Heracles

Born to be hated

Alcmene was the granddaughter of Perseus, married to Amphitryon, an exile living in Thebes. While her husband was away at war, Zeus came to her in Amphitryon's shape and stretched that one night to three times its length. Amphitryon returned the next day, and Alcmene bore twins: Heracles, the son of Zeus, and Iphicles, a night younger, the son of the mortal man. Homer already tells how Hera, hearing Zeus boast that a descendant of Perseus born that day would rule over his neighbours, held back Alcmene's labour so that Eurystheus of Mycenae came into the world first — and Heracles was born to serve him.

Hera's hatred followed the child into the cradle. When he was eight months old she sent two serpents to kill the twins; Iphicles screamed, and Heracles strangled one in each hand. He grew up taught by the best: Amphitryon for chariots, Eurytus for the bow, and Linus for the lyre — whom he killed with a blow of the instrument when the teacher struck him. At eighteen he killed the lion of Cithaeron, and Creon of Thebes gave him his daughter Megara for freeing the city from tribute.

The madness and the labours

Ten tasks that became twelve

Hera struck him with madness, and in it he threw his own children by Megara into the fire. When he came to himself he went into exile and asked the oracle at Delphi what to do. The Pythia was the first to call him Heracles — until then he had been Alcides, after his grandfather Alcaeus — and told him to settle in Tiryns and serve Eurystheus for twelve years, performing the ten labours the king would set. When they were done, she said, he would become immortal.

Eurystheus sent him first against the beasts near home — the lion, the hydra, the hind, the boar — then to the corners of Greece, then beyond it: to Thrace, to the Amazons, to the far west, to the garden of the Hesperides and finally down into the underworld. When the ten were done Eurystheus refused to count two of them: the hydra, because Iolaus had helped, and the stables, because Heracles had asked for payment. So two more were set, and ten became twelve.

That is the order in Apollodorus, the fullest ancient telling. Euripides, in his tragedy Heracles, turned it round: there the hero returns from the underworld to save his family from a usurper, and only then does Hera send Madness down to make him kill them. The suffering comes after the glory, not before it.

Omphale, Deianira and the blood of Nessus

Free of Eurystheus, Heracles gave Megara to Iolaus and went looking for a new wife. Eurytus of Oechalia had offered his daughter Iole to whoever could outshoot him and his sons; Heracles won and was refused, because a man who had killed his own children was not to be trusted with more. Soon afterwards, in a second fit of madness, he threw Eurytus's son Iphitus from the walls of Tiryns. To be purified he had to sell himself as a slave: Omphale, queen of Lydia, bought him for three years, and later poets loved the picture of the hero spinning wool at her feet while she wore his lion skin.

At Calydon he wrestled the river god Achelous for Deianira, daughter of King Oeneus, and won her. Travelling with her, he came to the river Evenus, where the centaur Nessus carried people across. Nessus took Deianira on his back and tried to rape her; Heracles shot him with one of the arrows dipped in the hydra's poison. The dying centaur told her to gather his blood: it would keep her husband from ever loving another woman. She kept it.

Years later Heracles sacked Oechalia, killed Eurytus and sent Iole home as a captive. Deianira, afraid of losing him, smeared the centaur's blood on a robe and sent it with the herald Lichas for him to wear at the sacrifice of thanks. In the heat of the altar the poison woke and ate into his flesh. He hurled Lichas into the sea and tore at the robe, which tore away his skin with it. When Deianira understood what she had done, she hanged herself.

The pyre on Oeta

Heracles had his son Hyllus carry him to the top of Mount Oeta, above Trachis, and build a pyre. He climbed onto it and asked for it to be lit. No one would; in the end Poeas, a passing shepherd, did it, and Heracles gave him the bow and the poisoned arrows that would one day be needed at Troy. As the pyre burned, a cloud came down under thunder and carried him up to heaven.

On Olympus he was made immortal and — the last turn of the story — reconciled with Hera, who gave him her daughter Hebe, the goddess of youth, as his wife. Hesiod already knows the ending:

Sophocles, in Women of Trachis, ends earlier, on the pyre being built, and leaves the god out of sight. In the Odyssey, Homer has it both ways: Odysseus meets the shade of Heracles in the underworld, while the hero himself, the poet says, feasts with the immortals.

Hero and god

No other Greek hero was worshipped as widely, or in so double a way. Herodotus, who thought the Greeks had borrowed Heracles from Egypt, praised those cities that kept two sanctuaries — sacrificing to one Heracles as an immortal Olympian, and to the other as a hero, a dead man honoured at his tomb. Pindar simply called him “hero-god”. He had temples on Thasos and at Marathon, and every gymnasium and wrestling-school kept his image, because strength was his gift. The twelve labours in their fixed order were first shown together on the metopes of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, in the fifth century BC.

Rome took him over as Hercules, with an ancient altar in the cattle market where he was said to have rested with Geryon's herd, and Roman generals claimed him as an ancestor. Stoics made him a model of endurance; Christians read the choice of a hard road over an easy one as a parable. He is the most painted, carved and told of all the Greek heroes, and the one whose story most clearly ends not in a grave but on Olympus.