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From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; pp. 79-87.

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Heroic Poetry

V.  Herakles.   §136.  Herakles is the son of Zeus and 80 Alkmene (‘strong one’), who was the wife of King Amphitryon of Thebes, a descendant of Perseus. In his youth he was known also, like his grandfather the ruler of Tiryns, by the name of Alkaios (‘man of might’), whence is derived his by-name of λκείδης , in Latin Alcides. No certain explanation has been found for his usual name, which is probably Argive. The second part -κλέης-κλής, like the fuller form -κλειτος, is connected with κλήος (’glory’); but it is not certain that the first part is derived from ρα, the tutelary goddess of Argos, who imposed on him his toils. As a hero he was especially honoured among the Boiotians, Dorians, and Thessalians; among the first indeed we find hero-worship in general quite fully developed at an earlier time than elsewhere. In Athens, Marathon, and Leontinoi again he received from ancient times divine honours as ἀλεξίκακος (’averter of evil’) and καλλίνικος (’conqueror’). Later, when he was looked upon as chief representative of wrestling, and hence also as founder of the Olympian Games, his statues were to be found everywhere in the gymnasium and in the baths regularly joined to the latter, so that he actually became the god of all hot baths and healing springs. As again he cleared the roads from hostile powers, he figures also as guiding god of travellers (ἡγεμόνιος). Often he is accompanied by his protectress Athena, more rarely by Hermes and Apollon.

§ 137.  Like all the sons born to Zeus by other wives, he is hated by Hera. When Zeus had destined the empire of Argos to the first descendant of Perseus who should next be born, she delayed his birth until his cousin Eurystheus came into the world at Mykenai; and so Eurystheus became lord of Argos and therewith liege lord of Herakles. This story makes it clear that Tiryns was originally looked upon as the birthplace of Herakles; for the distant Thebes, though it is already spoken of in the Iliad as his home, can never have stood in such a relation of dependence to Mykenai.

While still in the cradle Herakles strangled two serpents which Hera sent against him. After he had struck dead with his lyre his teacher Linos for chastising him, Amphitryon 81 sent him as herdsman to Kathairon, where he destroyed a monstrous lion. When his father fell in battle against the inhabitants of Orchomenos, Kreon the last Spartos (§ 123) became king of Thebes, and Herakles received his daughter Megara as his wife. In a frenzy inspired in him by Hera he shot down his three children; on his recovery he was compelled as atonement to enter the service of Eurystheus, who now imposed on him a series of grievous toils. This legend forms the link between the Theban (Boiotian) and the Argive (Dorian) Herakles-saga; the latter seems to contain the oldest elements in it.

§ 138.  According to this Argive saga, Herakles had his dwelling-place in Tiryns, south of Mykenai, as indeed the legend of his birth suggests. First he struggled here, as at Kithairon, with a mighty lion haunting Mount Apesas between Nemea and Mykenai, whose hide he afterwards wore, slung round his upper body, as his characteristic dress. Then he proceeded, accompanied by his half-brother and charioteer Iolaos, against the Hydra, the water-snake of the swampy springs of Lerna in the south of Argos, which legend magnified into a creature like the devil-fish. For every head cut off from the monster two new ones grew again, until Iolaos set the neighbouring wood on fire and scorched the wounds; the last deathless head Herakles covered with a rock. He then soaked his arrows in the poison of the monster.

§ 139.  From Mount Erymanthos in Arkadia, down from whose snow-covered summit plunges a raging mountain-stream of the same name, comes a boar — representing the stream itself — that desolates the meadows of Psophis. Herakles pursues it into the icy uplands and then brings it in bonds to Eurystheus, who in abject terror takes refuge in a barrel. This is followed by the conquest of the Centaurs (Kentauroi). These are sons of Ixion and Nephele (‘Cloud’), wild half-bestial hunters who dwell on Ossa and Pelion in Thessaly, as well as upon Mount Pholoe on the western border of Arkadia. Like the Silenoi, they are a compound of the bodies of man and horse. The oldest works of art give them 82 the rear-parts of a horse simply joined at the back to a complete human body, but afterwards the latter passes over in the region of the hips into a horse’s fore-parts. Unlike the other Centaurs, Cheiron (‘the handy one’), who dwells in a cavern of Pelion, is gentle, upright, and famous as leech, soothsayer, and trainer of the heroes Achilleus, Iason, and Asklepios. Pholos, who gives his name to Mount Pholoe, resembles him. With the latter Herakles lodges; on being entertained with the wine that is the common property of all the Centaurs, he falls to quarrelling with them and at length slays most of them with his arrows. Pholos also (and Cheiron too in later story) perishes on injuring himself through carelessness with an arrow. Herakles then captured the hind of Keryneia in Arkadia and chased away birds resembling the Harpies and Keres, which haunted the lake of Stymphalos and shot out their feathers like arrows (a type of the hail-storm). His native Argolis was now secure from all dangers.

§ 140.  His later journeys were to distant lands. Elean local legend is the basis of the tale of how he cleansed the filthy stables of the Elean King Augeias (‘shining one’); according to tradition, he fulfilled the task by leading through them the river Menios (‘moon-stream’), while on the metope of the Olympian temple, the only surviving picture of this adventure, he uses a long broom. For this work Augeias promised Herakles the tithe of his herds, but he did not keep his word, for which he was afterwards slain by him, together with his warriors, after a fierce resistance.

§ 141.  With this is probably connected an adventure usually enumerated tenth in the list, the capture of the kine belonging to the giant Geryoneus (‘Roarer’), who likewise rules in the far West on the island of Erytheia (‘Red-land’). In order to sail over the ocean Herakles forces Helios to lend him his sun-boat; then with his arrows he slays the triple-bodied giant. On his return he overcomes on the site of the later Rome the fire-breathing giant Cacus, who has stolen some of the cows captured by him and hidden them in a cave, and in Sicily he conquers the mighty boxer 83 and wrestler Eryx, the representative of the hill of that name.

The seventh adventure, the taming of the Cretan bull, and the ninth, the fight with the Amazons, from whose queen Hippolyte he was commissioned by Eurystheus to demand her girdle, are perhaps only borrowings from the legend of Theseus, who accomplishes deeds of this sort; Herakles’ conflict with the Amazons however appears in art somewhat earlier than that of Theseus, hence a derivation of the latter from the former is also not impossible.

As eighth labor Herakles receives the order to fetch from the far North the horses of the Thracian King Diomedes, which were fed on human flesh. He fulfils the task after casting the cruel king to his own steeds.

§ 142.  The last adventures are closely related to one another, for both show how at the end of his career Herakles won immortality by his journey into the nether world and into the gardens of the gods — a conception however which later, when the Argive legend was combined with that of Oita and Thessaly, was ousted by that of the hero burning himself. On the way to the garden of the Hesperides (‘maidens of the West’), who guard the golden apples of youth and dwell on the margin of the western heaven gilded by the sinking sun, he strangles in the desert of Northern Africa the giant Antaios, raising him up from the earth, his mother, whose touch lends her son ever fresh strength. Then he destroys in Egypt the King Busiris, who cruelly sacrifices all strangers cast upon the shores of his land, and in whose name that of the Egyptian god Osiris is certainly contained. After at length freeing Prometheus, whom Zeus had chained to the Caucasus, he comes to Atlas, who bears the heavens on his shoulders, as every mountain appears to do. He begs him to pluck for him three apples from the tree of the Hesperides and in the meantime takes his place; or he enters himself into the garden of the gods and destroys the dragon Ladon which guards the tree.

§ 143.  The bringing up of the hound of hell, Kerberos, was 84 put as the hardest toil at the end, plainly because it had been forgotten that the fetching of the apples which bestowed eternal youth from the Land of the Blessed, conceived as in the furthest West, properly signified the reception of Herakles among the gods. The same thought later found expression in a trait which may also belong to the Argive legend, the marriage of Herakles to Hebe, the daughter and virgin counterpart of the now appeased Hera, whilst Italian story unites its Hercules with Iuno herself. Herakles descends at the promontory of Tainaron into the lower world, frees Theseus from bondage, fetters Kerberos, and rises again with him near Trozen or Hermione. Another and perhaps older form of the same legend seems to be present in the campaign of Herakles against Pylos (‘gate’ of the nether world), which is already mentioned in the Iliad; in it he wounds with a three-barbed arrow Hades, the ruler of the lower world, and his enemy Hera.

On the fulfilment of the tasks imposed upon him by Eurystheus, Herakles’ servitude came to an end. But seemingly it was not till after c. 480 B.C. that the number of his labours was fixed at twelve.

§ 144.  The third main group of the Herakles-myths consists of the traits native to Thessaly and Oita, to which originally belong his conquest of Oichalia and his slavery under Omphale.

Herakles sues for Iole, daughter of the mighty archer Eurytos, who rules in the Thessalian Oichalia. But although he defeats her father in a competition of archery she is denied him. In revenge he shortly afterwards hurls her brother Iphitos down from a rock, although the latter is lodging with him as a guest-friend; later he also captures the city and carries off Iole as captive. To free himself from blood-guilt he goes to Delphoi; but Apollon refuses him an answer. He then seizes on the sacred tripod in order to carry it off; Apollon seeks to prevent this; the thunderbolt of Zeus stops a conflict as it is breaking out. Herakles is now told by the oracle that he can be freed from guilt only by three years of slavery.

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§ 145.  Hermes therefore sells him to Omphale, who was later regarded generally as queen of Lydia and ancestress of the Lydian kings, but originally seems to be the heroine from whom was derived the name of Omphalion, a city which probably lay at one time on the borders of Thessaly and Epeiros;1 for while in her service he subdues the Itonoi, who are certainly the inhabitants of the Thessalian Itonos, where he also has a struggle with the mighty Kyknos. He likewise conquers the Kerkopes, cunning thieves whose home is at Thermopylai, and Syleus (‘Robber’) by Pelion. His son by Omphale, Lamios or Lamos, gives a name to Lamia, which lies not far north from Trachis. Perhaps it was not until the legend had been shifted to Lydia that it was embellished by the further conceit that Herakles in the disguise of a maid worked with the distaff while Omphale adorned herself with the lion’s skin and club.

§ 146.  Herakles’ wooing of Deianeira (‘Slayer of men’), daughter of King Oineus (‘Wine-man’) in the vine-growing Kalydon, for whose possession he has to fight — probably as a representative of civilisation — with the wild river-god Acheloos (§ 97), is directly connected with these legends, and probably too formed originally a part of them, as its scene was the neighbouring Aitolia. Acheloos appears sometimes as a natural river, sometimes as a bull or a man with a bull’s head. It is not until Herakles breaks off one of the horns that he confesses himself defeated, and in order to get it back offers in exchange the horn of the goat Amaltheia, i. e. the horn of plenty from which pour forth nourishment and blessing. This horn however is strictly the property of Herakles as the giver of fertility, in which quality he was much worshipped, especially in this country. A counterpart to the contest with the river-god is an adventure usually brought into connection with that of the Hesperides — the 86 wrestle with the Halios Geron or Old Man of the Sea, who is later called Nereus or Triton.

§ 147.  On his return to Trachis he slays the Centaur Nessos — a counterpart to the fight with the Centaurs on Pholoe — when the latter seeks to do violence to Deianeira as she passes through the river Euenos on his back. When dying, the Centaur counsels her to collect as a love-philtre the blood streaming from his wound and to take it with her. Afterwards when she hears that Herakles, on capturing Oichalia, has made the fair Iole his captive, she smears it on a robe and sends it to her returning husband. Scarcely has Herakles put it on when the poison of Nessos eats into his body. In anger at the tortures imposed on him he hurls the bringer Lichas into the sea, but is not able to tear off the robe clinging to his limbs. Deianeira slays herself in despair; Herakles weds Iole to his son Hyllos, mounts a funeral pile erected on the summit of Oita, and hands over his bow and arrows to Poias the father of Philoktetes or to the latter himself, appointing him to set fire to the pyre. Amidst thunders and lightnings he then rises, purified by the flame, into heaven and becomes the peer of the gods.

§ 148.  A passage in the Iliad, and, strictly speaking, another in the Odyssey — where however, in accordance with the harmonising tendencies of a later reviser, only his wraith appears — shew that the notion was elsewhere held that Herakles actually died through the decree of fate and Hera’s anger, and that he dwelt in the nether world.

In his whole character Herakles in after times embodies the ideal of the noble Dorian warrior; and in many parts of his legend, in his wanderings and struggles, he may be simply a type of the Doric race, which paid him especial reverence.

§ 149.  The oldest of his cult-statues that is known to us in any detail is one at Erythrai, where like other heroes he worked as a god of healing by dream-oracles (§ 4). According to coins on which he is represented, he stood there without the lion’s skin, a club in the uplifted right hand, in 87 the left a lance or pole, with some unknown object. On the other oldest monuments he is also figured as naked; afterwards he also wears full armour and a short jerkin, until about 600 B.C. the type with the lion’s skin from Cyprus and Rhodes became dominant. The latter was probably connected, through the influence of the Phoenician models, with Melqart the sun-god and king of the city of Tyre, with whom later he was often identified. His hair and beard are usually cut short; more rarely he appears in older times without a beard. After the beginning of the fourth century he is again regularly figured as quite naked; he then carries the lion’s skin on his left arm, the club in his right hand. Praxiteles gives him an expression of profound sensibility, Lysippos a posture of activity in which he balances himself on his hips; the latter is certainly the originator of the type of the weary resting Herakles, as it is preserved to us especially in the so-called ‘Farnese Hercules’ at Naples. In the pictures of his exploits in earlier times, as well as in the narrative of the Iliad, he commonly carries the bow as his weapon, more rarely and generally in works of Ionic origin the club, and in those from Peloponnesos the sword, which in the Odyssey he bears as well as the bow.

FOOTNOTES

1  It is described as a city of Chaonia, Ptolem. iii. 14, 17. The ethnic adjective occurs as μφαλιῆες and μφαλες, nom. plur., and μφαλος, gen. sing.





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Heroic Poetry :

VI.  Theseus.



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