Heracles, Part 1 - Mythillogical

this video is sponsored by the great courses plus more on that to come [Music] shortly [Music] so crofty are you enjoying the uh the pubs being open again i'm in wales they're not open yet oh yes sorry you uh live in the land of the not not free i don't know how you'd phrase that but anyway i i have very definitely not been going to the pub at the moment i've been staying in and reading about greek mythology so uh hello to everyone out there at home welcome to another episode of mythological i think it's mythological number eight this time is it yep number eight yeah we're getting perilously close to double digits at this point and a year to the week since our first recording oh wow it was this week last year i did not realize that so i don't know if it's a good or a bad thing that we only got through seven episodes in that time but uh hopefully we'll have a little bit of a better uh track record in the rest of the year and there were massive episodes yeah exactly so uh we've produced more than enough uh hashtag content in the last year or so to go around and um well from one perspective it may be unfortunate it looks like we're going to have a whole bunch of content on our current subject as well aren't we crafty yes we uh kept saying let's not do another two-parter and we think this is a two-part job definitely definitely uh my name is charles by the way because i just realized i introduced crofty but not myself so hello hello everybody at home i am a human with a human name and i exist i mean i doubt some of those facts yeah you have to bring out a debunking video so folks at home today's episode i think we teased at the end of the last one didn't we crofty that today's episode is on ancient greece yes we have finally made it to ancient greece after eight episodes yeah i think we uh very briefly were there during the course of our second episode but now we're going to actually focus down and get some pure mythology on the channel and as crofty said before we have so much material on this particular person that we're going to be discussing that we split this into two parts so the first part of this episode is going to cover that person's early life and the first part of a certain group of exploits they are associated with so crofty do you want to reveal who the subject of today's episode is yes the man of the hour the son of zeus himself heracles so we need to start off i think with the important distinction that we are mostly today going to be talking about the greek hero heracles what we are largely not going to be doing is talking about the roman hero hercules they are very very very similar obviously it's a case of the romans kind of copying the greek's homework on this one but we want to stay focused on the greek traditions and we may well return to the topic and look at hercules in the future just two episodes on him just isn't enough yeah exactly exactly plenty more more hercules and you can shake a club at so as we have increasingly started by asking crofty what was your previous familiarity with heracles before you started the research for this episode well i was strangely lucky among students in you know uk primary schools and comprehensive schools in that i actually got to study a lot of greek as well as roman and egyptian mythology from when i was in primary school which is the uk equivalent of what americans would call elementary school so the stories of heracles or hercules are things i've been familiar with since i was quite young even though obviously they were very uh sanitized versions quite a lot of what we will cover today was not deemed suitable for children no i'm not surprised by that um so crofty would it be appropriate today to say out of the two of us you are effective with this the heracles scholar here that may be going a bit far because remember i left school more than 10 more than 12 years ago so you know i've forgotten a lot since then well you work at university therefore you're still at school true that's exactly how that works definitely yes not working in a classics department doesn't mean anything yeah so i am basically the diametric opposite of crafty in this scenario in the the only scholarly knowledge that i have of heracles or you know knowledge of the original classical greek sources is entirely what i've filtered through heracles in popular culture so my main source of knowledge for this is hercules the disney film which as you mentioned heavily changes and sanitizes almost all aspects of hercules life of course it's disney yeah it's it's disney it was part of disney's weird phase in the 90s where they decided to adapt stories and characters that that were perhaps too complex for disney's way of presenting things yeah there were a few of those and uh i enjoyed it as a kid it's a bit of a mess watching it as a kid now they're all over the place there is like whiplash from tragic heartfelt scenes to comedy scenes to action scenes and it's just generally a bit all over the place but so it's a 90s disney film yeah and uh and hey the uh video game adaptation on the playstation was the first game i played on that console so uh there you go my other vague knowledge of the subject comes from of all things uh hercules the legendary journeys the kevin sorbo fronted tv show from the 90s which i remember watching tons of it as a kid i could not tell you what happens in a single episode you'll be very um disappointed yeah to hear that i never watched either of those no very disappointing so i'm coming at it from what i'm doing i'm coming in here with the perspective of the man on and woman on the street is what i'm saying and you are the high-minded snooty academic who is no doubt going to show me up my classics teacher will be so proud so that's our basis for what we know about herakles as the subject before we get into herakles proper and discuss not only the man the hero the god and the way he has been presented as such i'd like to take a moment to talk to you about this episode's sponsor so today's episode is sponsored by the great courses plus which is an on-demand educational streaming service that's offering you a free trial today the great courses plus offers a vast library of carefully curated lectures and courses from world leading academics i've recently been re-watching professor amanda h padani's course on mesopotamian history which helped inspire my own video on the topic the series covers the ancient history of the region from start to end beginning with the early origins of agriculture in the region through to its final conquest by cyrus the great in the 6th century bc and if you're looking for something other than history the great courses plus has over 11 000 courses on a wide variety of topics including art and literature science and mathematics and yes even mythology so if you want to access your free trial today visit thegreatcoursesplus.com the histocrat or click the link in the description below okay before we get properly started crofty do we want to talk about what sources we used for this particular episode uh yes when we looked into the primary sources so the original ancient greek histories or poetry etc i think we both did focus on what could be considered the two most definitive versions um wouldn't you say charles yeah so we focused really on the narratives given to us by i think he is trying to off top of my head i think he's from the second century bc but he might be from the first uh deodoris seculars or theodorus of sicily who wrote a universal history titled the library of history one of the books of which largely deals with the life of heracles in addition to this we also use a document written by what at the time was fought to be a man by the name of apollodorus of athens who wrote his own library which is probably the best single source for all of greek mythology just because he summarized so many stories and wrote them down that had previously been uh surviving in only fairly disparate sections so those are the two kind of organized narratives i think that we followed and that we're going to be talking the most about today i'm sure crofty that you as i have have kind of looked at some of the other primary sources out there that are perhaps more fragmentary so i looked briefly at some of the works attributed to the epic poet uh which date from the 8th or 7th centuries bc depending on uh various theories surrounding the composition of his works uh in particular i read through the shield of heracles and also what remains of the few fragments of the catalogue of women and there are a few parts of his theogony that kind of just off-handedly mention heracles as well the rest of my information comes from the works of homer which are the iliad and the odyssey um where heracles is very briefly mentioned and i will discuss also briefly in looking to the background of the character and the final thing which i looked into was a play by a greek by the name of euripides called heracles so we kind of get a dramatic sense of how heracles was portrayed as well crafty uh yes i used the same main sources apoloderos or pseudo says there has been some dispute over who to attribute it to um deodorant siculus um who i've just double checked he died in 30 bc okay so he's first century then yeah just had to double check that and again i also got a few bits and pieces from hesiod's theogony europeans is heracles also um the roman poet ovid's metamorphoses provide a bit of extra information and also the poet theocritis provided a couple of quite useful accounts in addition to these primary sources i also used a few scholarly articles and books probably the most helpful work that i read was the academic work heracles part of the gods and heroes of the ancient world series by emma stafford for which much of my information regarding heraquis's background and his development as a character has come from i also used an article written by the same author which is heracles between gods and heroes and i also went through a transcript of a lecture uh read by dr silvio barr that was held at the norwegian institute in athens in 2018 and it is titled a glutinous strongman an erasable stoic heracles in greek epic from homer to nonnus and the final work is something that crofty you uh very helpfully sent my way from bowman to club man heracles and olympia by beth cohen i also read through emma stafford's papers as well as like you just said the from bowman's clubman paper a book that i found very useful was hercules the first superhero an unauthorized biography by philip matazak who is a professor of roman history from cambridge university but he does reference mostly the greek sources as it's more a bit more of a popular book there will be points where he doesn't reference the primary sources and so if i'm mentioning something from his book that doesn't have a primary source i will make that clear also in terms of the academic papers as well as the emma stafford paper and the from bowman's clubman paper another useful one that i found was by laida stevanovich called human or superhuman the concept of hero in ancient greek religion and in politics okay crafty i think that's enough discussion of sources let's start by getting to the meat of heracles and in order to do that we need to be able to establish heracles the hero so in ancient greece the idea of a hero is very different from what we would consider a hero now someone who commits heroic deeds crofty and i believe that you have prepared something of a definition yes so like you say we will call a hero someone who commits heroic deeds so for example we might say that a firefighter would be a hero they put themselves at risk in order to save lives and protect people and to us a hero is something that any person can become by performing such deeds we will see in the paper hero rescues drowning person from river sort of thing and it's also a status that can be revoked if that person is later found to have committed some sort of evil deed for example a firefighter may be called a hero for saving lives but if it's then revealed that the firefighters started a lot of the fires they're no longer considered a hero yeah whereas in ancient greece if somebody was a hero that was a fixed part of their identity of their story whatever evil deeds they may have performed does not take away from that yeah they are fated to be a hero fundamentally yes because to be a hero in ancient greece required some connection to the gods either the gods had visited you and granted you some form of power or more commonly you were descended from the gods for example ev pretty much every greek hero that's in the popular consciousness so perseus theseus oedipus achilles etc was descended directly from a god or from one of the lesser immortals such as the narrates or the nymphs i think of all the ones i checked the furthest removed from a god was oedipus who was six generations removed from poseidon but quite often they were either the son or the grandson of a god and this as well as meaning that they were part of the epic stories that we now come to know it also granted them quite a bit of special status in the greek religion in the paper that i mentioned a moment ago stefanovich's paper on the concept of the hero he discusses that the idea of the hero came about as an evolution of a form of ancestor worship in that in bronze age tribes prior to the formation of the greek cities ancestors and founding members of the tribes were were given special status after they died there were very special rituals associated with them and as these city-states began to form from these tribes then the leaders of these city-states starts to try and turn this into a more centralized religion for that city-state in order to essentially create unity amongst people who may not have originally been part of that tribe or if it's a group of tribes who came together to form what would later become a city-state and so by giving these original kings or original warlords where they were real or fictional the status of a hero and having certain rituals in order to worship them that helped to create a sense of identity amongst this group and that's thought to have been how the groups that later became the city-states may have been formed and later on as the stories got me more complex that then led to people such as cadmus who founded corinth hello folks it's charles here with a quick correction i just wanted to point out that cadmus did not found corinth he founded thebes crofty did originally get this right during the recording however i mistakenly corrected him and overruled him so apologies for that back to the show and the later heroes of mythology whom often kings or lords would try and trace their lineage back to for example pelops whom later on various kings claimed to be pelipids or perseus various leaders claimed to be perseids or heracles where the kings of sparta claim to be from the line of the heracle die one final thing to mention about the interpretation or more of the literary interpretation of heroes is that well they got many of their superhuman abilities from being descended from gods or have their abilities somehow bestowed on them by gods from a literary standpoint what is important is that their personalities come from their humanity their flaws and their positive traits are only really amplified by that association with the gods so their positive and their negative traits while they come from their human side and are merely amplified by this divine connection rather than coming from the gods themselves the important thing is that they are still mortal they still grow and change whereas the gods being immortal are also fixed the gods do not develop as characters the same way that a mortal half god hero would and so that is why a lot of more literary scholars think that they may resonate down the years through the greeks through the romans and through to modern times so i think that gives a good overview of what one might consider a hero in ancient greece the only thing i would really have to add to that is in many ways heroes were worshiped in ancient greek religion i think what's perhaps a useful distinction however is that they were not necessarily worshipped in the same ways as the gods were worshiped for example they would be worshipped usually in the form of a ritual and a feast at which the participants the ritual would usually consume the flesh of the animal the version which i found looking through the very sources i did was that heroes were usually revered by having an animal destroyed rather than feasted upon and often this was because of the hero's association with the underworld so obviously with the case of a hero who's being venerated they are venerating a mortal who has passed on that kind of has a caphonic association as a result is associated with the greek underworld there are examples of the superstitions ancient greece where someone was to drop food on the floor that was considered food left for the heroes in the underworld so i think that's an important distinction for us to have because that distinction is one rule that heracles almost uniquely breaks yeah that's it the thing about heracles is that he is very much on both sides of the divide between hero and god and even more than the other heroes that we know commonly he was venerated throughout greece whereas a lot of heroes were limited to their city or their geographical area so for example like the 10 original founders of athens prior to the line of kings that we know from the mythology they were originally venerated as heroes before theseus and the kings of athens became part of the mythology but that was very much limited to athens itself the rest of greece would not really have had anything to do with them so with that sort of idea of what a hero would have constituted during the what i would call the archaic period of greece which is the 9th century through to the early 5th century and also classical greece which is kind of greece from that point onwards up until the actions of a certain alexander the great with that definition in mind let us talk then about heracles the man and his traits as a hero so in most versions of ancient greek mythology heracles is the son of the gods zeus who is a storm god as most people will know and is also the son of a mortal woman by the name of alkamine or alkamene also known as alkamena i apologize in advance if we get many different uh phrases wrong in this particular episode as we tend to do with a lot of the episodes that we've recorded alchemy is the daughter of the king electron of tyrins and of mycenae which were two powerful cities on the peloponnese peninsula generally heracles has the following traits and these are either depending on the tail gained through his divine parentage or through another source that we will get into soon so his main traits are superhuman strength and courage unrivaled sexual prowess an excessive appetite and also in many works a fierce temper so it depends greatly between the author who is discussing him but a lot of the time heracles is just as marked by his heroic labors as he is by the ragers that he falls into that lead to him to hurt both his enemies and his loved ones alike in some versions these rages are the work of outside forces and other gods in some versions they are simply part of his character and being so throughout most greek traditions heracles is depicted with the following weaponry so crofty fill me in on any here that i've missed so some of these items were gifted to him by the gods in recognition of his deeds others were simply mundane items that were marked out by his exceptional use as a weapon or even in some cases that were transformed beyond the mundane through the circumstances of his labor we'll get into that shortly the major piece of weaponry which is usually associated with heracles in artistic depictions is his lying cloak and helm again there are a couple of versions to how this was item was procured according to most sources it was acquired through the first of his 12 labors which we will get on to soon in addition to this he is also marked out by other items including a sword that's provided to him by hermes a bow and a set of arrows given to him by the sun god apollo who was associated with archery a breastplate that was given to him by the god of smith's hephaestus and perhaps his most iconic weapon the club and this club is a purely mundane branch and perhaps the one thing i would say that is really exceptional about herakley's use of the club is that there are a few other heroes within greek mythology that are ever depicted as club wielders have i missed anything there crafty i think the one thing that i would add is that there is one depiction of heracles which gives him a spear and a shield and that is in hesiods or hesiod and others shield of heracles in which he fights the son of aries with a very elaborate shield and a spear unfortunately most significant chunks of which have been lost the story of that is very much more about the shield in my mind and his actual contention with the son of aries but yeah it basically the shield is covered in so much art that it would actually take up an entire castle wall in reality as crofty went into briefly beforehand and as emma stafford also states in her article heracles between gods and heroes heracles carries many of the same qualifications as other cultural heroes of greek mythology so crofty gave the example of people like perseus vecius achilles so for example he is descended from the pairing of a god with a mortal woman as many of those men are he spends his life performing what are considered heroic labors and siren his own royal bloodlines and in addition he is also well known for founding the olympic games where he probably differs the most crafty i would say from other heroes though is that he ultimately does attain immortality yes i think he is the only one or one of only maybe two retaining mortality yeah there is another example i will get into in a second so it is due to this kind of dual nature that throughout the ancient greek world he was both regularly sacrificed to as a hero in his more mortal sense uh and as a god with the appropriate selection of sacrifices as a result so as you said crofty i think the only equivalent i can think of would be the god dionysus also known as the roman god bacchus who was generally the god of wine and merrymaking along with another wide variety of attributes as well one of my favorite gods feasting in hell indeed so dionysus also had a similar situation where he appeared to be both mortal and immortal depending on the tale so he was said to have been born twice versus first as the offspring of the gods zeus and persephone and second as the result of the union of zeus and the mortal woman samil to melee sommelier to melee that's the one so he is a good comparison and of course as a son of zeus he is a half-brother of heracles as are many of the gods that we'll be getting into so that's the general archetypes i think surrounding heracles crofty is there anything you want to chime in with uh i think i would add two small things regarding the sacrifices to heracles one common method of sacrificing to him as both a god and a hero meant burning some of the edible meat from a sacrifice to him as a hero while also burning the entrails as a garden so having a smaller feast than one might have if you were just sacrificing to a god and also i think the one thing that sort of sets him apart from dionysus in terms of why he is considered both hero and god while dionysus is only considered a god is that dionysus was always immortal as far as i'm aware whereas heracles had to die in order to become immortal and so that's what gave what meant that he kept his human aspect because he still had to experience death so before i want to go into the exact events of heracles life i wanted to start by talking a little bit about where the myth associated with herewith may have come from uh what potential influences from other areas of the world may have led to his development if you look into a lot of scholarly insight into the topic of heracles a lot of the time they relate his myth to more general hunter hero myths that are associated with indo-european cultures so yeah the the archetype of the hunter hero usually descended from some form of storm god is a recurring figure throughout many of the indo-european regions throughout western and southern and even eastern europe what i found more interesting personally during the course of the reading i was doing and which appears to have been focused on far more recently is the possible influence on heracles that came from the middle east so perhaps the best example of a potential influence from the middle east on the development of heracles is the mesopotamian god ninerta so crofty if i were to describe to you a being of great strength who wields a lion's king a club and a bow you would probably think of heracles wouldn't you yes that's exactly who i would think of but these are in fact all traits of ninerta in two of the works he appears in in the epic of anzu and in the other work the return of dinerta to nipper [Music] so that is a very obvious comparison in early greek history of the period when heracles would have been emerging for example there is what is known as the orientalizing period of greek pottery where after a long period of geometric motifs appearing in the pottery of the region there is signs of a clear orientizing influence in pottery designs and it's theoretically possible that this could have had some influence at least on artistic depictions of heracles i'll get into that again a little bit later on another point but there are also reasons to doubt this potentially in addition to comparisons with inertia another useful parallel i found that could be drawn between heracles and another figure is with that of gilgamesh um who again shares many of heroku's physical he too is a demigod born of the goddess ninsoon and he is marked by superhuman strength and vitality tremendous labors that he conducts throughout what would have been considered the breadth of the known world to the peoples of mesopotamia and not only that but there are similarities in some of the aspects of these stories so for example gilgamesh frequently dons animal skins during his travels and also when gilgamesh is depicted in art there are some clear parallels in the poses that both figures make so in terms of the earliest possible identifiable sign of heracles existence we have a bit of a distinction between the appearances in artwork and in literature the earliest possible figure that could have in any way connotations associated with heracles actually dates from the late greek bronze age and it takes the form of a small number of seals from mycenae in greece this is you know 12th 13th century bc going all the way back to the 16th century bc and it consists as i said of a small number of kind of ring seals depicting men grappling with wild beasts such as lions men hunting deer from chariots and there is one seal in particular does show a man holding a lion by the throat as if he is strangling it although he is also wielding a blade and his other hand so crafty i think that's quite clear those could be interpreted in a very charitable light as being associated with some of the labors of heracles yes the lion image in particular sounds quite familiar indeed i think probably the safest thing you could say on this topic was that this sort of heroic attitude amongst the early greeks the mice name period may have been a later influence on how heroes such as heracles were depicted especially in the periods of oral storytelling before literacy was re-established in greece after the collapse of the mycenaean cultures in the 12th century bc but i don't think you can read much more than that into it quite frankly because there is no literary source that exists from my snare in greece that gives us any insight into these activities greece after the mycenaean age went through what is often referred to as the greek dark ages and this is a period where the palace-based economies of the mycenaean age which is marked by local kings ruling areas of the greek peninsula after the collapse of these powers-based cultures greece reverts very much to local communities which don't have like a unifying culture between them and it is likely at some point in this process the earliest seeds of either heracles himself all the heroes that were later amalgamated possibly into heracles that they came into being by the 8th century bc when greece really begins to move away from the geometric artwork in favor again of depictions of human figures uh on its pottery by that point scenes are already appearing that can be pretty clearly attributed to heracles and in some cases many of his labors this is really transition to a period of greek history known as the archaic period rather than the dark ages for them and this is to say when many of the polities of classical greece came into being so with the exception of one labor which we will get into almost all of his labors have been found represented in some artistic form or another dating from this period crofty uh the only exception which i could find is labour five which makes sense when we'll come to it because it is an unusual event to try and depict yeah i wouldn't like to try and draw that event really unfortunately for us whilst there are rich artistic traditions of heracles going back even to the earliest parts of archaic greece many of the earlier prose and epic poetry based works of his life and labors from this period just simply have not survived so the most notable of those that appear to be known of but lost are things such as the catalogue of women as we said before tribute hesiod which was kind of his bridge between the uh the more godly antics of the fjord is it theogony into uh is it works and days which is purely to do with the heroic endeavors of mortals yeah yeah that's right probably the most significant epic that has been lost was by an author by the name of paneasis i believe who in some sources is the source of his 12 labors specifically the 12 number we do however have a small number of works that date from the early archaic period such as the works of homer in particular he appears in the iliad not in person because the iliad is set in the generation of heroes after heracles but in that particular work he is he is already considered to be a heroic figure and an ideal for other heroes to aspire to particularly achilles this is interesting because the iliad in its oral form was likely composed somewhere in the 8th century bc which shows you that his status is already pretty well developed by the time we get to an auto period when oral tradition is starting to be turned into written accounts in addition to this he also as mentioned appears briefly in the theogony where he is again more mentioned as kind of a footnote or in passing reference he also appears very prominently in the odyssey which is a work that is also attributed to homer there is a great deal of argument over whether it was written by the same person what is interesting about his depiction in the odyssey is it is almost a complete flip from his depiction in the iliad so in the iliad as i said is this heroic ideal in many ways in odyssey he is a non-ideal for odysseus so he not only is he presented as a figure that dysus should not emulate he is presented as appearing in the underworld where his labors are briefly mentioned he is also in one of the chapters i believe it's chapter 21 he is presented simply as a murderer not wrong so in book 21 as i mentioned uh we get part of the story of iphitus from whom odysseus once received a bow as a host gift and how heraquies subsequently killed evitus and stole his horses in comparison to the earlier painting of him as this heroic ideal in homer's works here he's not only a brutal killer as is phrased by the uh lecture by dr silvio barr that i mentioned but he's also someone who commits the greatest of possible dishonorable acts at least one of the greatest of all possible dishonorable acts which is to deny the hospitality right and to murder his host so yeah already we are getting very mixed depictions of herakles the man and the hero one of the next kind of archaic sources that we do have which i think i neglected to mention in our sources so apologies were the works and odes of pindar who was a influential poet i believe in the sixth or fifth centuries bc who incomplete counterpoint to the odyssey presents heracles as a heroic figure with his negative attributes all but stripped away completely removed he is very much considered pindar's favorite figure not only to detail but in terms of the way he kind of brushes over his more negative aspects so for example he does not mention the circumstances of heracles death or his apotheosis later on apart from these fragments and these smaller appearances in larger accounts we also have some mentions of heracles in plays such as the main one we mentioned before as euripides we also have two major accounts of his life which as we mentioned before i sort of attributed to paula doris of athens the pseudo podorus and we also have a substantial account by theodorus of sicily from these accounts we do have a general outline of heracles life and his d's and i wanted to start by saying there is not really considered to be a definitive sole source of heracles deeds and life from the ancient greek world he appears with many details different between these various accounts we mentioned that cast him in different lights and involve him in different events we are going to be following the very general accounts that are given by those two authors i mentioned last so as i previously mentioned at the beginning of this episode heracles is for the most part the son of the king of the gods zeus and the woman alk mene alkamine i'm still not sure i'm supposed to say that alkamine was the daughter of electron who was king of tyrins and maicini and she was also the wife of amphitrion in addition to being the son of zeus in most narratives heracles is also descended matrilineally from zeus through his ancestor perseus who was commonly seen as the founder of the ancient greek city of mycenae on the palpanese peninsula the result of this is that heracles is both perseus's great-grandson and his half-brother which puts me in mind of the future armor episode where fry accidentally becomes his own grandfather hmm or the red dwarf episode where lister is his own father yeah exactly blister lister another uh another hero of epic poetry so to speak something like that yeah the uh ancient greek family trees are sometimes a bit more of a spider web yes exactly um as uh as he said of the family tree of charles ii of spain um it's upside down he said that as a taking drink of water excellent so that does uh kind of set the scene for how a lot of the relations within heracles family are going to go and i feel like before we go on to the events of his life crafty we really do need to go into the actions of his immediate ancestors how they led to the peculiar circumstances of heracles birth a great point to start with as i said before is with his ancestor perseus so perseus was popularly considered within greek culture the founder of mycenae and he during his time in greece begat a number of sons so these sons were al chaos svenolos elaios mestor and electrion there will be a quiz on these names by the way i'll start writing them down so of these sons the oldest alkyus father the son named anfitrion and a daughter anaxo who in turn married her uncle electron two electron and an exo was born a daughter named alkamene and nine sons i'm not going to name them individually because i don't want to get this to get even more complicated and we haven't hit the complicated bit yet i will emphasize yeah it gets worse so in the meantime perseus's son mester had fathered a daughter by the name of hippophobia who was carried off by poseidon to the ecce a canadian islands here they fathered a son by the name of tafios who colonized the island of taphos i wonder who he named that after and named his people the talibans so tafos in turn had a son named terra lowes whom poseidon who again they are descended from made immortal by placing a single golden hair upon his head and tara lowest then in turn had six sons again i will not go into the individual names so whilst electron was king of tyrins and mycenae tara lowers his six sons came to him and demanded their rightful show in the kingdom by the way of their deceased ancestor mester after electron refused the sons of taralaus turned around and stole his cattle so in response to this slight his son's electron sons decided to rescue them and the result of this was a battle between the two sets of suns the end result of which was only one son on either side surviving so of electron's sons lysiminius i believe is his name survived because he was a child and uninvolved in the fighting and of tara louis's sons all saved one named everes were killed and his reason for surviving is he was guarding the ships so it was basically a complete massacre on both sides there were no great survivors amongst them the remaining telephones escaped with the cattle the tanfitrion again was the son of al chaos and the nephew of electron stepped in and succeeded in ransoming them back so in response to this slight and conflict and the slaying of his sons electron planned an expedition to avenge his sons against the teleboens in the meantime he entrusted his kingdom and daughter alkamene to vitrion on the condition that amphitron respect his daughter's virginity until his return and that indeed is one of alchemine's great characteristics within these tales is her chastity it's a bit of a common one in ancient greece that indeed it is but uh i guess it was a virtue that was highly valued by their society at the time one little fly in the ointment here of uh electrons planned expedition of electrons planned expedition when am vitrion went to return his cattle to him that he had succeeded in ransoming back one of the beasts rushed towards the king unexpectedly sam vitrion stepped in to try and defend the king by aiming his club at the beast but the blow rebounded off its horns and stuck electron in the face killing him so that's somewhat awkward isn't it here is the king who has promised you his daughter and effectively entrusted his kingdom to you and now you have accidentally killed him yeah that's going to be a tough one to explain to the wife indeed and uh his wife wasn't angry with him but it appears that the circumstances of electron's death did allow another of perseus sons we mentioned before svenolos to seize the throne and exile and vitrion and alkamene to thebes and it is here that heracles came to be born so the siren of heracles follows this general form in both apollodorus and theodorus's accounts depending on which of them is telling the tale alkamene is now either married or betrothed in some way to amphitrion but she makes either the final marriage or the consummation of the marriage contingent on his avenging of the deaths of her brothers and victron indeed sets out to do so and in order to do this he enlists the help of creon who is the king of thebes so there are varying forms of exactly how creon agrees to help him there's one particular version where i believe this comes from apollodorus creon says he'll help him after he completes the labor of catching a vixen that was fated to never be caught and that was terrorizing the land off the top of my head the way that in vitron fixes this is he finds a dog that is fated to always catch what it hunts which creates something of a paradox a little bit yeah and this is such a paradox that in the end zoo steps in and turns both animals to stone i guess is one way to get out of that just change the rules entirely indeed so in this version uh and patreon is rewarded for this deed by creon who agrees to help him with avenging the deaths of his wife's brothers in some versions the myth creon also purifies and patreon of the dishonor of killing electron as well samvitron gathers his allies and he goes forth and he sacks the islands of the talibans although it is specified that their chief stronghold of taphos is unable to take for the simple reason this is where the immortal terra lois resides remember what i said about the golden hair in the head yeah yeah this remains the case until tera lois's daughter kamefo having fallen in love with amphitryon plucks the golden hair from tara lois's head which kills him and allows amphitron to take the city as her reward for betraying the city to him and fitron has her put to death okay for the forehead the dishonor of betraying both her father and her city in his favor of course yeah so with there now being no ruler or the taliban's this on the islands were given over to infitrian's companions and he went off and returned home meanwhile as he is returning home a certain uh zeus i don't know if you've heard of this guy before and what he gets up to um comes to the city of thebes and assumes the likeness of amphitrion after convincing her alchemine of the details of amphitrion's war against her bones that her brothers have indeed been avenged he goes to bed with her so in most versions of the retelling he deliberately extends the night to be three times as long as normal in order to delay amphitron's arrival or i believe this is more the case in deodorance's version he simply wants to increase the length of the intercourse in order to increase the strength of the child that would be born because that's that makes that kind that obviously that doesn't make sense by our own understanding of intercourse nowadays and how children are conceived but you can understand an ancient greek society believing that would very much be the case yeah there's a certain logic to it it's logical it's incorrect but it is kind of logical yeah especially when you're dealing with guards so as i kind of said before paula doris doesn't go into a great detail as to zeus's motivations for doing so but we do have a couple of other sources um as i mentioned theodorus india doris uh zeus's act is expressly done for the sake of procreation rather than as an act of love or lust in the case of many of the other women that he slept with indeed later in the same telling um he goes on to say that after the might and accomplishments of heracles zeus actually stopped his intercourse with mortals so as to avoid any future descendants of his being less worthy than their illustrious predecessors and i have a quote to that effect it appears then that zeus began to beget human beings with the ancestors of alkamene and ceased with her that is he stopped with her his intercourse with mortal women since he had no hope that he would beget in after times one who would be worthy of his former children and was unwilling to have the better followed by the worse basically no one else is going to top this yes those are two possible uh versions of zeus's motivations the other version i have is what i'd call zeus being zeus which is um in an account related to us by hesiod which is included in the shield of heracles it is the desire of zeus for quote the neat uncle daughter of electron that leads him to do his deed and disguise himself as amphitron who quote surpassed the tribe of womankind in beauty and height and in wisdom non-vide with her of those whom mortal women bore of the union with mortal men her face in dark eyes wafted such charm as comes from the golden aphrodite so that's her a bit more of a a zeus oriented explanation for his interest in heracles mother after zeus is finished with his deed amphitron does indeed return to pheebs and greet his wife only to be somewhat surprised when she greets him with what is described as no great arda after asking her why this is the case she replies that he had come the previous night and slept with her so on patreon thus learned the truth of the matter in time alkamene gave birth to two sons the oldest by day being heracles sired by zeus and the younger if equals heracles half-brother who was sired by amphitreon so according to both the accounts of apollodorus and deodoris even before the moment of his birth heracles as with many of the descendants of zeus or the mortal sense of zeus i should say had earned the wrath of zeus's wife hera this begins even with the timing of heracles birth so around this time zeus had decreed that the very next descendant of perseus who would be born would become the king of mycenae which as i remind you was at the time held by svenolos who had usurped the throne from amphitryon and his wife now logically speaking heracles should have been the heir for the simple reason that um amphitryon was directly sired by perseus's oldest son so logically he would be first in line and indeed it seemed like he was also likely to meet the conditions of what zeus had proclaimed for the next ruler of mycenae however hera intervened and according to the version she either delayed heracles birth or she deliberately sped up the birth of svenolos's son the result being that eurystheus was born first and became heir and then king of mycenae so before he is even born hera has denied heracles the rightful throne of tyrion's and mycenae so from this point onwards in another tale related to us by theodorus there is indeed another encounter between hera and heracles as a baby with the difference being this time hera is largely unaware of heracles identity fearing hera's revenge for the incident involving heracles birth alchemy exposes heracles to die in a field which we are told become is later known as the field of heracles both hera and athena managed to approach the exposed child unaware to this heracles and amazed by his vigor athena convinces hera to offer the babe her breast however heracles being who he was suckled so fiercely that he caused great harm to hera who hurled the babe from her so according to this version of the tale this is actually the source of heracles superhuman strength by being suckled by hera's milk another version of this tale also proclaims this to be the source of the milky way which would have been considered simply another constellation in these times and that it was said to be the squirt of hera's milk that was flung into the sky as she hurled heracles from her afterwards athena then retrieves heracles uh probably brushes him off a little bit i assume checks for bruises and broken bones and then returns him to his mother so after this hera's enmity would continue uh i believe theodorus actually does kind of point to heracles suckling too fiercely as one of the main reasons for her dislike of him which uh says a lot of how fickle the greek gods really are yeah considering some of the things that hera does later to get back at him as well indeed indeed and immediately following on from this event we have a story that i think most people are going to be quite uh familiar with in relation to heracles this is the story of the two serpents that were sent to dispatch him in his cradle so this is recounted to us by both paul doris and dioderas so hera dispatches two serpents in order to kill heracles in his cradle however there is an alternative version so apollodorus does mention this first tale but he also details that the sender of this serpent was not in fact hera in one of the versions he mentions and vitrion sends the serpent and this is not done to kill heracles it is done so ampitron can discover which of the two boys have been born is actually his son that could have ended very badly if they went for the wrong one but as to be expected if eccles being terrified by the creatures recoils from them and cries and kicks off his blanket but heracles simply seizes the neck of each snake and proceeds to strangle them so it is definitively shown to amphitrion that ifocules is in fact his son as heracles grows up according to apollodorus he is taught chariot riding by his stepfather wrestling by a man by the name of otto lycos archery by a man by the name of juritos fencing by castor and liar playing by a phobian man called linos who was the brother of orpheus who uh some people familiar with greek mythology may know as a legendary musician and poet it is during this tuition that heracles kills a man for the first time and this is when he is a you file remind you some of the versions of these give more details than others the general understanding i have is that heracles proves to be a poor student with the liar and he comes into conflict with linos in apollodorus version heracles ends up killing the musician after the musician starts the quarrel by striking him not surprisingly heracles was as a result brought up on a charge of murder but he claimed to be acting in self-defense according to the laws at the time and as a result he was acquitted however amphitrion worrying that he may indeed cause further instance like this instead sends him away to tend his stepfather's herds where he remained until he was 18 i did some locking into this because we actually get a description of heracles size in one ways or at least his height so crofty heracles is described as growing to the great size and height of four cubits now the qubit is a measurement throughout european and middle eastern history that has varied greatly between cultures the version that i found in this case is just slightly less than one half of a meter yeah that sounds about right i've heard it as about a foot and a half so about evens out yeah which means that heracles this great towering the beast of a man is probably somewhere in the region about six foot two she's very tall for the time indeed that's what i'm trying to get at is i would give this an example of like human beings until quite recently in many early urbanized societies and not particularly tall so uh to give a an example even in the early 20th century there was a boxer by the name of jack johnson who i mostly know of because there's a documentary about him because he was the first uh black world heavyweight champion and he was a very colorful figure but in his time he was described as the ju as a giant i believe he was called the ethiopian giant which is a bit racist but um because he was american but anyway he was i think about six foot one so it does show up until quite recent times many uh figures who are considered incredibly tall by modern standards would just be a moderately tall person or an in some cultures a normal height person we've seen a few people well i say we've seen the world has seen people as high as seven feet nowadays yeah i mean uh we we know the tallest man i ever did was eight foot eleven so we're getting into goliath territories at that point yeah and yeah six foot four is you know fat not uncommon these days exactly but as a five foot eleven man i'm going to move this conversation on quickly so during this time heracles remains with his father's herds until the age of 18 and it is according to poladoris that in this timeframe he fought and slew his first great beast i'm not going to go into great detail on the details of this for the simple reason that it is thought that this is uh that is not kind of a widely considered part of his mythology and indeed it seems to mix up some details of one of his later labors it does however involve another event which needs mentioning so during this time there was a lion known as the line of kefarian a kefarian who was menacing both his stepfather's herds and those of the king of the fest pi who was helpfully named thespios during the course of this hunt fespios entertained the young heracles and every night that the hunt continued and that he would return he would arrange it so that one of his 50 daughters who all looked all but identical would sleep with heracles heracles believed that they were all the same woman and as a result he was able to sire a child on each of these women the reason given for this in a paul doris's account is that vespios wished to sire strong children from heracles that's the simple reason did this be us given of heracles ancestry at this point it is unfortunately not mentioned in a podoris account it may well have been yeah but then also a six foot two man strong enough to fight a lion is also generally quite valued anyway back then so upon returning from this hunt after successfully slaying the beast heracles was met by heralds from the king of the minions at the time the city of thebes which is where he's grown up and where ampatreon was exiled to was in fact paying regular tribute to the minions who lived at neighboring orchimenos which is another city on uh the boeitian i think it's called peninsula ohisian i think that's the one on that as well yeah well greek is not our first language unfortunately so we apologize to anyone out there just uh let's copy and paste the last disclaimer from every other episode that we have used at this point at this time thieves was paying regular tribute to acamenos and the minions and this was the result of their previous defeat by their king aguinos and specifically the tribute list given by podoris is that 100 cattle each year were being gifted to these peoples by thebes and it was to continue for 20 years not only that but i believe in deodorance's account they had also stripped thebes of any useful weapons so when heracles happens to come across these heralds who are journeying to receive these tributes he responds by horribly mutilating them for what he perceives as the offense against his city he cuts off their ears their noses and their hands and he ties them around their necks and disease he tells them to take to guinos and that this is to be the only tribute he is to receive a guinness rather unsurprisingly responds by marching with his army against thebes in both a podoris account and in theodorous accounts uh herokuis and the youth of the city end up doing battle with the rival king in theodorus account king creon of thebes is prepared to hand over heracles to ginos however heracles on his own initiative rallies the young men of the city and realizing that the enemy have not actually taken the arms and armor that had been left in the various temples of thebes retrieve those and equip them so in both accounts heracles is victorious and egynos and his men are slain as a reward creon gives him not only the hand of his daughter magara but also grants him control of the city as if it was his own so after herakles had married megara she went on to bear him three sons and alongside this creon gave his younger daughter to ithacles who already had one son by the name of uh iolus and han went on to have two more children at this point things are looking i think we have to say pretty rosy for heracles he's already conducted himself in several heroic acts and he's also now effectively the heir to pheebs done quite well for himself indeed he has for uh a young divinely uh i was gonna say a young man who dragged himself up but for a young divinely sired man who was the uh the son of an exiled heir to a throne um he didn't have to pull himself that far admittedly yeah he he starts out with nothing just a small loan of godly power from his father yeah so yes a small loan of a million godly powers that's not a reference to anything in real life at all yes gravity so things are looking pretty rosy for heracles at this moment but it is unfortunately at this moment according to whichever version you read that calamity befalls him in one of two potential ways i think i need to do a little bit of back a little bit of back step to explain something here in some versions of the tale when herrera intervened to change the day of the date of birth of heracles so that another man would become heir to tyrion's and mycenae in one version i believe it is theodorus version i may be wrong zeus's response is to decree that heracles will conduct 12 labors and if he completes them he will be gifted immortality so it's kind of his recompense for no longer being the heir to the city in some versions it is simply the case that this debt is called jew because whilst uh these works well whilst the news of heracles works and in particular his deeds at thebes are now reverberating throughout greece and becoming the source of great acclaim it is stated that the now king of tyrion's the man that we previously mentioned by the name of eurystheus steps in and thinks i need to put the kibosh on this one and it's at this point that he demands that heracles begin these labors the gods have ordained for him in theodorous version this is the point where he is struck by a madness this madness differs between versions in a po doris's version this whole chain of events is very different according to polar doris this madness which strikes heracles does not come because he is divinely ordained in indulging these labors or anything to do with eures fierce instead he is struck down by this madness by hera and crofty do you want to enliven us as to the details of what this madness results in yes it is definitely not disney friendly no the madness in which herrera casts upon heracles causes him to kill megara amiguera to fling both of his children and two of ifeklisa's children into the fire killing them then after which he comes to his senses and is guilt-ridden by what he has done apologist says that he was purified by thespians though it doesn't really go into detail on what purified means in this case yeah i had trouble i trouble finding that as well i must admit yeah i assume that that would be something that would be well understood at the time i i think the vague sense i got from reading the sources it meant absolved him of his dishonorable act yeah because they understood that it was a madness that was placed upon him and rather than an actual premeditated murder because they could do that but heracles then chose to condemn himself to exile and so in his exile um hercules travels to delphi and asks the oracle where he should dwell and how he should atone for his sins and the oracle then tells him that he should go and present himself to eurystheus for 12 years and perform the 10 labors that eurystheus would impose on him but that after completing these tasks he would then attain immortality i think one useful thing to point out as well from this meeting uh occurring according to different versions of the story this is actually a point up to which heracles has not actually received his name of heracles i believe in some versions his mention before this point is is it alchemies alcadies i think alcades that's the one so up until this point his name is often given as alcades and he is effectively re-christened heracles by the fear at this point there's other versions where it happens much later i believe after he's completed his labors hmm yeah and there's a slight uh ironic aspect to that name in that it means the glory of hera and it was bestowed on him due to the great glory that he would attain as a result of hera scheming against him so the alternative version of this that was given by theodorus has eurystheus summon heracles to perform labors for him prior to any madness um heracles chooses to ignore this initial summons and zeus then commands him to submit himself to eurystheus heracles again rather than directly obeying both the king and his father he instead chooses to go to the oracle and ask the oracle for advice and the oracle then also tells him to present himself to eurystheus for the completion of twelve labors and that if he completes them immortality would be his reward however even after the oracle and zeus and eurystheus commanding him he is still too proud to submit himself to uristhes and he is described by deodorant as he fell into a despondency of no ordinary kind which hera takes advantage of and sent upon him a frenzy and in his vexation of soul he fell into a madness as the affliction grew on him he lost his mind and tried to slay ayola's aeolus was his nephew by um if he's yep and so after aeolus escaped he instead shot his bow and killed both of his children and when he comes to his senses he griefs what he's done and he chooses after all this to finally submit himself to eurystheus and complete the labors the third and final version of the madness that we'll mention here was told by the playwright euripides in his tragedy the madness of heracles in this version amphitryon states that these events are occurring after the 12th labor heracles has returned from his labors he has found that megara's father has been overthrown by a man named lycus and who like us is about to have magara and her sons executed heracles returns in the nick of time because that's the appropriately dramatic way to do things and kills like us and it's after this that as a celebratory dinner hera sends lissa the goddess of madness to give heracles a hallucination heracles claims in his hallucination that he will slay eurystheus he then acts out the ride to eurystheus's castle and in this he kills megara and his sons believing that they are eurystheus and euristius as sons before athena appears and subdues him and allows amphitrion to tie him up which point he then wakes comes his senses and grieves what he's done um the play basically ends with heracles and theseus leaving for athens where he'll return for his sins in a different way so it gives some more detail on the madness but then puts it in a completely different context yes i think as we said before there isn't really a canonical version uh unfortunately of his whole uh this whole pursuit and in fact many of the scholars i read kind of celebrated the idea and said it's a mistake to try and impose a single version yeah but what's interesting i think like that's where the series of events where magara is killed that's that's where that thread appears into his version of the story and the other two versions magara actually survives for much longer so is this where we hand over and begin the labors themselves then not quite yet crofty not not so fast now um i wanted to just quickly mention before we start talking about the 12 labors of heracles which is the uh big uh crowd-pleasing event that we are all here for i'm sure i thought i'd just want to mention a couple of things around the construction of the labors so the big thing for us to mention here is that different sources on heracles do change the exact order of some of the labors the most noticeable examples for us that we're going to have today is that the accounts of apollodorus and deodoris are slightly different in terms of order so we're going to be following the order laid out podoris just for the sake of consistency and so you can follow along at home the one thing i also want to point out is that the there's some conflict as to whether you know the canonical number of labors which in some versions initially 10 of entry 12 in most versions originally 12 and always 12 in some of the earliest sources associated with heracles the exact number of feats and labors attributed to him do vary quite wildly so um it's not really until the third century bc that the exact labors and numbers seem to become fully canonized although i did find some contradictory information on that so um the lost work of paneesis that i mentioned before is mentioned by some scholars as a potential source of the 12 number of the authors that mention any of the more than one of the labors pindar is probably the best example he mentions uh the first labor deferred labor and i believe the fifth labor you may mention a couple more as well but it's not really is just in apollodorus and deodorant that we get these definitive lists that we're going to go into now and one argument i also saw crafty is that there isn't really a theme that runs through the labors there is occasionally labor's back to back that resemble each other in terms of the challenge given to heracles there isn't really a thematic progression for them is there no there's a few sort of common aspects between certain labors and there is the one major common aspect that eurystheus couldn't benefit personally from them but those are the only real there's the only real commonalities that we see throughout so yes that's all i wanted to make clear folks so now we're going to go over to crafty for the first three labors yes and so we have the main event round one the first labor the lion of name does fit into the more modern idea of a heroic deed in that it is to go and slay a beast that has been killing livestock and kidnapping the common folk and so it does make sense in the deodorant version where eurystheus first summoned heracles to complete labors before he had anything to atone for it's definitely something that a king or local warlord would want dealing with so nimaya was a small city to the west of tyrion's it was close to the border between the argolas region where turins and mycenae were and corinth the lion itself lived in the caves of the nearby mount tritos which is about half way between mycenae and nymer and it regularly ventured out to feed on livestock kidnap young women and kill any man sent to rescue them unlike the lion that was previously mentioned this lion was one of the descendants of typhon who i believe we discussed in episode two way back when indeed we did the 100 100-headed dragon and echidna the half-serpent half-woman who was said to live in tartarus apollodorus describes the nemian lion as the child of typhon echidna whereas hesiod in his theogony claims that it was the grandchild of typhon echidna and that its parents were orthos and the chimera who were the first and the fourth children of typhon and echidna so once again the uh unusually shaped family trees yeah i mean um it's also i think we should mention a tradition within uh most of ancient greek mythology is that almost every monstrous creature uh with the possible exception of maybe the giants and the titans almost every other creature is usually sired by a combination of echidna and typhus they are respectfully referred to as the mother and the father of monsters and at least one of them is usually involved in the ancestry of every monster that we'll see so despite being descended from typhoon who had nearly killed zeus previously or perhaps because he'd been descended from typhon hera herself raised the name lion and sources including hesiod and the poet kelly marcus claimed that hera set the lion on the nemea region and the argolas region as a punishment for believing that the local humans had seen her bathing in a nearby spring which she bathed in once every year hera had been known at that time as the patron goddess of the argolas region and so once people had been suitably punished by a few livestock thefts and murders and etc from the lion she then needed the lion to be removed and so whether heracles succeeded or heracles failed it would still benefit her by rescue either rescuing the people who considered her their patron or by getting rid of heracles as heracles traveled to the mayor he rested one night at the farm of a man named malaccus that night malarkas had been planning to sacrifice a ram to zeus so according to apollodorus heracles convinced malurkus to wait 30 days if he returned victorious then together they would sacrifice the ram to zeus if he did not return heracles asked that malorcus then sacrificed the ram to heracles as a hero which as we discussed earlier would be a particularly important distinction to malaccas because if heracles came back alive and they sacrificed to zeus maloccus would get to eat the meat if heracles was dead then malarkas was just wasting an entire round the most detailed account that we have of heracles encounter um actually comes from the poet theocritis in one of his idols in this poem heracles tells a man named philaeus of his exploits he explains that he found the lion's hunting grounds where the palate of fear hung over the farmsteads and no man worked with his oxen or labored in the fields for almost a month he tracked the lion around these hunting grounds with the lion quite regularly circling the region and traveling through a pass at the treetos mountain which was quite narrow at both ends after four weeks of this so with his deadline that he promised to malurkus approaching heracles had to force the lion into a corner so he could battle it and so he created a rock slide at one end of the pass in order to block it off he then hid in the bushes by the roadside until late in the day and when the lion attempted to come through the pass it found itself cornered once the lion was caught heracles leapt out from the bushes and attempted to shoot it and it was here that he found out that lion's skin was impenetrable as the first and the second arrow flew through but they bounced off of the skin between the lion's ribs so as the lion pounced heracles first folded his cloak around his remaining arrows as a makeshift shield as it's unknown why he wasn't carrying shields the shield that he had in his earlier battles and he counter-attacked with his club he managed to strike the charging lion on his skull which shattered the club but managed to stun the lion and the lion fell heracles took advantage of this momentary weakness he dropped his bow in his arrows he managed to straddle the lion pinned the lion's four paws to the ground with his feet and strangled the lion's death from behind while heracles hadn't known about the lion's impenetrable skin he did know that the lion's claws could cut through anything he knew that he couldn't let the lions pause free or let the lion turn because then his claws would finish him off however the labor was not to simply kill the lion but to bring back the lions hide while the apollodorus version simply states that heracles carried the lion on his shoulders to eurystheus deodorant siculus and theocritus both state that heracles put the skin of the lion about himself covering his whole body due to its great size and could then use it as protection against future dangers deodoris doesn't explain how he managed to skin a lion with an impenetrable hide whereas theocritus states that a god advised heracles that the claws could cut through anything and so to use the claws to skin the lion and so while earlier we had one answer to to the riddle of a predator that can catch anything and a prey that can escape anything here we have an answer to the unstoppable force and the immovable object yes uh it seems that the unstoppable force wins yeah though i am willing to bet that there is another story somewhere in greek mythology where the immovable object wins in a similar situation after using the claws to skin the lion he fashioned it into a protective outfit and then returned to malaccus on the 30th day when malaccus had all but given up on seeing him again and so together they sacrificed the ram to zeus and presumably had quite a good feast according to ptolemy heracles also then held a small burial for one finger that he had lost in the fight with a lion and tombing it underneath the stone lion which then became an established practice for the tombs of heroes following all of this he returns to eurystheus and apollodorus states that he was amazed at heracles manhood and henceforth forbade him to enter the city but to exhibit the fruits of his labors at the city gates and he had his herald coprius give heracles his next commands from the city gates and observe any evidence of each completed labor and at this time in his fear eurystheus then commissions a bronze jar beneath the earth within his palace in which he could hide should heracles ignore his commands and enter the city yeah we'll be seeing that again folks don't worry oh we will yep chekhov's gun yeah although um it's a weird one where it's chekhov's gun but it's not chekhov's gun within the same story so maybe that's a bad comparison i don't know well you know the rules of literature haven't really been fully formed at this point and there were a lot of you know a lot of different sources sort of coming together to this history so we assume from the various ignore that yeah i was just going to say i'm just going to discontinue yeah i had i had a train of thought it got derailed yeah yeah train of thought it got stopped at the station so on to the second labor uh the second labor was in a similar vein to the first which was to slay the hydra of lennaia lanai was still within the argyllis region which was roughly four miles from the city of argos itself according to the roman writer palcenias and it was close to marshlands that were fed by the river and minami wow wow you know i've seen him finding nemo where he's trying to say an an enemy yeah i like which as you said it my eyes hit the word and i was like oh [Music] a miminy yeah amimone the hydra was thought to dwell close to the spring of the river hessiad states that the hydra was the third child of typhon and echidna and that the hydra was also raised by hera and in fact some translations say that it was suckled by hera there's a slight callback to earlier on when heracles was a baby as she chose to use the hydra to deliberately set it upon heracles hesiod simply describes this as heracles killed the hydra with his pitiless bronze joined by war loving iolios through the plans of athena leader of the war house so here hessia doesn't describe the hydra's form no mention of multiple heads no mention of it being a serpent or a dragon or anything similar simply as this is a child typhon an echidna the generally accepted form is that of a water serpent with multiple heads though the number does vary quite a bit between writers so pausinias who was a roman travel writer and so was like more skeptical than poets or earlier greek historians believe that while it was larger and more venomous than other water snakes that it only had one head he claimed that the first description by peya sander of camaros gave it multiple heads in order to make it scarier and make his poem more memorable what a rotter wanting to make his poem entertaining that's not what poetry is for but there's not even a single school child annoyed by having to read this i unfortunately can't find any of pere sanders works to tell you whether he's no poetry was entertaining or memorable um they don't seem to have survived well cabin can't be that entertaining then oh they were so entertaining that someone was jealous and destroyed them all it was too dangerous to survive sorry sorry go on that's a possibility on a serious note then back to the uh less entertaining but quite interesting histories by apollodorus polidorus described the hydra as originally having nine heads one of which was immortal deodorant siculus claims it has 100 necks each bearing the head of a serpent sprouting from a single body and this version is also then supported by the roman poet ovid who has heracles himself described the hydra as drawing from wounds i gave at first it had 100 heads and every time i severed one head from its neck there grew two in place of one by which its strength increased this creature then out branching with strong serpents sprung from death and thriving on destruction i destroyed so that version is a bit uh boastful on heracles part uh given that he is trying to intimidate a shape-shifting serpent god yes but also generally accurate to the deodorous version of events and according to deodorants as well the increasing number of heads meant that the hydra was considered to be invincible so the description of its strength increasing with each head is also quite fitting yeah there are quite a few creatures in uh the course of his labors who are what we would call invincible but not immortal they're they're invulnerable to harm and have to be dispatched by some like physical harm and have to be dispatched by some other means yeah heracles uh proves that they're not as immortal as everyone thought so when heracles finds the hydra he used fire arrows in order to drive it from its lair before attempting to grapple with it which is uh probably not the best way to fight a serpent no in the end it does seem to work at this point a large crab which has been sent by hera tried to aid the hydra by biting at heracles foot but heracles quite easily dispatched that by smashing it with his new club according to apollodorus heracles then attempts to smash the hydra's heads with his club which doesn't seem the easiest way of going about defeating serpents whereas deodorants and ovid and others do specify that he was severing the heads with a blade either way more heads grew where each one was destroyed until heracles ordered aiolios to light a brand and to cauterize each wound as heracles severs or destroys ahead apollodorus and deodorant siculus imply that this was heracles idea but as i mentioned earlier hesiod claims that this was the plan of athena so uh poladoris and deodoris are giving heracles a bit more credit than earlier writers were yeah i mean athena is often depicted alongside them in some of the early archaic depictions on pottery of the uh of the labour so that doesn't surprise me yeah so according to apollodorus the final immortal head was chopped off and heracles buried it under a large rock beside the road between lenaia and the city of elias heracles then dips his arrows in the gallbladder of the hydra's body which covers them in the most potent venom in the world and which will become very important later on there's various descriptions of the hydro where its poison is in its blood where its poison coming from its teeth from its breath yeah in india doris it's it's venom for example yeah um generally there was a lot of poison in this thing and one poem had heracles describe his arrows as sorrow bringing which definitely fits later on so in apollodorus version upon returning to aristheis aristis proclaims that this labour was failed as he had help from aeolias and so adds an extra labor so in a polydoris version we're now on 11 labors whereas deodorant it's always started as 12. yeah it's not discounted in his version simply because yeah there's no reason to discount it yeah also as an interesting little side note just because i found this and i quite quite liked it lenaea later became the genus name of a group of parasites which known as anchor worms which are a worm with several hooks at one end that latch onto fish and so they do bear quite a distinct resemblance to some early depictions of the hydra as a serpent-like body with many heads sprouting from it oh wow yeah i've just looked up an image on google images and i wouldn't want that on me if i was a fish no no it's a bit nasty so we have two labors completed or one complete and one failed depending on which version you prefer the next two labors were a bit less in heracles wheelhouse as killing monsters i'm going to work from apollodorus's order and so the next labor will be capturing the keranetian hind and so in this labor it was specified that heracles must bring the animal back alive which he's not really done with most things he's encountered at this stage yeah it's it's uh strangle set fire to hit with club um beat to death with a liar yeah kill an entire army yeah yep you know so the first two were relatively easy really threw a kid in the fire yeah yeah so yeah keep keeping things alive and a new experience for hercules so the carnation hind also known as the carnation dao was a female deer with large golden antlers which outside of myth is not found in european deer some authors say that it must be a stag because it has antlers whereas there is also some evidence to suggest that it could in fact be a reindeer yes i saw that account as well yeah yeah as female reindeers do have antlers well well it's not uncommon for some elements of greek before you don't actually uh represent animals that would have been alive in greece at the time so for example the first labor was a lion but there are very very few lions in ancient greece plenty in the middle east but not in uh ancient greece so that's another possible influence there on the story yeah and in fact in pindar's olympian odes which were poems celebrating the panhellenic games it mentions that heracles when hunting the golden horn doe had to travel to the land beyond the cold blasts of boris which is the north wind oh hyperborea yeah yes i've encountered hyperborea before because it was in my druids video that i made way back a whole a whole 11 months ago which uh before the end times and um is he's like a metaphorical place uh beyond the northern edges of the world basically i was wondering if it was an old name for scandinavia no there has been it's hilarious um i actually have paboria that's i read an entire detailed argument how hyperborea was like part of the outer hebrides um ignoring the fact that in the various different stories hyperbole reappears in um it just seems to progressively move further north the longer like the more of the world that the greeks become aware of i remember that part of the video now where you were discussing that yes so sorry sorry continue no no it's quite it's all right that actually gives a bit more information than i had because yeah i'd basically been assuming that hyperborea in this case represented um finland or scandinavia oh just just somewhere metaphorically northwards yeah i believe i believe there are reindeer in finland aren't there i am right about that uh the santa claus that counts that might be why i'm thinking yeah so yeah ignore ignore all of my claims regarding the distribution of various doom there's probably a smarter word for that but never mind nope it's a deorologist so the actual story that was we were going to tap after that lengthy lengthy digression sorry after one of our many lengthy digressions in the actual story the origin of the hind is within the known lands of ancient greece according to calamax's hymn to artemis artemis came upon a herd of five golden horned heinz on a hill in parhasia in arcadia in the central peloponnese however the very next line then states that they heard by the banks of the anaros river which is in thessaly on the east coast it's about halfway between athens and thessaloniki so that's quite a bit of a distance four of these she harnessed in order to draw her golden chariot and the fifth one she let free on the hill of kerinaya which is in archaea also on the north coast of the peloponnese and the poem stated that it might be in the after days a labor for heracles and so it's here on the hill of kerinaya that apollodorus states that heracles found it heracles then hunts it for a whole year as he's quite wary of directly attacking it so as not to kill it and anger artemis eventually heracles shoots and wounds the deer in its leg as it crosses the river laid on which is at mount artemisian which is a sacred mountain artemis and the name later became a general name for her shrines and he then carries the wounded deer to eurystheus on his back artemis and apollo confront him about this as he returns but he pleaded that the hein had not been seriously harmed and that he was acting on the orders of eurystheus and so artemis and apollo allow him to complete labor deodorant siculus doesn't specify an origin of the deer or any claim on it by artemis only that it's the golden horned hind known for its swiftness of foot he also claims that heracles catched it with intelligence and not with violence saying that in the performance of this labor his sagacity stood him in not less stead than his strength of body for some say he catched it by the use of nets others that he tracked it and mastered it while it was asleep and some that he wore it out by running it down so no mention of wounding it at all in the description in the book i mentioned earlier the unauthorized biography of heracles it claims that eurystheus demanded behind his menagerie while heracles promised artemis that he would return it to her so heracles demanded that eurystheus come out himself to accept the hind as the labor specified to deliver it to him heracles then set behind down before eurystheus which com counted the labour as complete and then the hind immediately fled for euristius could catch it and so could not argue that he could disqualify heracles from succeeding at that one however like i say that one is from the unauthorized biography and so there is no i don't have a direct source for that one so take that as a modern interpretation or just as something that i can't get back up fair enough i believe then crofty after the end of that particular tale we have almost a little bit of an interlude in his story yes we have a slight digression on the way to heracles is fourth labor uh in which heracles goes from being a hero and son of gods to being an extinction level event you could say oh yeah this is one of the uh this is one of the parts of the story where in a modern view it would disqualify him from being a hero but here it's just accepted as something that he did yeah so when traveling for his fourth labor heracles stayed the night in the home of the centaur fullest in ancient greece centaurs were as they're quite commonly depicted in fantasy an entire horse body with four legs with a human body from the waist upwards sprouting where the horse's neck would be however these centaurs are also quite brutish they eat their meat raw they're very large and strong enough to uproot trees with their bare hands fulless is slightly different from most centaurs in that he walks on two legs so he only has the hind legs of a horse and he was also the wisest of centaurs or one of the two wisest centaurs so his personality much more fits the more modern depictions of centaurs as wise and nature loving in the house of fullest two of them shared a meal with fullest eating his meat raw and heracles eating his cooked heracles during this meal called for wine apollodorus says that the wine belonged to all the centaurs and so follus was reluctant to open it and heracles insisted deodoris says that the wine had been given to fullest by dionysus for generations previously and dionysus had told him only to open it for a man named heracles either way the wine was strong enough that when it was opened all of the centaurs smelled it whether it was opening their wine and so they reacted in anger or opening super strong dionysus wine which drove them mad they attacked fullest house and some of them like i say could uproot trees and so they were using entire trees as clubs some were armed with firebrands some were armed with axes and heracles single-handedly killed at least a dozen of them and the remaining ones fled heracles not being happy about centaurs trying to kill him decided to chase them all down nephili the cloud goddess who was the mother of centaurs attempted to slow heracles in his pursuit with endless rain but heracles was undeterred he tracked them halfway across greece from arcadia in the north of the peloponnese all the way to malaya in the very far south so several weeks travel on foot in the pouring rain the remaining centaurs had begged the protection of chiron who was an immortal centaur who had been directly born from the gods and i believe some accounts had him teaching heracles in his youth i can't remember um i didn't encounter that myself i know that he was considered a friend heracles in some way so that'll be why they tried to shelter with him thinking that he could talk heracles down i think was the interpretation um but i could be wrong on that okay regardless of any previous relationship um between heracles and kyran heracles was still insistent on trying to slaughter all of the centaurs in response to them attacking him and he shot at them with his poisoned arrows and one of the shafts unfortunately hit kyren and since the poison of the hydra could kill anything kyron was basically stuck hovering in pain between life and death yeah unable to actually die yeah so i basically interpret it as dying over and over again i think is the best wave i kind of saw it as like this is interpretive i must admit but i kind of saw it as like someone who is just living in constant burning pain from the venom of the hydra uh that's driven him to the point of wishing for death yeah i think that might be the best way actually of interpreting it again it's all interpretive at this point yeah the the sources basically just state that he couldn't die but he was hovering between the two so apollodorus says here that prometheus who was chained to a mountain in punishment for stealing fire from the gods and daily having his liver eaten by an eagle yep that that prometheus that prometheus um offered to take kyron's immortality and his pain from him and so karen died and prometheus added to his suffering however that's going to become important later indeed it is this is uh something that will be in something that will be covered in part two yes and so deodoris claims of the centaurs that escaped that heracles tracked them all down and they each received fitting punishment meaning that he killed them all yeah he he heracles them yes yes he turned them all into a fine red mist which considering a madness was upon them and after the first dozen or so they knew to you know flee and leave him alone yeah might have been overdoing it a little bit possibly but uh heracles is the personification of overdoing it a little bit that's that's the whole point yeah that is a very appropriate description of him one final note on the centaur story and on the sorrow bringing arrows fullest had been following heracles and finding the destruction left in his wake he drew an arrow from the body of one of the dead centaurs and while wondering how so small a thing could cause such destruction he accidentally dropped the arrow on his own foot and died of the poison and was found and buried by heracles so these arrows were very sorrow-bringing as they were described earlier and with that i believe that's where i should be handing over to you indeed there is one hanging thread that i think is important for us to establish from centaur's story uh in apollonius's version um one of the few tourists of centaurs to escape from heracles wrath was a centaur by the name of nesos who fled the river evanos just uh pack him away in the back of your mind because uh he's coming back eventually and uh heracles may have wanted to get yeah he may have wanted to deal with him because it's gonna have complications down the line the one time he wasn't thorough about making sure everyone was dead um the on the one time he under did it but yes i believe that is the hand over to me and um the thing about that story crofty is um that story in some versions um of the towing basically is the actual body of the fourth labor of heracles in many ways because the um description of the actual labor itself in most cases that i could find is actually significantly less than those uh given of his encounter with the centaur i am talking of heracles goal to capture the erimanthian boar so this labor very much follows on from the style of the previous labor behind in fact you could probably say that both of these particular labors are really examples of heracles having to show restraint compared with his previous tasks um i would almost say that this is the closest you get to a thematic progression in the labors in the the goal of his previous labor was to retrieve an animal known for being difficult to catch this time he has to retrieve an animal that is also dangerous to him and not kill it as well yeah so showing even more restraint than he had to show with the deal so eures fierce tasks heracles we're retrieving the erimanthian ball which is given as dwelling on the mountain of lampea in arcadia the actual description provided by apple dorius here of the labour itself is very very brief i think this is possibly this and maybe um this sixth flavor are his briefest possible explanations um and indeed his section on the centaurs is much longer in his version heracles contention with the beast is described simply as dust he chased the beast from the thicket with loud cries and thrusting it exhausted into deep snow he trapped it in a noose and took it to mycenae that's it he doesn't provide a wider description of the beast or anything like that simply that it is a creature that heracles retrieved a nice easy one but uh luckily for us i have a couple more fragments of information regarding it so dear doris curious as we mentioned beforehand similarly provides a short description but he gives a little bit more mostly he emphasizes the difficulty of the task so to quote him it's required of the man who fought such a beast that he possessed such a superiority over it as to catch precisely the proper moment in the very heat of the encounter or should he let loose white still retained its strength he would be in danger from its tushes which is a word meaning tusks effectively i think it means like um a diminished k9 in the exact definition when i looked at him uh and should he attack it more violently than was proper then he would have killed it and so the labor would remain unfulfilled so as we say again yeah increased restraint on herakley's behalf ultimately however as in apollodorus's version he is indeed able to subdue the beast and he carries it back to mycenae in theodorus version however eurisvius is so terrified by the creature that he hides himself in the bronze vessel we should note that the previous version of the bronze vessel we described was in apollodorus's account so it's not really the payoff but it's as close as a payoff as we're going to get on the bronze vessel here but it's another sign of eurystheus's kind of inferiority over heracles and in the unjust nature of heracles having to serve under such a man i have an additional minor fragment on this topic that comes to us from an early historian by the name of hecateus of militus who i discussed briefly in my drew's video again he gives us a tiny little extra fragment which says where the previous two simply say there is a boar to be retrieved by heracles he writes that there was a boar on the mountain and it was doing much harm to the people of sophis and uh sophists for reference as crowdy gave a few geographical examples beforehand sophists was an ancient greek city on the northwestern end of arcadia so again these all these labels are taking place in a relatively self-contained area of mainland greece so that is really the extent of the fourth labor it is quite short and i could not find many more elaborate sources on it that unfortunately is going to be the trend with the next two labors that i'm going to be covering and i think it's a nice kind of gentle way for us to wrap up this episode when we'll come to the end of them the flip side to this by having labors four through six for me to explain is i get labors 10 through 12 which will more than make up for in detail so labour 5 is often referred to as the stable of gaius or in the version of a polar doris's works that i found the castle of angelus is the other version i don't know where that that name comes from it just was the title in the translation i had which was the oxford translation for this labor heracles was tasked with removing all the dung of the cattle of orgias without assistance in a single day so the goal in this particular case by eures fierce is not to give uh heracles a difficult task like he did for some of his early labors or even something which he had to use guile and restraint in order to accomplish his goal here was almost purely just to humiliate heracles by making him shovel dung and that comes across in theodorus very brief description if you're gonna read through the subtext and later statements theodorus makes it's also implied that such a dishonorable act may have actually been designed to make heracles unworthy of immortality so another example of yours uh urespheus trying to do heracles in in one way or another now there are a number of complications around these cattle so so not only was it described that the dung of these cattle in the stable had been left for many years without being cleared but in another version i've also seen these cattle are so healthy and so lusty that they produce a vast amount of dung as well so the general conceit of this whole labor is it's impossible for heracles to actually do this in one day so the version given by deodorants for once is actually shorter than the version given by apollodorus and it simply says surely then we may marvel at the ingenuity of heracles or he accomplished the ignoble task involved in the command without incurring any disgrace or submitting to something that would render him were unworthy of immortality and he did so by diverting the course of the near alpheus river to cleanse the stables and this accomplished the task in one day this version it's very simple heracles goes to the place and diverts the river the version given by apollodorus is more elaborate in this version or gears as a son of beside either poseidon or apollo and was king of ellis in the western reaches of the panopolis this king was known for having many herds of cattle and in this case heracles approached him and he chose not to actually reveal uris fierce's order instead he simply offered to remove the dung that had accumulated in a single day in return for receiving one-tenth of the cattle as his payment in this case heracles again diverted the alfayous river but in this occasion he also diverted another river called the pineos to clean the dung and according to emma stafford's version i think there are another version where he diverts yet another river as well so it is a little variable as the exact geography of how this is going on so with the deed completed orgas refuses to pay him after he has discovered that the task was done at the order of the king of mycenae and tyrants but then august goes a little further and he claims that he never made the promise in the first place luckily heracles had fought to bring a witness to his deeds and the agreement uh which was august's son files orgas agrees to go before judges on this particular case and filius stands as a witness against his father upon him doing this orgis flies into a rage and banishes both of them from his kingdom the result of all this is that not only does heracles leave empty-handed and as a result of his haggling for the tenth of the cattle urespheus much as he did with the second labor against the hydra ultimately says this is not of our labor due to heracles having effectively worked for pay and by all accounts using the rivers to clean the stables rather than doing it himself this last bit is very much a wikipedia thing i found whilst i was going through that claims there is another version apparently where heracles upon ogius flying into rage heracles simply kills orgius and gives his kingdom to philias uh i could not find a primary source for that version does it sound like something heracles would do though yeah that's a problem with being so famous for doing things a certain way is people attribute all sorts of things to you but yes so uh again difference between a polar doris uh india doris it's a part of the 12 labors that heracles has always faded to complete in apollodorus this now moves the number of tasks that he must complete to 12 rather than the 11 he had before so the final labor which i'm going to be covering today and the last part of the first episode is going to be on the simpholian birds this is a bit of a damp squib of a labor to end on i must admit crofty it's a bit mundane compared to those which came before it i found two different versions of it in this version urespheus tasks heracles with driving off the stimphalian birds who according to diodrus had been destroying the country around the lake of stem phallus which the version when i looked this up um it's actually a town or a swamp that is situated in the northeast of ancient arcadia as well so again we're still in quite a local area when you think about uh where herakles will end up going in his later labors due to the vast number of the birds which had sheltered there which i believe according to pola doris they had sheltered that due to fear of being eaten by the wolves in the surrounding area there was no real way for heracles to overcome them by sheer force of will or physical prowess as he had in some of his previous tasks of all of his previous tasks really so in this case heracles had to use his pure ingenuity here's where there's a little bit of a split in the account so one of the accounts which is a bit funnier i must admit uh up until a certain point anyway is that according to apollodorus heracles couldn't think of anything he could do to drive the birds away so at this point his half-sister athena again steps in and gives him a set of bronze cast nets that she had been given by the divine smith ephasios it's very simple from this point onwards he simply drives the birds up into the air with their noise and heracles simply shoots them down with his arrows so heracles doesn't really display much guile in that version because he basically has someone else do it for him and then he shoots stuff is again fitting with some versions of the earlier labors as well uh the slightly smarter version on heracles behalf is theodorus version in which he fashions a bronze rattle by which he was able to create such a din that he drove the birds away this is the version that's also uh included by authors uh as we mentioned before by pysandros and also by apollonios who we'll probably get into a little bit in the next episode as he is the author of the argonautica which heracles is in for a minute so crofty we've come to the end of the first part we're now halfway through the labors and uh what do we got in store next time next time we see heracles start to go further afield from greece traveling as far as the lands of the amazons would you would you or would you not call this part the legendary journeys could call this part of the legendary journeys yes yes uh i'll just bleep that bit out so we don't get sued by the people who actually made that tv show um if we got sued i'd be very disappointed so this is to me is hercules getting through the first half the task and now he's going on to bigger and better things heracles on top indeed so folks we'll be uh back as soon as we can as soon as we write the second part of this episode is it is it obvious that we uh deliberately split this up so that we had to do half as much work the first time no that's that's not really what happened but uh we're gonna claim it was so same time next year same time next year indeed so before we go today i would just like to quickly mention a few things to do with the channel so if you want to support the channel a little bit further you can follow me over on twitter at twitter.com the underscore histocrat where i generally keep you updated as to what the topics of future podcasts are going to be and when about we're hoping to get one out basically whenever we have time to get together these days in addition to this if you'd also like to help support the channel a little bit further you can head on over to patreon.com histocrat where i am taking any proceeds and using it and funding it straight back into the channel to improve things like channel art equipment and anything else i feel could help the process so quick thank you to everyone on there who has pledged so far and that's everything i had to plug so uh it's good night from me crafty and it's good night from him good night

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 77,490

Rating: 4.8576851 out of 5

Keywords: mythology documentary, mythology, heracles documentary, ancient greek mythology, heracles podcast, hydra, hercules documentary, ancient greek mythology documentary, ancient roman mythology documentary, hercules podcast, 12 labours of hercules, 12 labours of heracles, jason and the argonauts, golden fleece, ancient greece, ancient rome, european history documentary, trojan war documentary, trojan war, achilles, chiron, mycenaeans documentary, myceneans, cerberus documentary

Id: tUWJYUIJLUI

Length: 124min 42sec (7482 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021