The labours of Heracles

The oracle at Delphi first set Heracles ten labours; he ended up doing twelve because two were not counted.

The son Hera hated

Heracles, called Hercules by the Romans, was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Alkmene of Thebes. His name means something like "glory of Hera", which is odd, because Hera hated him from birth as the living proof of her husband’s affair. In one well-known story she sent two snakes into the cradle of the baby Heracles, and he strangled them with his hands. As a grown man he was the strongest of all heroes, and also the most troubled. Hera sent a fit of madness on him, and in it he killed his own children. To be cleansed of that crime, he went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.

The fullest list of what followed comes from the Library of Apollodorus, a mythological handbook usually dated to the 1st or 2nd century CE, many centuries after the stories began. According to Apollodorus, the oracle told Heracles to serve Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, for twelve years and carry out ten labours. Eurystheus later refused to count two of them. He said the Hydra did not count because Heracles’ nephew Iolaus had helped, and the Augean stables did not count because Heracles had asked for payment. So two more labours were added. Other sources tell it differently.

Six labours close to home

The first six labours all take place in the Peloponnese, the large peninsula of southern Greece, within a few days’ walk of Tiryns. The Nemean lion had a hide no weapon could pierce, so Heracles strangled it and afterwards wore its skin as armour, which is how Greek painters show him: a man with a lion’s head over his own like a hood. The Hydra of Lerna grew two heads for every one he cut off, until Iolaus burned each neck with a torch. The Augean stables had not been cleaned for years, and Heracles turned two rivers through them to wash them out in a single day.

Six labours far away

The last six take Heracles to the edges of the known world: Crete, Thrace in the north, the Black Sea, the far west beyond the Mediterranean and finally the land of the dead. In Apollodorus, on his way to fetch the cattle of Geryon he set up two pillars facing each other at the boundaries of Europe and Libya to mark how far he had travelled, known as the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar. For the golden apples he needed the help of Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky. In Apollodorus, Heracles takes the sky on his shoulders while Atlas fetches the apples, then tricks Atlas into taking it back. The last labour is the hardest of all: to go down to the underworld and bring up its three-headed watchdog, Cerberus, without weapons.

The labours in stone and clay

Heracles was the favourite subject of Greek vase painters. The Met holds an Athenian amphora signed by the potter Andokides, made about 530 BCE, that shows him struggling with Apollo over the Delphic tripod. The most famous carved set is on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, finished in the 460s BCE. Twelve metopes, square stone panels above the porches at each end of the temple, showed the twelve labours, six at each end. The University of Oxford’s Classical Art Research Centre notes that his guardian goddess Athena appears on four of them. The number twelve may have become standard partly because of famous sets like this one.