The Nemean Lion

A lion raised by Hera

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives the lion a family before it has an enemy. It is the offspring of Echidna and Orthus, and the goddess Hera raises it. She sets it to prey on people around Tretus, Nemea and Apesas, places in the Argolid, the region inland from Nafplio. Its place among the labours of the hero Heracles is no accident. Hera opposes Heracles, and she has prepared the creature he must face.

The order comes from King Eurystheus, who sets Heracles his labours. He wants the lion’s skin. Killing the lion is the first labour.

Before the hunt, Heracles stays with a man named Molorchus at Cleonae. A sacrifice is due, but Heracles asks him to put it off for 30 days. The deadline gives the hunt a human measure. Somewhere beyond the lion’s den, a man is waiting to learn whether his guest will come back.

When arrows fail

Heracles shoots at the lion, and his arrows fail. The weapon meant to kill from a distance cannot wound it. The historian Diodorus Siculus makes the protection complete: iron, bronze and stone cannot wound the lion. Heracles has to follow a creature he cannot cut into ground it knows better than he does.

The den gives him his answer. Apollodorus, whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths, says the lion retreats into a cave with two mouths. Heracles blocks one entrance and goes in through the other. He closes his hands around the lion’s throat and chokes it. The narrow cave takes away the lion’s escape, and it also takes away the hero’s distance. The labour ends with a choking, without a weapon.

The lion’s protection changes the kind of victory this is. Heracles does not find a stronger arrow. Once the usual materials have failed, his strength counts only because he can force the animal into a place where its skin no longer protects its breath.

Back to Cleonae and Mycenae

Heracles does come back, carrying the lion first to Cleonae. Apollodorus then sends him on to Mycenae, where the order began. Eurystheus had asked for the skin, so the body is more than proof that the beast is dead. The hide that stopped the arrows has to be brought back and put to use.

Diodorus says Heracles wears the lion’s skin. The skin that could not be pierced passes from the animal to the man who killed it without piercing it. The account gives no separate struggle with the skin. It records the result that people could see: the hunter comes home dressed in the armour his weapons could not break.

At Mycenae the sight changes how Eurystheus handles every later labour. Once Heracles carries the lion into view, the king bars him from entering the city. From then on, proof must be shown outside the gates. Apollodorus also gives Eurystheus a bronze jar to hide in.

A king in a jar

The contrast is exact. Heracles went into a cave with two mouths and cut off the lion’s way out. Eurystheus answers by shutting himself into a container of his own. The king still gives the orders, yet the lion’s arrival has left him unwilling to face the man who carries them out.

His reaction also explains why the skin is more than a trophy. It keeps the unbeatable body present after death. Eurystheus does not have to trust a report or examine an ordinary hide. The hero stands before him with the proof that arrows, iron, bronze and stone had all failed.

Where the sources differ

Hesiod spreads the lion’s attacks across three named places in the Argolid: Tretus, Nemea and Apesas. Diodorus brings the den close to Mount Tretus and calls it a cleft, a crack in the rock. Apollodorus calls it a cave, and he supplies the two openings that decide how Heracles attacks.

The accounts agree on the region and on the killing, but each keeps a different part of the story. They do not need to be joined into one description in which every detail appears.

What remains of the first panel

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, names the Nemean Lion among the labours carved on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. They were carved on the metopes, stone panels set in a row high on the outside of the temple. The temple dates from about 476 to 457 BC, and its sculptures were made of Parian marble. Across the metopes, separate orders became one carved series.

The Nemean panel does not survive whole. Its only original fragment, numbered Ma 718, shows part of the dead lion, with part of the left foot and leg of Heracles and his club. It was found at the Temple of Zeus in 1829 and is now on display in the Louvre. The Archaeological Museum of Olympia shows the temple’s wider carved decoration.

At Nemea, the name survives on the Argolid ground where Hesiod and the later writers set the beast. Olympia keeps a second record in stone. Only one original fragment is left, but it can still be recognised as the labour that begins with arrows failing.