Summary: Chapter III — Hercules
Hamilton draws her story of Hercules mostly from later
writers but also borrows from Greek tragedians. Hercules, born in
Thebes, is the son of Zeus and Alcmene, a mortal whom Zeus deceives
by disguising himself as her husband. Hercules’ demi-god status
allows him many liberties. He can challenge the gods and often win,
as when he offends the Oracle at Delphi and quarrels with Apollo.
He also helps the gods defeat the giants with his superhuman strength; above
all else, he is remembered as the strongest man who ever lived. Only
magic can harm him, as he overpowers all else. His unequalled strength
makes up for deficiencies in intelligence and patience—he can be
impetuous, emotional, and careless, and once threatens to shoot
an arrow at the sun because it is too hot. Nonetheless, he has boundless
courage and a noble sense of right and wrong.
Hercules’ strength is evident from his infancy. One night,
two giant snakes attack him and his half-brother, Iphicles, in their
nursery, but Hercules strangles them both at once. While still a
youth he kills the legendary Thespian lion of the Cithaeron woods,
taking its skin as a cloak he always wears thereafter. In his youth
he also demonstrates a tragic weakness that haunts him his entire
life—he rashly and unthinkingly kills one of his teachers, not knowing
his own strength. After conquering the warlike Minyans, he marries
the princess Megara. He has three children with her, but then Hera,
jealous of Zeus’s infidelity with Hercules’ mother, uses magic to
make Hercules go insane and kill his wife and children. Recovering
his sanity and seeing what he has done, he rushes to kill himself,
but Theseus convinces him to live. Knowing he must purify himself, Hercules
goes to the Oracle at Delphi for advice. She tells him to visit
his cousin, Eurystheus of Mycenae, who will devise a penance.
Spurred on by Hera, Eurystheus devises a series of twelve
impossibly difficult tasks. The first of these Labors of Hercules
is to kill the lion of Nemea, a beast that cannot be harmed by weapons;
Hercules chokes it to death. Next, he must kill the Hydra, a monster
with nine heads, one of which is immortal. A new head grows whenever
one of the other heads is chopped off—a problem Hercules solves
by burning the neck-stumps and burying the immortal head. In the
third task, Hercules captures the sacred golden-horned stag of Artemis and
brings it back alive. The fourth task is to capture a giant boar. The
fifth, cleaning the stables of King Augeas in a day. The king has thousands
of cattle whose manure has not been cleaned in years, so Hercules
redirects two rivers to flow through the stable. Athena helps Hercules
with his sixth task, which is to rid the people of Stymphalus of
a flock of wild birds that terrorize them.
All the other tasks involve the capture of things extremely
resistant to captivity: a beautiful wild bull of Minos; the flesh-eating horses
of Diomedes; the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons; the
cattle of Geryon; a three-bodied monster (it is on the way to fulfill
this labor that Hercules balances two giant rocks at Gibraltar and
Ceuta, on either side of the strait between Spain and Morocco). The
eleventh task is to steal the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, the
mysterious daughters of Atlas. Journeying to find Atlas, the only one
who knows the Hesperides’ location, Hercules stops to free Prometheus
from his chains. Atlas offers to tell Hercules only if he holds
up the world—normally Atlas’s job—while Atlas fetches the Apples
for him. Atlas gets the fruit but decides he prefers walking around
without the weight of the world on his shoulders. Hercules tricks
him into taking the earth back, saying he needs to be relieved for
a moment to place a pad on his shoulders. Finally, for the twelfth labor,
Hercules has to bring Cerberus, the three-headed dog, up from the
underworld. Before leaving Hades, Hercules frees his friend Theseus
from the Chair of Forgetfulness.
Hercules undergoes other various adventures after his
labors, defeating Antaeus—a wrestler who is invincible as long as
he touches the ground—and rescuing King Laomedon’s daughter, who is
being sacrificed to a sea serpent. Hercules also carelessly kills
several others along the way: a boy who accidentally spills water
on him and a friend whose father, King Eurytus, insults him. As
punishment for this last murder, Zeus sends Hercules to be a slave
to Queen Omphale of Lydia, who forces him to dress and work as a
woman for a year (though some say three years). Despite his errors,
Hercules almost always has a clear sense of right and wrong as well
as the need to make things right. On the way to kill the wicked Diomedes
(owner of the flesh-eating horses), Hercules gets drunk at the house
of his friend, Admetus, not knowing that Admetus’ wife has just
died. When Hercules learns of his friend’s loss, he feels so bad
about his inadvertent disrespect that he fights and defeats Pluto (Hades)
to bring Admetus’s wife back from Hades.
One time, however, Hercules refuses to see the error of
his ways, and this leads to his death. Angered that Zeus had punished
him for inadvertently killing King Eurytus’s son, Hercules kills
Eurytus and razes his city. One of his captives is a beautiful girl,
Iole. Deianira, Hercules’ wife, feels threatened, and recalls some
magic she earlier acquired, when Hercules shot a centaur named Nessus
who insulted Deianira. As Nessus died, he told Deianira to take
some of his blood as a potion to use if her husband ever loved anyone
more than her. Deianira secretly rubs some of the potion on Hercules’
robe. When he puts the robe on, pain surges through his body. He
does not die and must end the agony by killing himself, building
a giant funeral pyre where he burns himself to death. Ascending
to Olympus, Hercules reconciles with Hera and marries her daughter,
Hebe.
