Mythology Mondays: A hero’s welcome

Okay, I was doing so well at this blogging daily thing for awhile. But then Fable 2 got in the way. And episodes of Gossip Girl. But don’t worry, pets, I have posts planned out for the rest of the week!

Another Mythology Monday on a Tuesday but it’s technically still Monday as I type this so it counts. Right?

I’m going to put the next three of Heracles’ labours together because they were supposed to be his last. Originally the deal was that Heracles would perform ten labours of Eurystheus’ choosing and then be absolved of his guilt. But as you know, it’s the twelve labours of Heracles, not ten. Let me explain.

Labour number eight was similar to a number of the earlier ones: to round up the mares of Diomedes, the king of Thrace. The Mares were uncontrollable man-eating horses that belong to Diomedes (not the Trojan War hero, but the son of Ares.) Diomedes would feed the Mares unsuspecting passersby and travellers.

In Ancient Greek culture there is a principal called xenia - hospitality. It was the foundation of interstate and interpersonal relationships. Under the law of xenia a traveller was guaranteed safe passage and lodging at the homes along the way. In return, the traveller would provide a gift to his host and the subsequent generations of each family would have an alliance bonded by xenia. This was so important to the Greeks that xenia was protected by none other than the King of the Gods himself, Zeus. If a traveller’s right to xenia was violated, Zeus would be pissed. The Odyssey is the best example of xenia. Telemachus is hosted by Nestor and Menelaus. Xenia keeps Penelope from kicking out the suitors. Odysseus is rescued several times by the relationship between host and suppliant. Those who violate xenia are barbaric at best.

From the Greek word “xenia” we get our word genial, though the term is more often translated as “guest-friendship” since we have no equivalent idea in our culture (and a shame, too.)

Diomedes was breaking the rules of xenia by feeding visitors to his horses. Thus, Diomedes was as much a monster as the Mares.

Because of this, Heracles was bound as a hero to deliver justice. When he arrived in Thrace, he marched right up to the palace and took Diomedes prisoner. He dragged the king down to where the Mares were tethered to a bronze manger, and threw Diomedes into the manger. The Mares devoured him. When they were full, the Mares were far more subdued. This allowed Heracles to round them up and drive them back to show Eurystheus. They were dedicated to Hera and allowed to roam free in Argos. It’s mythologized that Bucephalus, the famous horse of Alexander the Great, is descendant from the Mares of Diomedes.

The ninth of Heracles’ labours was to obtain the girdle of Hippolyta. Hippolyta was the Queen of the Amazons, who eventually married Theseus and bore him a son, Hippolytus. The girdle (a waist belt) was given to her by Ares and signified her as the Queen. Eurystheus wanted to give it to his daughter Admeda as a present. This is a case where Heracles’ brawn was a good thing. Hippolyta supposedly took one look at him and was so impressed by his physique that she gave up the girdle without a fight.

The tenth labour was to herd the cattle of Geryon. Geryon was the grandson of Medusa, a monster with one head and three bodies (opposite of the Hydra?) He had a two headed dog, Orthrus, the brother of Cerberus who guarded the gate to the underworld, and a herd of magnificent red cattle.

As soon as Heracles reached Erytheia, where Geryon lived, he was attacked by Orthrus. He killed the dog with one mighty blow of his club. Next, Geryon himself attacked, wearing three helmets and three shields and carrying three spears. Heracles shot him with an arrow covered with poisonous Hydra blood. The arrow pierced through all three helmets and came out the other side, such was Heracles’ strength.

All Heracles had left to do after that was to herd the cattle back to Eurystheus and happily move on with his life, having completed all ten seemingly impossible labours.

But when he returned to Eurystheus, the man had other plans. Eurystheus claimed that Heracles could not be absolved of his guilt because he had broken the rules on two of the labours. For the Hydra, Heracles had accepted the help of his cousin Iolaus when he was meant to complete all of the tasks on his own. For the Augean Stables, Heracles violated the rules in agreeing to accept payment from Augeas for the task.

And so, Heracles would have to do two more labours, possibly two of his most famous. And that, my pets, is a story for next Monday.

Mythology Mondays: Birds and Bull

Sorry for putting another Mythology Monday on a Tuesday, pets. My life has been occupied by watching horrible TV shows, but I’m done that now!

Back to Heracles and his labours (which, speaking of bad television I highly recommend the Hercules series with Kevin Sorbo if you ever want a good laugh!)

The sixth of Heracles’ labours was to drive away the Stymphalian Birds. The Birds were the pets of Ares, the god of war. They were horrid creatures, with wings made of brass and sharp feathers they could launch at their enemies. They had settled near Stymphalos and terrorized the locals.

Now, Heracles couldn’t kill the Birds, since they belonged to Ares. And if you thought angering Artemis was a bad idea, Ares was worse. Artemis had a history of turning men into stags but Ares had a history of turning men into pin cushions. Anyway, this pretty much rid Heracles of all of his usual options- strangling, beating and poisoning. So again, brutish rather than brainish, Heracles was in a predicament.

This time help came in the form of the goddess Athena. She brought Heracles a pair of krotala - sort of like really noisy castanets - made by Hephaestus. Heracles danced around, clattering loudly, to scare away the Birds. They took flight, startled either by the krotala or Heracles’ horrible dancing. Sometimes it says he shot them, other times he just shot at them. Whether he killed them or not is never really mentioned.

Capturing the Cretan Bull was Heracles’ next task. The bull is a major symbol for Crete and the Cretan Bull is a creature with a vast mythology of its own.

The Bull had been sent to Crete by Poseidon on King Minos’ promise that he would sacrifice whatever he was sent as a gift to Poseidon. When the Bull arose from the sea, Minos thought it was too beautiful and so kept it and sacrificed a different bull. Poseidon was outraged and took his revenge twofold. First he caused Minos’ wife, Pasiphae, to fall in love with the Bull. Somehow, she was impregnated by the Bull, and gave birth to the Minotaur. The Minotaur was the monster of the Labyrinth, but that’s a story for another Monday. The second revenge was that Poseidon drove the Bull mad and had it wreak havoc in the streets of Crete. While Cretans were avid bull jumpers, they preferred to leave it to festival and sport and not on their way to the agora (Greek marketplace.)

So when Heracles arrive in Crete, King Minos was happy to let him take the Bull off his hands. Heracles walked right up and took the bull by the horns, literally. He strangled the thing into passivity and shipped it back to Eurystheus. Eurystheus let it escape and the Cretan Bull soon became the Marathonian Bull, later to be killed by Theseus.

Maybe after Heracles, I’ll continue my hero series and do Theseus, Jason and Odysseus. Maybe.

Mythology Mondays: A Truly Herculean Task

Labours numbers 4 and 5, the Erymantian Boar and the Augean Stables.

The story of the Erymantian Boar itself is not very interesting. Very similar to the labours set to Heracles before, he was to capture the boar, just as he had the Hind. The interesting part of the story is what happened before.

Heracles set out for Mount Erymanthos to complete his fourth labour. On the way, he stopped to visit his old friend Pholus, a centaur. They had dinner, and Heracles wanted some wine to wash it down with. Pholus only had one jar of wine - it had been given to him by Dionysus himself. Heracles convinced Pholus to open it. The smell of the superior win attracted the other nearby centaurs, who descended on the, took the wine, and began to drink. Centaurs, notoriously uncivilized in myth, didn’t know to mix the wine with water and quickly became drunk. They attacked Heracles, and he fought back with his arrows, which had been dipped in the poisonous blood of the Hydra. The centaurs were quickly defeated.  Chiron, the wisest and most civilized of the centaurs, was hit with a poisonous arrow. He was immortal, but not immune to pain. He was in so much agony that he begged to be released of his immortality and promised, in exchange, to take Prometheus’ place, chained to the rock. Heracles brought Chiron to where Prometheus was chained, and the two switched places. Then Heracles shot the eagle with another poisonous eagle, so that Chiron wouldn’t have to suffer Prometheus’ torture.

In gratitude, Chiron told Heracles that to capture the Boar, he must drive it into a snow bank first. It worked and Heracles returned to Eurystheus with the Boar.

The next task set byEurystheus was to clean the Augean Stables.

Augeas , one of the Argonauts and the King of Elis, and had the single biggest herd of cattle in all of Greece. His stables had never been cleaned. Eurystheus was growing tired of the fame Heracles’ previous labours had won and wanted a way to degrade him. And so Heracles was to clean the biggest pile of shit in Greece in just one day.

Heracles, a hero and the son of a god, had likely never done any manual labour in his life. He was far better suited to swinging a sword than a shovel. He arrived in Elis, and stood in front of the mess that was Augeas’ stables. The cattle were a gift from a god, and thus immune to disease. But to enter the stables would probably be fatal to anyone else. Because of this, Heracles came up with a plan. Instead of cleaning the stables himself, he diverted two rivers to wash them clean. The task was done in less than a day, and Augeas was more than suprised. Thinking that the task was insurmountable, he had promised to give Heracles a tenth of his cattle if he completed it in one day. When Heracles finished, Augeas refused to honour the agreement and Heracles killed him.

herculean [her-kew-lee-an]

For me the Augean Stables have always been the best measure of a herculean task. I imagine this as most insurmountable tasks, a huge pile of shit that you have no idea whether you’ll ever be able to clean. And you stand and stare at the mess and wonder how you’re going to make it to the end of the day. But often it’s not a matter of picking up a shovel, but of coming up with a new solution to the problem. When I’m faced with a truly difficult task, I often picture the stables in my head.

Mythology Mondays: The Hydra and the Hind

To continue on my theme of the labours of Heracles, I bring you labours number 2 and 3.

As we found out last week, Heracles was bound to perform twelve tasks set to him by his enemy, Eurystheus, to be absolved from the wrath of the Furies incured by accidentally killing his entire family.

The Lernaean Hydra is probably one of Heracles’ most famous labours. The Hydra was a monster with the body of a serpent and nine serpent heads and poisonous breath.

As Heracles approached lake Lerna, he was forced to cover his mouth and nose to keep from inhalling the poisonous stench. He fired flaming arrows to drive it from it’s hiding place in a cave. The Hydra emerged and reared for attack, all nine heads aiming for Heracles. But Heracles was faster, and quickly swung his sword to cut off the nearest of the heads. The monster stumbled back, and Heracles advanced to rid it of more heads. As he beheaded the monster, he noticed something odd. In the place of the first head he had cut off grew two more. And so the heads of the monster began to grow back, doubling as they did. The monster now had eighteen angry heads ready to attack.

Not the brightest star in the sky, it’s generally thought that Heracles attempted to cut off a few more heads and was obviously rewarded with more heads to contend with. He had found himself in quite a predicament, one that could not be solved by the normal Bronze Age hero solution of hacking away at things.

Heracles, not a thinker, wouldn’t be able to solve this one on his own. And so, he enlisted the help of his nephew, Iolaus. Iolaus came up with the idea of cauterizing the Hydra’s necks with fire to keep the heads from growing back. And so, Heracles set to cutting off the now several dozen heads while Iolaus ran around with a burning torch to cauterize each of the headless necks. This worked, and so the Hydra was killed and Heracles had some wonderful poisonous hydra blood to use on future endeavors.

When he returned to Eurytheus, he was assigned the next task of capturing the Ceryneian Hind. The Hind was a beautiful creature, faster than any other creature on Earth, with majestic antlers made of gold. It could outrun an arrow and was sacred to the goddess Artemis. Eurytheus hoped that even if Heracles could suceed in this task, he would then incur the wrath of the goddess and thus be destroyed.

Heracles set out in search of the Hind. He chased it on foot for over a year, through Greece and Asia Minor. Finally, one day, he came upon the creature while it slept and was able to capture it with his bare hands. He took the creature back with him to Eurytheus. On the way, he stopped in at a temple of Artemis and begged his half sister to understand. He explained his labours and promised to return the Hind to her after presenting it to Eurytheus. Artemis agreed to the plan, and Heracles returned with the Hind, thus completing

On the next Mythology Monday, we’ll learn the true meaning of a “herculean task” with the next two of Heracles’ Twelve Labours.

Mythology Monday: The Nemean Lion

I’ve decided to do the Twelve Labours of Heracles for the next few Mythology Mondays. In my Classical Mythology class in second year, we had to memorize these. But I confess, I had to Google it.

Heracles (actually only known as Hercules to the Romans) is the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene. Zeus disguised himself as her husband, Amphitryon, to fool her into sleeping with him. Alcmene became pregnant with twins, Heracles the son of Zeus and Iphicles, the son of Amphitryon. When they were about to be born, Zeus’ wife Hera found out about Zeus’ infedelity. Needless to say, she hated Heracles from the beginning. She sent two serpents to kill him, but he strangled them, born with incredible strength.

Heracles grew up and married, had children. Out of jealousy, Hera drove him mad and caused him to kill his own wife and children. Haunted by the furies, the personification of his guilt, Heracles was forced to put himself under the mercy of his archenemy, Eurytheus and perform ten tasks as required by him.

His first task was to kill the Nemean Lion.

Though called a “lion,” the creature who terrorized Nemea was not only larger than an average lion, but its skin was impenetrable. The arrows Heracles had crafted for use on the Lion were of no use, they bounced off without a scratch.

Eventually Heracles lured the Lion back to its cave. He snuck in through a second entrance and stunned the Lion with his club. He then strangled the Lion to death, and used its own claws to remove its skin. He returned to Eurytheus with the pelt as proof.

From that day on, Heracles wore the Lion’s pelt as his armour, and this is the image we see of him - draped in fur with a lion’s head behind his head. This is the image that inspired centuries of mimics, from Alexander to Antony to Commodus.