What Are the Twelve Labours of Heracles?

Heracles was a son of Zeus, which made the goddess Hera hostile to him from birth. In the myth she drove him into a madness during which he killed his own family.

Seeking a way to live with what he had done, he was told to serve King Eurystheus and perform whatever tasks were set. The twelve labours of Heracles are therefore an attempt at atonement, not a display of strength for its own sake.

The list settled into a standard order in later Greek writing. The twelve labours of Heracles were to:

• •Kill the Nemean lion and the many-headed Hydra
• •Capture the Ceryneian hind and the Erymanthian boar
• •Clean the Augean stables in a single day
• •Drive off the Stymphalian birds and capture the Cretan bull

The remaining tasks took Heracles further from home and further from ordinary life. He took the man-eating mares of Diomedes, won the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and drove home the cattle of the giant Geryon.

The last two are the strangest. He fetched the golden apples of the Hesperides from the edge of the world, and finally brought the three-headed dog Cerberus up from the underworld itself. In Greek mythology that last labour is the point where a mortal walks into death and comes back.

The twelve labours of Heracles are not only adventure stories. They move outward in stages, from local monsters to distant lands to the underworld, which gave the Greeks a way of mapping their world and its edges.

They also carry a moral idea that still lands. Heracles cannot undo what he did. What he can do is spend years in difficult, unglamorous service. Strength alone never solves his problem, and several labours are won by thinking rather than fighting.

The traditional number is twelve, but the original assignment was ten. Eurystheus refused to count two of them on technicalities, which is one of the more human details in the whole cycle.

He rejected the killing of the Hydra because Heracles had help from his nephew, and the cleaning of the Augean stables because Heracles had asked for payment. Two more were added to replace them. The pettiness is clearly deliberate on the storyteller's part, sharpening the contrast between the labouring hero and the small-minded king he serves.

No single ancient author invented the twelve labours. Stories about Heracles fighting monsters circulated for centuries, and different writers and artists chose different episodes. The canonical set of twelve seems to have become fixed by the fifth century BCE. One key piece of evidence is the temple of Zeus at Olympia, built in that century, where carved panels above the porches showed twelve labours, six at each end. Seeing all twelve together in such an important sanctuary would have helped fix the list in the minds of visitors from across the Greek world.

The fullest surviving written account comes much later, in a handbook of myths traditionally attributed to Apollodorus and probably compiled in the Roman period. It sets out the labours in order and includes details such as Eurystheus refusing to count two of them. Other writers disagree on the order and the details, and in some versions Heracles has extra adventures between labours. The Romans adopted the hero as Hercules, and his labours became a favourite subject in their art, which is one reason the Latin name is often more familiar today.

After killing the Hydra, Heracles dipped his arrows in its poisonous blood, making them deadly with the smallest wound. That detail returns at the end of his life. Later in the myth, while Heracles was travelling with his wife Deianira, the centaur Nessus offered to carry her across a river and then tried to attack her. Heracles shot him with one of the poisoned arrows. As he died, Nessus told Deianira to keep some of his blood, claiming it would work as a love charm if her husband's affection ever strayed.

Years afterwards, Deianira feared that Heracles had fallen for another woman, Iole. She soaked a tunic in the centaur's blood and sent it to him. When Heracles put it on, the Hydra's poison carried in the blood began to burn his skin, and he could not tear the tunic off. In agony, he had a funeral pyre built on Mount Oeta and was placed on it. In most versions his mortal part burned away while he was taken up to Olympus, reconciled with Hera and married to her daughter Hebe.

Several labours turn on a clever idea rather than a bigger blow. The Nemean lion's hide could not be pierced by weapons, so Heracles wrestled the beast and strangled it, and in a popular version he could only skin it by using its own claws. He wore the pelt afterwards, which is why he is usually shown with a lion skin over his head and shoulders. Against the Hydra, every head he cut off grew back, often as two. His nephew Iolaus solved the problem by searing each neck with a burning brand before a new head could sprout.

The Augean stables held the dung of huge herds that had built up for years, far too much to shovel away in a day. Heracles broke through the walls of the yard and diverted two rivers, the Alpheus and the Peneus, so that their water swept the filth away. For the golden apples, he persuaded the Titan Atlas, who held up the sky, to fetch them while Heracles took the weight. Atlas returned reluctant to take the burden back, so Heracles asked him to hold the sky for just a moment while he arranged a pad to cushion the load, then walked off with the apples.

Ancient writers also used Heracles to teach ethics directly. The sophist Prodicus, writing in the fifth century BCE, told a story that survives through Xenophon, who has Socrates retell it. As a young man, Heracles goes to a quiet place to decide how to live, and two women approach him. One, who says her friends call her Happiness but whose enemies call her Vice, offers an easy road of pleasure without effort. The other, Virtue, offers a harder path. She warns that the gods give nothing good to humans without toil, but promises lasting honour to those who choose effort.

Heracles chooses Virtue, and the scene neatly explains the labours to come, since a hero who has chosen hard work will spend his life doing it. The image of a young man at a crossroads proved irresistible to later artists. Annibale Carracci painted Hercules at the Crossroads for the Farnese Palace in Rome in the 1590s, and George Frideric Handel wrote a musical work called The Choice of Hercules in 1751. The familiar idea that a good life means choosing the steep path over the easy one owes a great deal to this short story.

The twelve labours of Heracles are a sequence of impossible tasks undertaken as atonement, and they show a hero defined as much by endurance and persistence as by raw strength.