The Hydra of Lerna and the Arrows That Outlived It

Lerna is a place where water will not stay put. Springs break out at the foot of the hills on the western shore of the Argolic Gulf, a short way south of Argos, and spread into reed beds before they reach the sea. Pausanias, who came here in the second century CE, was shown a pool called the Alcyonian Lake, said to have no bottom, through which Dionysus had gone down to fetch his mother Semele from the dead. It is the right country for a monster that, cut down, simply grows back.

A marsh at the edge of the Argolid

Hesiod is the earliest witness, and he makes the Hydra personal. In the Theogony it is a child of Echidna and Typhon, born after Orthus and Cerberus, and it was reared, he says, by Hera herself, out of her endless anger against Heracles. The beast was raised to be fought. Hesiod also names the two allies who would see it dead: Iolaus, and Athena, by whose counsel the hero won.

Pausanias saw the local landmarks: a plane tree at the source of the spring Amymone, under which the Hydra was said to have grown, and the sanctuary where Lerna’s mysteries of Demeter were held. He was not persuaded by the heads. In his view the creature was a water snake larger than others, with venom so deadly that Heracles used it on his arrows, and it was a poet, Peisander of Camirus, who first gave it many heads to make it more frightening. That sceptical aside is worth keeping, because it shows that Greeks themselves argued over how literally to take their monsters.

Heads that would not stay cut

The full fight is told by Apollodorus. Heracles drove to Lerna in a chariot, with Iolaus, the son of his half-brother Iphicles, holding the reins. He found the Hydra in its lair on a rise by the springs of Amymone and forced it into the open by shooting burning arrows into the hole. When it came, it wound itself round one of his legs. He beat at its heads with his club, but each time one was smashed two grew in its place. Apollodorus counts nine, eight of them mortal and the middle one immortal; other writers went higher.

Then the marsh itself joined in. A giant crab scuttled out of the water to help the Hydra and bit the hero’s foot. Heracles crushed it, and Hera, the story goes, set the crab among the stars for its loyalty; Hyginus explains the constellation Cancer this way. It is a small, faintly ridiculous detail, and a telling one: the monster has allies in the mud, and every part of Lerna seems to be on its side.

Iolaus and the torch

Cornered, Heracles called for his nephew. Iolaus set fire to part of the nearby wood and, using the burning brands, seared the stump of each neck as soon as the head was off, so that nothing new could sprout. With the mortal heads disposed of, Heracles cut off the immortal one, buried it and rolled a heavy rock over the spot beside the road that runs from Lerna to Elaeus.

Visitors to Delphi in the fifth century BCE could see the scene among the sculptures of Apollo’s temple, if Euripides is to be trusted. In his Ion, a chorus of Athenian serving women, sightseeing outside the temple, picks out the figures one by one:

Look, friend, look over here: the son of Zeus is cutting down the serpent of Lerna with a golden sickle. And beside him another lifts a blazing torch – is it the one whose story I tell over my weaving, Iolaus the shield-bearer?

Euripides, Ion (our rendering)

The torch cost Heracles dearly. Eurystheus refused to count the labour, on the grounds that the hero had not managed alone, and so the promised ten crept towards twelve, as our leaf-by-leaf account of the labours explains. Iolaus kept his place in the story all the same. Thebes showed his tomb, and in Euripides’ Children of Heracles the old man prays to be young again for a single day so that he can fight Eurystheus, is granted his wish and takes the king prisoner. The helper who spoiled one labour has the last word over the man who set it.

The arrows that outlived the beast

Before he left the marsh, Heracles slit open the body and dipped his arrows in its gall. From then on the Hydra fought on his side, and nobody it touched recovered.

The first victims were friends. When the centaurs stormed the cave of Pholus during the hunt for the Erymanthian boar, one of these arrows passed through another centaur’s arm and lodged in the knee of Chiron, the gentle teacher of heroes. Being immortal, he could neither die of the wound nor heal, until he was allowed to give up his immortality. Pholus, burying his kin, drew an arrow from a body and marvelled that so small a thing could kill something so big; it slipped from his fingers onto his foot, and he died too. Even in Pausanias’s day a river in Elis was said to stink because a wounded centaur had washed the poison out in its water.

The last victim was Heracles himself. Years later he shot the centaur Nessus, who had laid hands on his wife Deianira at a river crossing. Dying, Nessus told her to keep his blood as a love charm, knowing it was mixed with the venom. When she feared she was losing her husband, she smeared a robe with it and sent it to him; Sophocles’ Women of Trachis follows the poison as it eats into his flesh until he begs to be burnt alive on Mount Oeta. The bow passed, as payment for lighting the pyre, to Philoctetes or to his father Poeas, depending on the version, and with it the venom travelled on to Troy, which was fated not to fall without those arrows.

That is the real horror of Lerna. You can burn the necks and bury the head beneath a rock, but the poison is already in the quiver, and the hero who carries it carries his own death into every later story.