1. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 11; Euripides: Heracles 396; Pherecydes: Marriage of Hera ii, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1396; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi iii; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 3; Germanicus Caesar: On Aratus’s Phenomena; sub Draco.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 11; Hesiod: Theogony 333–5; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1396.
3. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Virgil’s Aeneidiv. 483; Hesiod: Theogony 215; Pliny: Natural History vi. 35–6; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 637 ff.
4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Herodotus: vii. 124–7; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 15.
5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1396; Apollonius Rhodius: 1396–1484.
6. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 3.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 31; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 17.
8. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Isthmian Odes iv. 52–5; Lucan: iv. 589–655.
9. Pliny: Natural History v. 1; Strabo: xvii. 3.2; Pomponius Mela: iii. 106; Plutarch: Sertorius 9.
10. Strabo: xvii. 3.7; Pliny: Natural History v. 8; Procopius: On the Vandal War ii. 10.
11. Callisthenes, quoted by Strabo: xvii. 1.43; Herodotus: ii. 42.
12. Diodorus Siculus: i. 15 and iv. 18; Ovid: Ibis 399; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 11; Agathon of Samos, quoted by Plutarch: Parallel Stories 38.
13. Philargyrius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 5; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabulae 31 and 56; Ovid: Art of Love i. 649.
14. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 54; Strabo: xi. 5. 5; Aeschylus, quoted by Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 15; Hesiod: Theogony 529 ff.
15. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 42; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Pliny: Natural History xxxiii. 4 and xxxvii. 1; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound 1025 and Prometheus Unbound, Fragment 195, quoted by Plutarch: On Love 14; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
16. Athenaeus: xv. 11–13; Aeschylus: Fragments 202 and 235, quoted by Athenaeus p. 674d; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
17. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 15; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana ii. 3.
1. The different locations of the Hesperides represent different views of what constituted the Farthest West. One account placed the scene of this Labour at Berenice, formerly called the city of the Hesperides (Pliny: Natural History v. 5), Eusperides (Herodotus: iv. 171), or Euesperites (Herodotus: iv. 198), but renamed after the wife of Ptolemy Euergetes. It was built on Pseudopenias (Strabo: xvii. 3. 20), the western promontory of the Gulf of Sirte. This city, washed by the river Lathon, or Lethon, had a sacred grove, known as the ‘Gardens of the Hesperides’. Moreover, the Lathon flowed into a Hesperian Lake: and near by lay another, Lake Tritonis, enclosing a small island with a temple of Aphrodite (Strabo: loc. cit.; Pliny: loc. cit.), to whom the apple-tree was sometimes said to belong (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iv. 485). Herodotus (loc. cit.) describes this as one of the few fertile parts of Libya; in the best years, the land brought forth one hundredfold.
2. Besides these geographical disputes, there were various rationalizations of the myth. One view was that the apples had really been beautiful sheep (melon means both ‘sheep’ and ‘apple’), or sheep with a peculiar red fleece resembling gold, which were guarded by a shepherd named Dragon to whom Hesperus’s daughters, the Hesperides, used to bring food. Heracles carried off the sheep (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 26) and killed (Servius: loc. cit.) or abducted, the shepherd (Palaephatus: 19). Palaephatus (loc. cit.) makes Hesperus a native of Carian Miletus, which was still famous for its sheep, and says that though Hesperus had long been dead at the time of Heracles’s raid, his two daughters survived him.
3. Another view was that Heracles rescued the daughters of Atlas, who had been abducted from their family orchard by Egyptian priests; and Atlas, in gratitude, not only gave him the object of his Labour, but taught him astronomy into the bargain. For Atlas, the first astronomer, knew so much that he carried the celestial globe upon his shoulders, as it were; hence Heracles is said to have taken the globe from him (Diodorus Siculus: iii. 60 and iv. 27). Heracles did indeed become Lord of the Zodiac, but the Titan astronomer whom he superseded was Coeus (alias Thoth), not Atlas (see 1.3).
4. The true explanation of this Labour is, however, to be found in ritual, rather than allegory. It will be shown (see 148.5) that the candidate for the kingship had to overcome a serpent and take his gold; and this Heracles did both here and in his battle with the Hydra. But the gold which he took should not properly have been in the form of golden apples – those were given him at the close of his reign by the Triple-goddess, as his passport to Paradise. And, in this funerary context, the Serpent was not his enemy, but the form that his own oracular ghost would assume after he had been sacrificed. Ladon was hundred-headed and spoke with divers tongues because many oracular heroes could call themselves ‘Heracles’: that is to say, they had been representatives of Zeus, and dedicated to the service of Hera. The Garden of the three Hesperides – whose names identify them with the sunset (see 33. 7 and 39. 1) – is placed in the Far West because the sunset was a symbol of the sacred king’s death. Heracles received the apples at the close of his reign, correctly recorded as a Great Year of one hundred lunations. He had taken over the burden of the sacred kingship from his predecessor, and with it the title ‘Atlas’, ‘the long-suffering one’. It is likely that the burden was originally not the globe, but the sun-disk (see 67. 2).
5. Nereus’s behaviour is modelled on that of Proteus (see 169. a), whom Menelaus consulted on Pharos (Homer: Odyssey iv. 581 ff.). Heracles is said to have ascended the Po, because it led to the Land of the Hyperboreans (see 125. b). We know that the straw-wrapped gifts from the Hyperboreans to Delos came by this route (Herodotus: iv. 33). But though their land was, in one sense, Britain – as the centre of the Boreas cult – it was Libya in another, and the Caucasus in another; and the Paradise lay either in the Far West, or at the back of the North Wind, the mysterious region to which the wild geese flew in summertime (see 161. 4). Heracles’s wanderings illustrate this dubiety. If he was in search of the Libyan Paradise, he would have consulted Proteus King of Pharos (see 169. a); if of the Caucasian Paradise, Prometheus (which is, indeed, Apollodorus’s version); if of the Northern, Nereus, who lived near the sources of the Po, and whose behaviour resembled that of Proteus.
6. Antaeus’s bones were probably those of a stranded whale, about which a legend grew at Tangier: ‘This must have been a giant – only Heracles could have killed him. Heracles, who put up those enormous pillars at Ceuta and Gibraltar!’ A wrestling match between the candidate for kingship and local champions was a widely observed custom: the fight with Antaeus for the possession of the kingdom, like Theseus’s fight with Sciron (see 96. 3), or Odysseus’s with Philomeleides (see 161. f), must be understood in this context. Praxiteles, the sculptor of the Parthenon, regarded the overthrow of Antaeus as a separate labour (Pausanias: iv. 11. 4).
7. An ancient religious association linked Dodona and Ammon; and the Zeus worshipped in each was originally a shepherd-king, annually sacrificed, as on Mounts Pelion and Laphystius. Heracles did right to visit his father Zeus when passing through Libya; Perseus had done so or his way to the East, and Alexander the Great followed suit centuries later.
8. The god Set had reddish hair, and the Busirians therefore needed victims with hair of that colour to offer Osiris, whom Set murdered; redheads were rare in Egypt, but common among the Hellenes (Diodorus Siculus: i. 88; Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 30,33 and 73). Heracles’s killing of Busiris may record some punitive action taken by the Hellenes, whose nationals had been waylaid and killed; there is evidence for an early Hellenic colony at Chemmis.
9. Curses uttered during sacrifices to Heracles (see 143. a) recall the well-established custom of cursing and insulting the king from a near-by hill while he is being crowned, in order to ward off divine jealousy – Roman generals were similarly insulted at their triumphs while they i
mpersonated Mars. But sowers also cursed the seed as they scattered it in the furrows.
10. The release of Prometheus seems to have been a moral fable invented by Aeschylus, not a genuine myth (see 39. h). His wearing of the willow-wreath – corroborated on an Etruscan mirror – suggests that he had been dedicated to the Moon-goddess Anatha, or Neith, or Athene (see 9. 1). Perhaps he was originally bound with willow thongs to the sacrificial altar of her autumn festival (see 116.4).
11. According to one legend, Typhon killed Heracles in Libya, and Iolaus restored him to life by holding a quail to his nostrils (Eudoxus of Cnidus: Circuit of the Earth i, quoted by Athenaeus: ix. 11). But it was the Tyrian Heracles Melkarth, whom the god Esmun (‘he whom we evoke’), or Asclepius, restored in this way; the meaning is that the year begins in March with the arrival of the quails from Sinai, and that quail-orgies were then celebrated in honour of the goddess (see 14. 3).
134
THE TWELFTH LABOUR: THE CAPTURE OF CERBERUS
HERACLES’S last, and most difficult, Labour was to bring the dog Cerberus up from Tartarus. As a preliminary, he went to Eleusis where he asked to partake of the Mysteries and wear the myrtle wreath.1 Nowadays, any Greek of good repute may be initiated at Eleusis, but since in Heracles’s day Athenians alone were admitted, Theseus suggested that a certain Pylius should adopt him. This Pylius did, and when Heracles had been purified for his slaughter of the Centaurs, because no one with blood-stained hands could view the Mysteries, he was duly initiated by Orpheus’s son Musaeus, Theseus acting as his sponsor.2 However, Eumolpus, the founder of the Greater Mysteries, had decreed that no foreigners should be admitted, and therefore the Eleusinians, loth to refuse Heracles’s request, yet doubtful whether his adoption by Pylius would qualify him as a true Athenian, established the Lesser Mysteries on his account; others say that Demeter herself honoured him by founding the Lesser Mysteries on this occasion.3
b. Every year, two sets of Eleusinian Mysteries are held: the Greater in honour of Demeter and Core, and the Lesser in honour of Core alone. These Lesser Mysteries, a preparation for the Greater, are a dramatic reminder of Dionysus’s fate, performed by the Eleusinians at Agrae on the river Ilissus in the month Anthesterion. The principal rites are the sacrifice of a sow, which the initiates first wash in the river Cantharus, and their subsequent purification by a priest who bears the name Hydranus.4 They must then wait at least one year until they may participate in the Greater Mysteries, which are held at Eleusis itself in the month Boedromion; and must also take an oath of secrecy, administered by the mystagogue, before being prepared for these. Meanwhile, they are refused admittance to the sanctuary of Demeter, and wait in the vestibule throughout the solemnities.5
c. Thus cleansed and prepared, Heracles descended to Tartarus from Laconian Taenarum; or, some say, from the Acherusian peninsula near Heracleia on the Black Sea, where marks of his descent are still shown at a great depth. He was guided by Athene and Hermes – for whenever, exhausted by his Labours, he cried out in despair to Zeus, Athene always came hastening down to comfort him.6 Terrified by Heracles’s scowl, Charon ferried him across the river Styx without demur; in punishment of which irregularity he was fettered by Hades for one entire year. As Heracles stepped ashore from the crazy boat, all the ghosts fled, except Meleager and the Gorgon Medusa. At sight of Medusa he drew his sword, but Hermes reassured him that she was only a phantom; and when he aimed an arrow at Meleager, who was wearing bright armour, Meleager laughed. ‘You have nothing to fear from the dead,’ he said, and they chatted amicably for awhile, Heracles offering in the end to marry Meleager’s sister Deianeira.7
d. Near the gates of Tartarus, Heracles found his friends Theseus and Peirithous fastened to cruel chairs, and wrenched Theseus free, but was obliged to leave Peirithous behind; next, he rolled away the stone under which Demeter had imprisoned Ascalaphus; and then, wishing to gratify the ghosts with a gift of warm blood, slaughtered one of Hades’s cattle. Their herdsman, Menoetes, or Menoetius, the son of Ceuthonymus, challenged him to a wrestling match, but was seized around the middle and had his ribs crushed. At this, Persephone, who came out from her palace and greeted Heracles like a brother, intervened and pleaded for Menoetes’s life.8
e. When Heracles demanded Cerberus, Hades, standing by his wife’s side, replied grimly: ‘He is yours, if you can master him without using your club or your arrows.’ Heracles found the dog chained to the gates of Acheron, and resolutely gripped him by the throat – from which rose three heads, each maned with serpents. The barbed tail flew up to strike, but Heracles, protected by the lion pelt, did not relax his grip until Cerberus choked and yielded.9
f. On his way back from Tartarus, Heracles wove himself a wreath from the tree which Hades had planted in the Elysian Fields as a memorial to his mistress, the beautiful nymph Leuce. The outer leaves of this wreath remained black, because that is the colour of the Underworld; but those next to Heracles’s brow were bleached a silver-white by his glorious sweat. Hence the white poplar, or aspen, is sacred to him: its colour signifying that he has laboured in both worlds.10
g. With Athene’s assistance, Heracles recrossed the river Styx in safety, and then half-dragged, half-carried Cerberus up the chasm near Troezen, through which Dionysus had conducted his mother Semele. In the temple of Saviour Artemis, built by Theseus over the mouth of this chasm, altars now stand sacred to the infernal deities. At Troezen, also, a fountain discovered by Heracles and called after him is shown in front of Hippolytus’s former palace.11
h. According to another account, Heracles dragged Cerberus, bound with adamantine chains, up a subterrene path which leads to the gloomy cave of Acone, near Mariandyne on the Black Sea. As Cerberus resisted, averting his eyes from the sunlight, and barking furiously with all three mouths, his slaver flew across the green fields and gave birth to the poisonous plant aconite, also called hecateis, because Hecate was the first to use it. Still another account is that Heracles came back to the upper air through Taenarum, famous for its cave-like temple with an image of Poseidon standing before it; but if a road ever led thence to the Underworld, it has since been blocked up. Finally, some say that he emerged from the precinct of Laphystian Zeus, on Mount Laphystius, where stands an image of Bright-eyed Heracles.12
i. Yet all agree at least that, when Heracles brought Cerberus to Mycenae, Eurystheus, who was offering a sacrifice, handed him a slave’s portion, reserving the best cuts for his own kinsmen; and that Heracles showed his just resentment by killing three of Eurystheus’s sons: Perimedes, Eurybius, and Eurypilus.13
j. Besides the aconite, Heracles also discovered the following simples: the all-heal heracleon, or ‘wild origanum’; the Siderian heracleon, with its thin stem, red flower, and leaves like the coriander’s, which grows near lakes and rivers, and is an excellent remedy for all wounds in-flicted by iron; and the hyoscyamos, or henbane, which causes vertigo and insanity. The Nymphaean heracleon, which has a club-like root, was named after a certain nymph deserted by Heracles, who died of jealousy; it makes men impotent for the space of twelve days.14
1. Homer: Odyssey xi. 624; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 12.
2. Herodotus: viii. 65; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Plutarch: Theseus 30 and 33; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 25.
3. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1328; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 14.
4. Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Plutus 85 and Peace 368; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Agra; Plutarch: Demetrius 26 and Phocion 28; Aristophanes: Acharnians 703, with scholiast on 720; Varro: On Country Matters ii. 4; Hesychius sub Hydranus; Polyaenus: v. 17.
5. Plutarch: Phocion 28; Seneca: Natural Questions vii. 31.
6. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 12; Xenophon: Anabasis ci. 2. 2; Homer: Odyssey xi. 626 and Iliad viii. 362 ff.
7. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 392; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Bacchylides: Epincia v. 71 ff. and 165 ff.
8. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: Chiliades: ii. 396 ff.
9. Apollodorus: loc. cit.
10. Servius on V
irgil’s Aeneid viii. 276 and Eclogues vii. 61.
11. Homer: Iliad viii. 369; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 31.12 and ii. 32. 3.
12. Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 409 ff.; Germanicus Caesar on Virgil’s Georgics ii. 152; Pausanias: iii. 25.4 and ix. 34.4.
13. Anticlides, quoted by Athenaeus: iv. 14; Scholiast on Thucydides: i. 9.
14. Pliny: Natural History xxv. 12, 15, 27, and 37.
1. This myth seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed Heracles descending to Tartarus, where Hecate the Goddess of the Dead welcomed him in the form of a three-headed monster – perhaps with one head for each of the seasons (see 31.f and 75. 2) – and, as a natural sequel to her gift of the golden apples, led him away to the Elysian Fields. Cerberus, in fact, was here carrying off Herades; not contrariwise. The familiar version is a logical result of his elevation to godhead: a hero must remain in the Underworld, but a god will escape and take his gaoler with him. Moreover, deification of a hero in a society which formerly worshipped only the Goddess implies that the king has defied immemorial custom and refused to die for her sake. Thus the possession of a golden dog was proof of the Achaean High King’s sovereignty and escape from matriarchal tutelage (see 24. 4). Menoetes’s presence in Tartarus, and Herades’s theft of one of Hades’s cattle, shows that the Tenth Labour is another version of the Twelfth: a harrowing of Hell (see 132. 1). To judge from the corresponding Welsh myth, Menoetes’s father, though purposely ‘nameless’, was the alder-god Bran, or Phoroneus, or Cronus; which agrees with the context of the Tenth Labour (White Goddess p.48).
2. The Greater Eleusinian Mysteries were of Cretan origin, and held in Boedromion (‘running for help’) which, in Crete, was the first month of the year, roughly September, and so named, according to Plutarch (Theseus 27), to commemorate Theseus’s defeat of the Amazons, which means his suppression of the matriarchal system. Originally, the Mysteries seem to have been the sacred king’s preparation, at the autumnal equinox, for his approaching death at midwinter – hence the premonitory myrtle wreath (see 109.4) – in the form of a sacred drama, which advised him what to expect in the Underworld. After the abolition of royal male sacrifices, a feature of matriarchy, the Mysteries were open to all judged worthy of initiation; as in Egypt, where the Book of the Dead gave similar advice, any man of good repute could become an Osiris by being purified of all uncleanness and undergoing a mock death. In Eleusis, Osiris was identified with Dionysus. White poplar leaves were a Sumerian symbol of renascence and, in the tree-calendar, white poplar stood for the autumnal equinox (see 52. 3).