moon sickle, it was a fresh-water monster, like most of those mentioned by Irish and Welsh mythographers – piastres or avancs (see 148. 5) – and like the one recorded in the Homeric epithet for Lacedaemon, namely cetoessa, ‘of the water-monster’, doubtless haunting some deep pool of the Eurotas (see 125. 3). The dog-like body is a reminiscence of the sea-monster Scylla (see 16. 2), and of a seven-headed monster (on a late Babylonian cylinder-seal) which the hero Gilgamesh kills. Astrologers have brought the crab into the story so as to make Heracles’s Twelve Labours correspond with the Signs of the Zodiac; but it should properly have figured in his struggle with the Nemean lion, the next Sign.
3. This ritual myth has become attached to that of the Danaids, who were the ancient water-priestesses of Lerna. The number of heads given the Hydra varies intelligibly: as a college of priestesses it had fifty heads; as the sacred cuttle-fish, a disguise adopted by Thetis – who also had a college of fifty priestesses (see 81. 1) – it had eight snaky arms ending in heads, and one head on its trunk, together making nine in honour of the Moon-goddess; one hundred heads suggest the centuriae, or war bands, which raided Argos from Lerna; and ten thousand is a typical embellishment by Euripides, who had little conscience as a mythographer. On Greek coins, the Hydra usually has seven heads: doubtless a reference to the seven outlets of the river Amymone.
4. Heracles’s destruction of the Hydra seems to record a historical event: the attempted suppression of the Lernaean fertility rites. But new priestesses always appeared in the plane-tree grove – the plane-tree suggests Cretan religious influence, as does the cuttle-fish – until the Achaeans, or perhaps the Dorians, burned it down. Originally, it is clear, Demeter formed a triad with Hecate as Crone, here called Prosymne, ‘addressed with hymns’, and Persephone the Maiden; but Dionysus’s Semele (see 27. k) ousted Persephone. There was a separate cult of Aphrodite – Thetis by the seaside.
125
THE THIRD LABOUR: THE CERYNEIAN HIND
HERACLES’S Third Labour was to capture the Ceryneian Hind, and bring her alive from Oenoe to Mycenae. The swift, dappled creature had brazen hooves and golden horns like a stag, so that some call her a stag.1 She was sacred to Artemis who, when only a child, saw five hinds, larger than bulls, grazing on the banks of the dark-pebbled Thessalian river Anaurus at the foot of the Parrhasian Mountains; the sun twinkled on their horns. Running in pursuit, she caught four of them, one after the other, with her own hands, and harnessed them to her chariot; the fifth fled across the river Celadon
to the Ceryneian Hill – as Hera intended, already having Heracles’s Labours in mind. According to another account, this hind was a masterless monster which used to ravage the fields, and which Heracles, after a severe struggle, sacrificed to Artemis on the summit of Mount Artemisium.2
b. Loth either to kill or wound the hind, Heracles performed this Labour without exerting the least force. He hunted her tirelessly for one whole year, his chase taking him as far as Istria and the Land of the Hyperboreans. When, exhausted at last, she took refuge on Mount Artemisium, and thence descended to the river Ladon, Heracles let fly and pinned her forelegs together with an arrow, which passed between bone and sinew, drawing no blood. He then caught her, laid her across his shoulders, and hastened through Arcadia to Mycenae. Some, however, say that he used nets; or followed the hind’s track until he found her asleep underneath a tree. Artemis came to meet Heracles, rebuking him for having ill-used her holy beast, but he pleaded necessity, and put the blame on Eurystheus. Her anger was thus appeased, and she let him carry the hind alive to Mycenae.3
c. Another version of the story is that this hind was one which Taygete the Pleiad, Alcyone’s sister, had dedicated to Artemis in gratitude for being temporarily disguised as a hind and thus enabled to elude Zeus’s embraces. Nevertheless, Zeus could not long be deceived, and begot Lacedaemon on her; whereupon she hanged herself on the summit of Mount Amyclaeus, thereafter called Mount Taygetus.4 Taygete’s niece and namesake married Lacedaemon and bore him Himerus, whom Aphrodite caused to deflower his sister Cleodice unwittingly, on a night of promiscuous revel. Next day, learning what he had done, Himerus leaped into the river, now sometimes known by his name, and was seen no more; but oftener it is called the Eurotas, because Lacedaemon’s predecessor, King Eurotas, having suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Athenians – he would not wait for the full moon before giving battle – drowned himself in its waters. Eurotas, son of Myles, the inventor of water mills, was Amyclas’s father, and grandfather both of Hyacinthus and of Eurydice, who married Acrisius.5