The Twelve Labours of Heracles, Leaf by Leaf

The king who gave the orders hid in a jar. When Heracles walked into Mycenae with the carcass of the Nemean lion across his shoulders, Eurystheus was so badly shaken that, Apollodorus tells us, he had a bronze storage jar sunk into the earth to hide in, barred the hero from the city and sent every later command through a herald named Copreus – a name built, unkindly, on the Greek word for dung. It is a comic picture, and it sets the tone for the cycle: the strongest man alive taking orders from one of the weakest.

The debt behind the labours

Why serve at all? In the nineteenth book of the Iliad, Agamemnon recalls how Zeus swore that a boy of his blood born on a certain day would rule all his neighbours, and how Hera, holding back Alcmene’s labour and hurrying on the birth of Eurystheus, turned the oath against her husband’s own son. Heracles came into the world a subject of his weaker kinsman.

The madness comes next, though not in every telling. Apollodorus says that Hera drove Heracles out of his mind, that he threw his children by Megara into a fire, and that after being purified he went to Delphi. There the Pythia called him Heracles for the first time – until then he had been Alcides – and told him to settle at Tiryns, serve Eurystheus for twelve years and perform ten labours; at the end, she promised, he would be immortal. Euripides, in his Heracles, reverses the sequence: the labours are done, the hero is home from the Underworld, and only then does the madness strike.

Ten became twelve because Eurystheus refused to count two of them. By the time the temple of Zeus at Olympia was carved, around 460 BCE, the number was fixed in stone.

Six labours in the Peloponnese

The first tasks keep close to home, in the Argolid and Arcadia.

One: the Nemean Lion. No weapon could pierce its hide. On the way Heracles lodged at Cleonae with a poor day-labourer, Molorchus, and asked him to wait thirty days before sacrificing: to Zeus the Saviour if his guest came back, to Heracles as a dead hero if he did not. Finding his arrows useless, the hero blocked one mouth of the lion’s cave, went in by the other and choked the beast in his arms. Most tellers dress him in its skin from then on; Apollodorus, oddly, gives that costume to an earlier lion from Mount Cithaeron.

Two: the Lernaean Hydra. The many-headed water snake of Lerna, fought with his nephew Iolaus at his side, has a folio of its own. Eurystheus struck it off the tally, because Heracles had been helped.

Three: the Ceryneian Hind. A deer with golden horns, sacred to Artemis. Unwilling to wound it, Heracles chased it for a year; Pindar sends the pursuit as far as the land of the Hyperboreans. Apollodorus says he finally shot it at the river Ladon, then escaped the anger of Artemis and Apollo by blaming Eurystheus.

Four: the Erymanthian Boar. On the way the centaur Pholus fed Heracles and, at his urging, opened a jar of wine that belonged to all the centaurs. The smell brought the rest, armed with rocks and fir trees, and in the brawl Chiron, wisest of them, was struck by an arrow meant for another. The hero then drove the boar into deep snow, snared it and carried it alive to Mycenae.

Five: the Stables of Augeas. King Augeas of Elis kept herds whose dung had never been cleared. Heracles bargained for a tenth of the cattle, broke through the foundations of the yard and turned the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through it in a single day. Augeas refused to pay; Eurystheus refused to count the task, because it had been done for hire.

Six: the Stymphalian Birds. A flock nesting in the woods by a lake in Arcadia. Athena gave Heracles bronze rattles made by Hephaestus; he shook them, and as the startled birds rose he shot them down.

Four labours at the edges of the world

Now the map widens: south over the sea, north into Thrace, east to the Black Sea, west to the setting sun.

Seven: the Cretan Bull. Poseidon had sent it out of the sea for Minos to sacrifice, and Minos had kept it. Heracles brought it to Eurystheus and let it go. It wandered to Marathon, where it became another hero’s problem.

Eight: the Mares of Diomedes. Heracles drove off the Thracian king’s man-eating horses, but young Abderus, left to guard them, was torn apart; the hero founded Abdera beside his grave. Euripides’ Alcestis catches him on this errand, pausing long enough to wrestle Death for the life of his friend’s queen.

Nine: the Belt of Hippolyta. Eurystheus’s daughter Admete coveted the war-belt that Ares had given the Amazon queen. Hippolyta was ready to hand it over, until Hera, disguised as an Amazon, spread word that the strangers meant to abduct her. In the fighting Heracles killed her and took the belt.

Ten: the Cattle of Geryon. On the island of Erytheia, beyond the stream of Ocean, lived Geryon, three men joined at the waist, with his red cattle, his herdsman Eurytion and the two-headed dog Orthus. On the way Heracles set up his pillars at the strait between Europe and Libya and, scorched by the sun, drew his bow on Helios, who admired his nerve and lent him the golden cup in which he crossed the Ocean. Hesiod already knows the ending: Geryon dead beside his shambling oxen on sea-girt Erytheia.

The last two, and the order of the book

Eleven: the Apples of the Hesperides. The golden apples that Earth gave Hera at her wedding grew in a garden kept by a serpent and by the nymphs of evening. Heracles seized the sea-god Nereus and held on through all his changes of shape until he told the way; on the road he shot the eagle that tormented Prometheus. At the world’s end he held up the sky while Atlas fetched the fruit. Atlas came back proposing to deliver the apples himself; Heracles agreed, asked him to take the weight a moment while he fitted a pad to his head, and walked off. Some, Apollodorus adds, say he simply killed the serpent and picked them.

Twelve: Cerberus. For the last labour Eurystheus sent him to fetch the watchdog of Hades. Initiated first at Eleusis, Heracles went down at Taenarum, mastered the hound without weapons as Hades required, showed it to Eurystheus and returned it below. The whole descent is told in our folio on the hound.

Not every list keeps this order. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the first century BCE, sets the boar before the hind and keeps the garden of the Hesperides for last. Yet the order Apollodorus follows has a shape worth noticing. The labours begin with beasts that plague a single valley, spread outwards to Crete, Thrace and the Ocean, and end by crossing the last boundary of all. When Sophocles’ dying Heracles counts over his deeds, the hound below the earth stands among them:

These are the hands, this the back and breast, that broke the lion of Nemea, the herdsmen’s scourge whom no one dared approach; that crushed the Hydra of Lerna; that mastered the three-headed whelp of Hades beneath the earth.

Sophocles, Women of Trachis (our rendering)

The bitterness of the scene is that he is dying of the Hydra’s venom, carried in the blood of a centaur he had shot. A man who brought death’s own dog into daylight could not outrun the poison of his second labour. Read from the last page back, the cycle looks less like a list of victories than a long negotiation with death – won only on the pyre on Mount Oeta, from which, in most tellings, he rose to Olympus.