Loading...
Loading...
Hera’s persecution drives Heracles through twelve impossible tasks, including the Hydra and Cerberus.
The model strong-hero cycle. Greeks and later Romans, who called him Hercules, collected these labors in vase paintings, temple sculpture, and handbooks like Apollodorus's Library. Details vary by author, and the set of twelve only became standard in the classical period, but the shape of the story is always the same: a hero of enormous strength who must serve a weaker man, and who wins by endurance and, more often than people remember, by cleverness.
A goddess's grudge and a penance. Hera hated Heracles from birth because he was a son of Zeus by a mortal woman, Alcmene. She sent serpents to his cradle, and he strangled them. Years later she sent a fit of madness in which he killed his own wife and children. To be cleansed of that act, the oracle at Delphi told him to serve his cousin Eurystheus, king of Tiryns and Mycenae, for ten labors. Eurystheus, a nervous and jealous man, refused to count two of them, so the ten became twelve.
The first tasks stayed in the Peloponnese. Heracles strangled the Nemean lion, whose hide no weapon could pierce, and wore its skin ever after. He fought the Lernaean Hydra, which grew two heads for each one cut off, until his nephew Iolaus burned each neck stump closed; Eurystheus refused to count it because Heracles had help. He chased the golden-horned Ceryneian hind, sacred to Artemis, for a full year and carried it back alive. He drove the Erymanthian boar into deep snow and brought it back living, which so terrified Eurystheus that he hid in a bronze storage jar. He cleaned the Augean stables, uncleaned for thirty years, in a single day by diverting two rivers through them; that one was disallowed too, because Heracles had asked for payment. And he drove off the man-eating Stymphalian birds with a bronze rattle that Athena gave him.
Each task sent him farther from Greece. He captured the Cretan bull and the flesh-eating mares of Diomedes in Thrace, and fetched the war belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. To steal the cattle of the three-bodied giant Geryon he traveled to the far west, where he set up the Pillars of Heracles at the edge of the known world. For the golden apples of the Hesperides he found the Titan Atlas holding up the sky, offered to hold it while Atlas fetched the apples, and then tricked Atlas into taking the sky back. The last labor was the hardest: he went down to the Underworld and asked Hades for the three-headed guard dog Cerberus. Hades agreed on one condition, that Heracles use no weapons, so the hero wrestled the dog into submission, carried it up to Eurystheus, and returned it.
Strength alone never finishes a labor. The Hydra needed fire, the stables needed engineering, the apples needed a trick, and Cerberus needed restraint rather than force. The gods help but do not do the work: Athena provides the rattle and Hermes guides him below. The labors also move outward, from the hills near Argos to the far west and finally into the land of the dead, which is why the Greeks read them as a story about a mortal pushing to the limits of the world and coming back. Eurystheus, cowering in his jar, is the story's reminder that power without courage looks ridiculous.
The strong man dies of a poisoned robe and is made a god. Heracles' later adventures included sailing with Jason and freeing Prometheus. His death came through a trick: the centaur Nessus, dying from Heracles' arrow, told the hero's wife Deianeira that his blood was a love charm, and years later she smeared it on a robe. The poison burned Heracles beyond saving, and he had himself carried to a pyre on Mount Oeta. Zeus took the immortal part of his son to Olympus, where Hera finally made peace with him and he married her daughter Hebe. The Romans made Hercules a favorite, and a Herculean task in English still means work that seems impossible.
Two kinds of hero. Heracles wins by strength and endurance; Odysseus wins by cunning, which the Greeks called metis. Both go down to the Underworld and come back, and in the Odyssey the two heroes actually meet there, when Odysseus sees the shade of Heracles among the dead. The Odyssey journey asks students to hold both hero types at once.
Read the handbook that fixed the list. Apollodorus's Library gives the twelve labors in order and is available in the Perseus Digital Library; Britannica's Heracles entry summarizes the variants. Edith Hamilton's Mythology retells the labors for students, and the D'Aulaires' picture book pairs them with the family tree of the gods.
Recommended, age-appropriate books to explore this further. Links open a library catalog search.
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
The classic illustrated retelling for middle-grade readers; check names and family trees here first.
The Odyssey
by Homer (tr. Emily Wilson)
A clear modern verse translation. Teachers can assign selected books rather than the whole poem.
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
by Edith Hamilton
Retells all twelve labors in order and explains which ancient authors each detail comes from.
The Library of Greek Mythology
by Apollodorus (tr. Robin Hard)
The ancient handbook that fixed the standard list of labors; short entries, good for checking a detail.
The twelve-labor list is a later standard set; individual stories are older
Hera's hostility, not a modern villain origin, drives the punishment: Heracles serves Eurystheus to be cleansed of a crime committed in madness
Two labors were disallowed (the Hydra, because Iolaus helped, and the stables, because he asked for payment), so ten became twelve
Strength alone never finishes a labor: fire, engineering, a trick, and restraint each win one
Heracles is the strength-hero; Odysseus is the cunning-hero, and the two meet in the Underworld in the Odyssey