The Ceryneian Hind

The chase begins at Oenoe

The Ceryneian Hind is a female deer with golden horns. It is sacred to the goddess Artemis. Its capture is one of the labours of the hero Heracles, the tasks set for him by Eurystheus. The fullest account comes from Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths. He places the hind at Oenoe.

The order Heracles receives is hard to carry out. Eurystheus wants the animal brought alive to the city of Mycenae. Heracles also knows that it belongs to Artemis. So he tries neither to kill it nor to wound it. He follows it as it runs from Mount Artemisius towards the River Ladon, and the chase stretches across a full year.

This labour asks Heracles to hold back his strength. The animal must survive him. He must complete an order that involves an animal sacred to a goddess. Even on the road to Mycenae, the hind still belongs to Artemis.

The shot at the river

The hind is crossing the River Ladon when Heracles at last uses his bow. In Apollodorus, he shoots it and catches it, then carries it through the region of Arcadia.

The account does not explain how the hind can be shot and still be delivered alive. The difficulty of the labour lies in that gap. Heracles can overcome the animal. If he killed it, he would fail the command of Eurystheus. If he angered its goddess, his success could bring a new danger.

The gods on the road through Arcadia

As Heracles carries the captured hind through Arcadia, Artemis and the god Apollo come to face him. The chase is over, but now the hind’s divine protectors stand in his way. Her sacred animal is in the hunter’s hands.

Heracles says he acted out of necessity. He places the blame on Eurystheus. Artemis is calmed, and Heracles brings the hind alive to the king. His excuse separates the one who carried out the order from the one who gave it. It does not undo the long chase or the shot. It lets Heracles go on his way with the living animal.

A chase beyond the North Wind

The poet Pindar tells a route that cannot be fitted onto this one through Oenoe, Mount Artemisius and the Ladon. In his poem, Taygete had once dedicated the golden-horned doe to Artemis under the name Orthosia. Heracles follows it to the Istrian land and the country beyond the cold North Wind. There he sees the trees that the poem links with the olive at Olympia.

This is a different map and a different use of the chase. Apollodorus keeps it on a route through Arcadia before the return to Mycenae. Pindar takes Heracles into a distant northern country, where the trees linked with the olive of Olympia become part of the labour’s setting.

The playwright Euripides shortens the episode still further. In his play, the chorus, the group that sings and comments on the action, describes a spotted hind with golden antlers that ruined the groves of Oene. Heracles chases it, seizes it and binds it as a trophy for Artemis. The passage gives no year, no river crossing and no meeting with the gods. It does not say that he kills the hind.

The carving at Olympia

At Olympia, the labour was carved in Parian marble, from the island of Paros, on the Temple of Zeus. The temple dates to around 476 to 457 BC. The Labours run across its metopes, the square carved panels above the columns. Pausanias, the ancient travel writer, later names the hind among them. The temple’s carved decoration is now in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia.

This panel is known as West Metope 5, an Early Classical work of about 470 to 457 BC. Only pieces of it survive. The largest original piece keeps the hind’s body and chest beside the right elbow of Heracles. Other pieces keep the animal’s neck with his left hand, his right knee and a lower corner with his left foot. A head and body once placed in an old restoration have since been moved to the Amazon metope.

The Louvre museum holds two more original fragments, found in 1829. They show the left hand of Heracles gripping what is left of the hind, and the end of his left foot. The panel does not keep the whole chase or how it ended. The capture survives in pieces: a body, a neck, a hand, an elbow, a knee and a foot.