Heracles

A night made three times as long

Heracles is the son of Zeus and Alcmena, a mortal woman. Zeus visits Alcmena disguised as her husband, Amphitryon. He stretches a single night to the length of three, and Heracles is conceived. Amphitryon comes home the next day and still knows nothing of what has happened. From that long stretch of nights Alcmena bears two sons: Heracles by Zeus, and Iphicles, one night younger, by Amphitryon.

Even the timing of the birth is fought over. Zeus has sworn that a descendant of Perseus born that day will rule Mycenae. The goddess Hera is jealous. She has the Eileithyiae, the goddesses of childbirth, hold back the labour of Alcmena. At the same time she speeds up the birth of Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus. So the throne Zeus meant for his own son goes to a cousin, who spends the rest of the story giving Heracles orders (Library 2.4.5).

The serpents in the cradle

When the child is eight months old, Hera sends two serpents into his bed. The baby Heracles strangles them with his bare hands.

Apollodorus, a later writer who retold the Greek myths in a book called the Library, also records a rival account. It comes from an earlier writer, Pherecydes. In this version, Amphitryon puts the serpents there himself. He wants to know which of the two boys is his own son. Iphicles runs away, and Heracles stands his ground (Library 2.4.8).

The madness and the new name

He is not born Heracles. Apollodorus calls him Alcides at first. In a fit of madness, he kills his own children. After he has been purified, cleansed of the killing by ritual, he goes to the oracle at Delphi, a shrine where a priestess gave answers from a god, to ask where he should live. There, “The Pythian priestess then first called him Hercules, for hitherto he was called Alcides.” She sends him to Tiryns to serve Eurystheus for 12 years. She promises that he will become immortal once his tasks are done (Library 2.4.12).

In this telling, the madness comes first. The killing of his children leads to the sentence at Delphi, and the sentence leads to his years of service at Tiryns, with its 12 labours.

A madness placed twice

The playwright Euripides puts the madness at a different point in the life. When his play Heracles opens, Heracles has already fetched Cerberus, the hound of the underworld, and finished all 12 labours. Moments earlier, his family feared he was “beneath the earth” for good (Heracles 496-533).

Only then do the goddess Iris and the spirit of Madness arrive, sent by Hera. The reason is given in the play: “until he had finished all his grievous labors, Destiny was preserving him, nor would father Zeus ever suffer me or Hera to harm him. But now that he has accomplished the labors of Eurystheus, Hera wishes to brand him with the guilt of shedding kindred blood by slaying his own children” (Heracles 822-852).

So one tradition makes the labours his punishment. The other makes their end the moment Hera can finally reach him. Neither account settles the other.

The pyre on Oeta

Heracles dies as a mortal. His wife, Deianira, fears that he loves his captive, Iole, more than her. She smears his robe with what she believes is a love charm. It is the blood of the centaur Nessus, and it is poison. The robe clings to Heracles and tears away his skin when he pulls at it.

He climbs Mount Oeta, builds his own funeral fire and orders it lit. Nobody will do it until a shepherd, Poeas, passes by.

In Apollodorus, a cloud rises beneath the burning hero and carries him up to heaven with a crash of thunder. He makes peace with Hera and marries her daughter Hebe. Apollodorus gives both events without claiming they are one: a poisoned body burns on Oeta, and an immortal husband enters Olympus, the home of the gods. The divided Heracles that Odysseus meets in the Odyssey is already there in the pyre.

Two Heracles, since Homer

The earliest surviving Greek text about Heracles already treats him as two beings at once. In the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer, the hero Odysseus visits the underworld. There he meets “his phantom; for he himself among the immortal gods takes his joy in the feast, and has to wife Hebe.” The phantom complains of the labours Eurystheus set him. It names the trip down for “the hound of Hades”, guided there by the gods Hermes and Athena (Odyssey 11.601-626).

The early poet Hesiod, in his Theogony, a poem on the origins of the gods, gives the same double ending in brief. Once his “grievous toils” are finished, Heracles marries Hebe on Olympus and “lives amongst the undying gods, untroubled and unaging all his days” (Theogony 950-955).

Two temples and two kinds of worship

Centuries later, the historian Herodotus travelled in search of the origin of this double nature. At Tyre he was shown a temple of Heracles that the priests dated to the founding of the city, “two thousand three hundred years ago.” At Thasos he found a temple built by settlers from Phoenicia “as much as five generations before the birth of Heracles the son of Amphitryon in Hellas.”

From this he drew his conclusion. The Greeks who “have established and practise two worships of Heracles” are in the right, “sacrificing to one Heracles as to an immortal, and calling him the Olympian, but to the other bringing offerings as to a dead hero” (Histories 2.44).