What Are the Twelve Labours of Heracles?
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The twelve labours of Heracles are the most famous set of tasks in Greek mythology, a run of apparently impossible jobs given to the strongest hero of the ancient world. He did not take them on for glory. They were a punishment, and that changes how the whole story reads.
Why the twelve labours of Heracles happened
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 twelve labours in order
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
How the later labours grew harder
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.
What the labours meant
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.
Why some labours did not count
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.
The takeaway
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.