3. The Lesser Mysteries, which became a preparation for the Greater, seem to have been an independent Pelasgian festival, also based on the hope of rebirth, but taking place early in February at Candlemas, when the trees first leaf – which is the meaning of ‘Anthesterion’.
4. Now, since Dionysus was identified with Osiris, Semele must be Isis; and we know that Osiris did not rescue Isis from the Underworld, but she, him. Thus the icon at Troezen will have shown Semele restoring Dionysus to the upper air. The goddess who similarly guides Heracles is Isis again; and his rescue of Alcestis was probably deduced from the same icon – he is led, not leading. His emergence in the precinct of Mount Laphystius makes an interesting variant. No cavern exists on the summit, and the myth must refer to the death and resurrection of the sacred king which was celebrated there – a rite that helped to form the legend of the Golden Fleece (see 70. 2 and 148. 10).
5. Aconite, a poison and paralysant, was used by the Thessalian witches in the manufacture of their flying ointment: it numbed the feet and hands and gave them a sensation of being off the ground. But since it was also a febrifuge, Heracles, who drove the fever-birds from Stymphalus, became credited with its discovery.
6. The sequence of Heracles’s feats varies considerably. Diodorus Siculus and Hyginus arrange the Twelve Labours in the same order as Apollodorus, except that they both place the Fourth before the Third, and the Sixth before the Fifth; and that Diodorus places the Twelfth before the Eleventh. Nearly all mythographers agree that the killing of the Nemean Lion was the First Labour, but in Hyginus’s sequence of ‘the Twelve Labours of Heracles set by Eurystheus’ (Fabula 30), it is preceded by the strangling of the serpents. In one place, Diodorus Siculus associates the killing of Anaeus and Busiris with the Tenth Labour (iv. 17–18); in another, with the Eleventh (iv. 27). And while some writers make Heracles sail with the Argonauts in his youth (Silius Italicus: i. 512); others place this adventure after the Fourth Labour (Apollonius Rhodius: i. 122); and others after the Eighth (Diodorus Siculus: iv. 15). But some make him perform the Ninth (Valerius Flaccus: Argonautica v. 91) and Twelfth (ibid: ii. 382) Labours, and break the horns of ‘both bulls’ (ibid: i. 36) before he sailed with the Argonauts; and others deny that he sailed at all, on the ground that he was then serving as Queen Omphale’s slave (Herodotus, quoted by Apollodorus: i. 9. 19).
7. According to Lycophron 1328, Heracles was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries before setting out on the Ninth Labour; but Philochorus (quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26) says that Theseus had him initiated in the course of its performance (ibid.: 30), and was rescued by him from Tartarus during the Twelfth Labour (Apollodorus: ii. 5. 12). According to Pausanias (i. 27. 7), Theseus was only seven years old when Heracles came to Troezen, wearing the lion pelt; and cleared the Isthmus of malefactors on his way to Athens, at the time when Heracles was serving Omphale (Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3). Euripides believed that Heracles had fought with Ares’s son Cycnus before setting out on the Eighth Labour (Alcestis 501 ff.); Propertius (iv. 19. 41), that he had already visited Tartarus when he killed Cacus; and Ovid (Fasti v. 388), that Cheiron died accidentally when Heracles had almost completed his Labours, not during the Fourth.
8. Albricus (22) lists the following Twelve Labours in this order, with allegorical explanations: defeating the Centaurs at a wedding; killing the lion; rescuing Alcestis from Tartarus and chaining Cerberus; winning the apples of the Hesperides; destroying the Hydra; wrestling with Achelous; killing Cacus; winning the mares of Diomedes; defeating Antaeus; capturing the boar; lifting the cattle of Geryon; holding up the heavens.
9. Various Labours and bye-works of Heracles were represented on Apollo’s throne at Amyclae (Pausanias: iii. 18. 7–9); and in the bronze shrine of Athene on the Spartan acropolis (Pausanias: iii. 17. 3). Praxiteles’s gable sculptures on the Theban shrine of Heracles showed most of the Twelve Labours, but the Stymphalian Birds were missing, and the wrestling match with Antaeus replaced the cleansing of Augeias’s stables. The evident desire of so many cities to be associated with Heracles’s Labours suggests that much the same ritual marriage-task drama, as a preliminary to coronation, was performed over a wide area.
135
THE MURDER OF IPHITUS
WHEN Heracles returned to Thebes after his Labours, he gave Megara, his wife, now thirty-three years old, in marriage to his nephew and charioteer Iolaus, who was only sixteen, remarking that his own union with her had been inauspicious.1 He then looked about for a younger and more fortunate wife; and, hearing that his friend Eurytus, a son of Melanius, King of Oechalia, had offered to marry his daughter Iole to any archer who could outshoot him and his four sons, took the road there.2 Eurytus had been given a fine bow and taught its use by Apollo himself, whom he now claimed to surpass in marksmanship, yet Heracles found no difficulty in winning the contest. The result displeased Eurytus excessively and, when he learned that Heracles had discarded Megara after murdering her children, he refused to give him Iole. Having drunk a great deal of wine to gain confidence, ‘You could never compare with me and my sons as an archer,’ he told Heracles, ‘were it not that you unfairly use magic arrows, which cannot miss their mark. This contest is void, and I would not, in any case, entrust my beloved daughter to such a ruffian as yourself! Moreover, you are Eurystheus’s slave and, like a slave, deserve only blows from a free man.’ So saying, he drove Heracles out of the Palace. Heracles did not retaliate at once, as he might well have done; but swore to take vengeance.3
b. Three of Eurytus’s sons, namely Didaeon, Clytius, and Toxeus, had supported their father in his dishonest pretensions. The eldest, however, whose name was Iphitus, declared that Iole should in all fairness have been given to Heracles; and when, soon afterwards, twelve strong-hooved brood-mares and twelve sturdy mule-foals disappeared from Euboea, he refused to believe that Heracles was the thief. As a matter of fact, they had been stolen by the well-known thief Autolycus, who magically changed their appearance and sold them to the unsuspecting Heracles as if they were his own.4 Iphitus followed the tracks of the mares and foals and found that they led towards Tiryns, which made him suspect that Heracles was, after all, avenging the insult offered him by Eurytus. Coming suddenly face to face with Heracles, who had just returned from his rescue of Alcestis, he concealed his suspicions and merely asked for advice in the matter. Heracles did not recognize the beasts from Iphitus’s description as those sold to him by Autolycus, and with his usual heartiness promised to search for them if Iphitus would consent to become his guest. Yet he now divined that he was suspected of theft, which galled his sensitive heart. After a grand banquet, he led Iphitus to the top of the highest tower in Tiryns. ‘Look about you!’ he demanded, ‘and tell me whether your mares are grazing anywhere in sight.’ ‘I cannot see them’, Iphitus admitted. ‘Then you have falsely accused me in your heart of being a thief!’ Heracles roared, distraught with anger, and hurled him to his death.5
c. Heracles presently went to Neleus, King of Pylus, and asked to be purified; but Neleus refused, because Eurytus was his ally. Nor would any of his sons, except the youngest, Nestor, consent to receive Heracles, who eventually persuaded Deiphobus, the son of Hippolytus, to purify him at Amyclae. However, he still suffered from evil dreams, and went to ask the Delphic Oracle how he might be rid of them.6 The Pythoness Xenoclea refused to answer this question. ‘You murdered your guest,’ she said. ‘I have no oracles for such as you!’ ‘Then I shall be obliged to institute an oracle of my own!’ cried Heracles. With that, he plundered the shrine of its votive offerings and even pulled away the tripod on which Xenoclea sat. ‘Heracles of Tiryns is a very different man from his Canopic namesake,’ the Pythoness said severely as he carried the tripod from the shrine; she meant that the Egyptian Heracles had once come to Delphi and behaved with courtesy and reverence.7
d. Up rose the indignant Apollo, and fought Heracles until Zeus parted the combatants with a thunderbolt, making them clasp hands in friendship. Heracles restored the sac
red tripod, and together they founded the city of Gythium, where images of Apollo, Heracles, and Dionysus now stand side by side in the market place. Xenoclea then gave Heracles the following oracle: ‘To be rid of your affliction you must be sold into slavery for one whole year and the price you fetch must be offered to Iphitus’s children.8 Zeus is enraged that you have violated the laws of hospitality, whatever the provocation.’ ‘Whose slave am I to be?’ asked Heracles humbly. ‘Queen Omphale of Lydia will purchase you,’ Xenoclea replied. ‘I obey,’ said Heracles, ‘but one day I shall enslave the man who has brought this suffering upon me, and all his family too!’9 Some, however, say that Heracles did not return the tripod and that, when one thousand years later, Apollo heard that it had been taken to the city of Pheneus, he punished the Pheneans by blocking the channel which Heracles had dug to carry off the heavy rains, and flooded their city.10
e. Another wholly different account of these events is current, according to which Lycus the Euboean, son of Poseidon and Dirce, attacked Thebes during a time of sedition, killed King Creon, and usurped the throne. Believing Copreus’s report that Heracles had died, Lycus tried to seduce Megara and, when she resisted him, would have killed her and the children had Heracles not returned from Tartarus just in time to exact vengeance. Thereupon Hera, whose favourite Lycus was, drove Heracles mad: he killed Megara and his own sons, also his minion, the Aetolian Stichius.11 The Thebans, who show the children’s tomb, say that Heracles would have killed his foster-father Amphitryon as well, if Athene had not knocked him insensible with a huge stone; to which they point, saying: ‘We nick-name it “The Chastener”.’ But Amphitryon had, in fact, died long before, in the Orchomenan campaign. The Athenians claim that Theseus, grateful to Heracles for his rescue from Tartarus, arrived at this juncture with an Athenian army, to help Heracles against Lycus. He stood aghast at the murder, yet promised Heracles every honour for the rest of his life, and after his death as well, and brought him to Athens, where Medea cured his madness with medicines. Sicalus then purified him once more.12
1. Plutarch: On Love 9; Apollodorus: ii. 6.1; Pausanias: x. 29.3.
2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 31; Pausanias: iv. 33. 5; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 260 ff.
3. Hyginus: Fabula 14; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 88–9; Homer: Odyssey viii. 226–8; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Sophocles: loc. cit.
4. Hesiod, quoted by scholiast on Sophocles’s Trachinian Women 266; Homer: Odyssey xxi. 15 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 6.2; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xxi. 22.
5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 271; Homer: loc. cit., with scholiast quoting Pherecydes; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.
6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: x. 13.4; Hyginus: Fabula 32.
8. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 21. 7; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.
9. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 248 ff. and 275 ff.; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300.
10. Plutarch: On the Slowness of Divine Vengeance 12; Pausanias: viii. 14. 3.
11. Hyginus: Fabula 32; Euripides: Heracles 26 ff. and 553; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Trachinian Women 355; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vii, quoted by Photiusp.490.
12. Euripides: Heracles 26 ff.,1163 ff., and 1322; Pausanias: ix. 11.2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55; Menocrates, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Isthmian Odes iv. 104 ff.
1. In matrilineal society, divorce of a royal wife implies abandonment of the kingdom which has been her marriage portion; and it seems likely that, once the ancient conventions were relaxed in Greece, a sacred king could escape death at the end of his reign by abandoning his kingdom and marrying the heiress of another. If this is so, Eurytus’s objection to Heracles as a son-in-law will not have been that he had killed his children – the annual victims sacrificed while he reigned at Thebes – but that he had evaded his royal duty of dying. The winning of a bride by a feat of archery was an Indo-European custom: in the Mahabharata, Arjuna wins Draupadi thus, and in the Ramayana, Rama bends Shiva’s powerful bow and wins Sita. Moreover, the shooting of one arrow towards each cardinal point of the compass, and one towards the zenith (see 126. 2 and 132. 8), formed part of the royal marriage rites in India and Egypt. The mares may have figured sacrificially at the marriage of Heracles and Iole, when he became King of Oechalia (see 81. 4). Iphitus, at any rate, is the king’s surrogate flung from the Theban walls at the end of every year, or at any other time in placation of some angry deity (see 105.6; 106.j; and 121.3).
2. Heracles’s seizure of the Delphic tripod apparently records a Dorian capture of the shrine; as the thunderbolt thrown between Apollo and Heracles records a decision that Apollo should be allowed to keep his Oracle, rather than yield it to Heracles – provided that he served the Dorian interests as patron of the Dymanes, a tribe belonging to the Doric League. It was notorious that the Spartans, who were Dorians, controlled the Delphic Oracle in Classical times. Euripides omits the tripod incident in his Heracles because, in 421 B.C., the Athenians had been worsted by the Treaty of Nicias in their attempt to maintain the Phocians’ sovereignty over Delphi; the Spartans insisted on making it a separate puppet state which they themselves controlled. In the middle of the fourth century, when the dispute broke out again, the Phocians seized Delphi and appropriated some of its treasures to raise forces in their own defence; but were badly beaten, and all their cities destroyed.
3. The Pythoness’s reproach seems to mean that the Dorians, who had conquered the Peloponnese, called themselves ‘Sons of Heracles’, and did not show her the same respect as their Achaean, Aeolian, and Ionian predecessors, whose religious ties were with the agricultural Libyans of the Egyptian Delta, rather than with the Hellenic cattle-kings; Xenoclea’s predecessor Herophile (‘dear to Hera’), had been Zeus’s daughter by Lamia and called ‘Sibyl’ by the Libyans over whom she ruled (Pausanias: x. 12. 1; Euripides: Prologue to Lamia). Cicero confirms this view when he denies that Alcmene’s son (i.e. the pre-Dorian Heracles) was the one who fought Apollo for the tripod (On the Nature of the Gods iii). Attempts were later made, in the name of religious decency, to patch up the quarrel between Apollo the Phocian and Heracles the Dorian. Thus Plutarch, a Delphic priest, suggests (Dialogue on the E at Delphi 6) that Heracles became an expert diviner and logician, and ‘seemed to have seized the tripod in friendly rivalry with Apollo.’ When describing Apollo’s vengeance on the people of Pheneus, he tactfully suppresses the fact that it was Heracles who had dug them the channel (see 138. d).
136
OMPHALE
HERACLES was taken to Asia and offered for sale as a nameless slave by Hermes, patron of all important financial transactions, who afterwards handed the purchase money of three silver talents to Iphitus’s orphans. Nevertheless, Eurytus stubbornly forbade his grandchildren to accept any monetary compensation, saying that only blood would pay for blood; and what happened to the silver, Hermes alone knows.1 As the Pythoness had foretold, Heracles was bought by Omphale, Queen of Lydia, a woman with a good eye for a bargain; and he served her faithfully either for one year, or for three, ridding Asia Minor of the bandits who infested it.2
b. This Omphale, a daughter of Jordanes and, according to some authorities, the mother of Tantalus, had been bequeathed the kingdom by her unfortunate husband Tmolus, son of Ares and Theogone. While out hunting on Mount Carmanorium – so called in honour of Carmanor son of Dionysus and Alixirrhoë, who was killed there by a wild boar – he fell in love with a huntress named Arrhippe, a chaste attendant of Artemis. Arrhippe, deaf to Tmolus’s threats and entreaties, fled to her mistress’s temple where, disregarding its sanctity, he ravished her on the goddess’s own couch. She hanged herself from a beam, after invoking Artemis, who thereupon let loose a mad bull; Tmolus was tossed into the air, fell on pointed stakes and sharp stones and died in torment. Theoclymenus, his son by O
mphale, buried him where he lay, renaming the mountain ‘Tmolus’; a city of the same name, built upon its slopes, was destroyed by a great earthquake in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.3
c. Among the many bye-works which Heracles performed during this servitude was his capture of the two Ephesian Cercopes, who had constantly robbed him of his sleep. They were twin brothers named either Passalus and Acmon; or Olus and Eurybatus; or Sillus and Triballus – sons of Oceanus by Theia, and the most accomplished cheats and liars known to mankind, who roamed the world, continually practising new deceptions. Theia had warned them to keep clear of Heracles and her words ‘My little White-bottoms, you have yet to meet the great Black-bottom!’ becoming proverbial, ‘white-bottom’ now means ‘cowardly, base, or lascivious’.4 They would buzz around Heracles’s bed in the guise of bluebottles, until one night he grabbed them, forced them to resume their proper shape, and bore them off, dangling head-downwards from a pole which he carried over his shoulder. Now, Heracles’s bottom, which the lion’s pelt did not cover, had been burned as black as an old leather shield by exposure to the sun, and by the fiery breaths of Cacus and of the Cretan bull; and the Cercopes burst into a fit of immoderate laughter to find themselves suspended upside-down, staring at it. Their merriment surprised Heracles, and when he learned its cause, he sat down upon a rock and laughed so heartily himself that they persuaded him to release them. But though we know of an Asian city named Cercopia, the haunts of the Cercopes and a rock called ‘Black Bottom’ are shown at Thermopylae; this incident therefore is likely to have taken place on another occasion.5