The Stymphalian Birds

A flock hidden in the wood

A huge flock of birds has fled from wolves. They gather in the deep wood around Lake Stymphalus, and there they are safe. King Eurystheus, who sets the hero Heracles his labours, orders him to chase them away.

The order is at first about removal. Eurystheus does not tell Heracles to kill the birds. He tells him to drive them off. The wood around the lake is their refuge, and Heracles cannot get far enough into it to reach them. He has to turn that refuge against them from outside.

The story so far comes from Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose handbook, the Library, retells the Greek myths. He calls the flock countless and explains why it gathered there. He does not call the birds man-eaters. That detail comes from Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece. He records it as the story told around Stymphalus. So it belongs to the local account he heard, and it is not shared by every version.

The noise above the lake

Until now, the birds’ shelter has beaten Heracles. Then the goddess Athena gives him bronze clappers. She had received them from the god Hephaestus.

Heracles climbs a mountain above the lake and sounds the clappers over the trees. The deep wood below suddenly lets out its countless birds. Once they rise into the open, he can use his bow. In the account of Apollodorus, Heracles frightens the birds out of the wood with the noise and then shoots them as they fly up. Driving them out and killing them are two steps in one action.

So the labour depends first on an instrument and on the fear it causes. The noise reaches where Heracles cannot, and it forces the hidden flock to move. Heracles can shoot only when the birds leave the cover that kept them safe.

Shot or driven away

Pausanias gives no single order of events. He sets two endings side by side. In one, Heracles shoots the birds. In the other, told by the poet Peisander, he drives them away with rattles and does nothing more.

A flock hit by arrows and a flock leaving the lake are different results, even if both meet the order to remove it. The labour has no single settled ending.

That disagreement changes what the bronze instrument means. In one version it turns the birds into targets. In the other, its sound alone is the victory. Heracles may need his bow, or he may need only enough noise to make the birds leave.

Birds in the temple of Artemis

The birds also belong to the local religion, and not only to the labour Eurystheus set. Pausanias records an old sanctuary, or sacred place, of Artemis Stymphalia, the goddess Artemis as she was worshipped at Stymphalus. It held a wooden statue of the goddess, mostly covered in gold. Near the roof were carved birds. Behind the statue stood maidens of white marble whose legs were shaped like the legs of birds.

Pausanias does not turn these figures into a single explanation of the flock. The roof carvings call birds to mind, and the marble figures combine a woman’s form with a bird’s legs. They show how closely the creatures stayed attached to Artemis and to Stymphalus. They do not settle whether Heracles killed the birds or drove them elsewhere.

How the birds reached Olympia

The labour was also carved on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The temple dates to around 476 to 457 BC. Its carved decoration is made of Parian marble, and the labours of Heracles run along the metopes, stone panels set in a row high on the building. Pausanias later names the Stymphalian Birds among those panels.

The surviving panel dates to about 460 BC. It is incomplete. Three original fragments remain: Athena seated, the head of Heracles and his right arm. They were found at the Temple of Zeus in 1829 and are now on display in the Louvre. What survives shows Athena in the scene, as she is in the account of Apollodorus. It cannot show which written ending the sculptors followed.

Metal once finished parts of the carving. The marble still shows traces where a diadem, a band worn on the head, and the birds were fixed. Those metal pieces have not survived with the three fragments. The birds themselves are gone, but the traces of their metal fittings remain on the marble found at Olympia.