The Erymanthian Boar

A boar that must arrive alive

The hero Heracles has to carry out a series of labours, tasks set for him by King Eurystheus. One of them is a wild boar on Mount Erymanthus, which is laying waste to the land around the town of Psophis. The order has a condition. The boar must reach Eurystheus alive.

That rules out a quick kill. Heracles has to force the animal into the open, tire it out and keep enough control to carry it to Mycenae. The king wants the living boar, not its hide or its head.

On the way, Apollodorus tells a longer story. He was an ancient writer whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths. In his account Heracles stops to visit Pholus, a centaur, one of the creatures who are half man and half horse. A fight breaks out over the wine the centaurs share, and the hunt waits. The pause changes nothing about the task. When Heracles returns to the mountain, the boar is still loose and the king still wants it alive.

Snow and a snare

The boar is hiding in a thicket. Heracles drives it out and chases it into deep snow. The snow wears the animal down until he can catch it in a snare.

In this telling, the snow does the work a weapon cannot. It slows the boar without killing it. The animal survives, and Heracles carries it to Mycenae. Apollodorus gives no second fight and no change in the beast along the way. It stays alive from the snare to the city.

At the end of the journey stands Eurystheus. The historian Diodorus Siculus says that when the king sees Heracles arriving with the boar on his shoulders, he hides in a bronze jar. The animal that laid waste to the land around the mountain is now close enough to drive the man who ordered it out of sight.

A king afraid of his own order

The scene turns the balance of power upside down for a moment, without changing it. Eurystheus can go on giving orders, and Heracles must go on obeying them. Yet the king cannot bear the sight of the proof he asked for.

Because the boar was taken alive, the proof is hard to predict. The boar that reaches Mycenae can still move.

The boar’s violence is the reason for the order, but the king never asks for its death. So Heracles has to use his strength without destroying the very thing he has been told to bring back. That restraint stays the same in every version.

Third labour or fourth

The ancient accounts tell the rest differently. Apollodorus sets the boar on Erymanthus and says it is laying waste to Psophis. In his order of events this is the fourth labour. The thicket, the deep snow and the snare all come from his account. There, the conditions on the mountain let Heracles meet the demand for a live captive.

Diodorus calls the order the third labour and places the boar on Mount Lampeia. He stresses that Heracles captures the boar and does not kill it, but he says nothing about snow.

The two accounts should not be joined into a single route between two named mountains. Nor should one be read as filling in weather that the other forgot. They keep different numbers and different landscapes, and they agree only on the result: the boar arrives alive.

The boar at Olympia

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia gave the capture a place among the labours. The outside of the temple carried metopes, carved stone panels set in a row high on the building. Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, names the boar among them. The scene was easy to recognise in the carved series, even though the written accounts disagreed about whether the order came third or fourth.

The temple dates to about 476 to 457 BC. Its carved labours were made of Parian marble and ran along the metopes. The building did not have to settle the numbering of Apollodorus and Diodorus. It set the deeds out as pictures.

Time has broken the boar panel apart. Four fragments of the original Olympia metope are in the Louvre: the hero’s head and thigh, the head of Eurystheus and the boar’s snout. The whole scene is gone, but all three figures can still be named from the pieces.

The Archaeological Museum of Olympia displays the carved decoration of the Temple of Zeus, and the temple itself gives the scene its Greek setting. At Olympia, the boar stays part of the series of labours through the building where its live capture was carved.