The Birth Of Heracles

ELECTRYON, Son of Perseus, High King of Mycenae and husband of Anaxo, marched vengefully against the Taphians and Teleboans. They had joined in a successful raid on his cattle, planned by one Pterelaus, a claimant to the Mycenaean throne; which had resulted in the death of Electryon’s eight sons. While he was away, his nephew King Amphitryon of Troezen acted as regent. ‘Rule well, and when I return victorious, you shall marry my daughter Alcmene,’ Electryon cried in farewell. Amphitryon, informed by the King of Elis that the stolen cattle were now in his possession, paid the large ransom demanded, and recalled Electryon to identify them. Electryon, by no means pleased to learn that Amphitryon expected him to repay this ransom, asked harshly what right had the Eleans to sell stolen property, and why did Amphitryon condone in a fraud? Disdaining to reply, Amphitryon vented his annoyance by throwing a club at one of the cows which had strayed from the herd; it struck her horns, rebounded, and killed Electryon. Thereupon Amphitryon was banished from Argolis by his uncle Sthenelus; who seized Mycenae and Tiryns and entrusted the remainder of the country, with Midea for its capital, to Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops.

c. Meanwhile, Zeus, taking advantage of Amphitryon’s absence, impersonated him and, assuring Alcmene that her brothers were now avenged-since Amphitryon had indeed gained the required victory that very morning-lay with her all one night, to which he gave the length of three. For Hermes, at Zeus’s command, had ordered Helius to quench the solar fires, have the Hours unyoke his team, and spend the following day at home; because the procreation of so great a champion as Zeus had in mind could not be accomplished in haste. Helius obeyed, grumbling about the good old times, when day was day, and night was night; and when Cronus, the then Almighty God, did not leave his lawful wife and go off to Thebes on love adventures. Hermes next ordered the Moon to go slowly, and Sleep to make mankind so drowsy that no one would notice what was happening. Alcmene, wholly deceived, listened delightedly to Zeus’s account of the crushing defeat inflicted on Pterelaus at Oechalia, and sported innocently with her supposed husband for the whole thirty-six hours. On the next day, when Amphitryon returned, eloquent of victory and of his passion for her, Alcmcne did not welcome him to the marriage couch so rapturously as he had hoped. ‘We never slept a wink last night,’ she complained. ‘And surely you do not expect me to listen twice to the story of your exploits?’ Amphitryon, unable to understand these remarks, consulted the seer Teiresias, who told him that he had been cuckolded by Zeus; and thereafter he never dared sleep with Alcmene again, for fear of incurring divine jealousy.

d. Nine months later, on Olympus, Zeus happened to boast that he had fathered a son, now at the point of birth, who would be called Heracles, which means ‘Glory of Hera’, and rule the noble House of Perseus. Hera thereupon made him promise that any prince born before nightfell to the House of Perseus should be High King. When Zeus swore an unbreakable oath to this effect, Hera went at once to Mycenae, where she hastened the pangs of Nicippe, wife of King Sthenelus. She then hurried to Thebes, and squatted cross-legged at Alcmene’s door, with her clothing tied into knots, and her fingers locked together; by which means she delayed the birth of Heracles, until Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus, a seven-months child, already lay in his cradle. When Heracles appeared, one hour too late, he was found to have a twin named Iphicles, Amphitryon’s son and the younger by a night. But some say that Heracles, not Iphicles, was the younger by a night; and others, that the twins were begotten on the same night, and born together, and that Father Zeus divinely illumined the birth chamber. At first, Heracles was called Alcaeus, or Palaemon.

f. Now, unlike Zeus’s former human loves, from Niobe onwards, Alcmene had been selected not so much for his pleasure-though she surpassed all other women of her day in beauty, stateliness, and wisdom-as with a view to begetting a son powerful enough to  protect both gods and men against destruction. Alcmene, sixteenth in descent from the same Niobe, was the last mortal woman with whom Zeus lay, for he saw no prospect of begetting a hero to equal Heracles by any other; and he honoured Alcmene so highly that, instead of roughly violating her, he took pains to disguise himself as Amphitryon and woo her with affectionate words and caresses. He knew Alcmene to be incorruptible and when, at dawn, he presented her with a Carchesian goblet, she accepted it without question as spoil won in the victory: Telebus’s legacy from his father Poseidon.

g. Some say that Hera did not herself hinder Alcmene’s travail, but sent witches to do so, and that Historis, daughter of Teiresias, deceived them by raising a cry of joy from the birth chamber-which is still shown at Thebes-so that they went away and allowed the child to be born. According to others, it was Eileithyia who hindered the travail on Hera’s behalf, and a faithful handmaiden of Alcmene’s, the yellow-haired Galanthis, or Galen, who left the birth chamber to announce, untruly, that Alcmene had been delivered. When Eileithyia sprang up in surprise, unclasping her fingers and uncrossing her knees, Heracles was born, and Galanthis laughed at the successful deception-which provoked Eileithyia to seize her by the hair and turn her into a weasel. Galanthis continued to frequent Alcmene’s house, but was punished by Hera for having lied: she was condemned in perpetuity to bring forth her young through the mouth. When the Thebans pay Heracles divine honours, they still offer preliminary sacrifices to Galanthis, who is also called Galinthias and described as Proetus’s daughter; saying that she was Heracles’s nurse and that he built her a sanctuary.

h. This Theban account is derided by the Athenians. They hold that Galanthis was a harlot, turned weasel by Hecate in punishment for practising unnatural lust, who when Hera unduly prolonged Alcmene’s labour, happened to run past and frighten her into delivery.

i. Heracles’s birthday is celebrated on the fourth day of every month; but some hold that he was born as the Sun entered the Tenth Sign; others that the Great Bear, swinging westward at midnight over Orion-which it does as the Sun quits the Twelfth Sign-looked down on him in his tenth month.

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1. Alcmene {‘strong in wrath’) will have originally been a Mycenaean title of Hera, whose divine sovereignty Heracles (‘glory of Hera’) protected against the encroachments of her Achaean enemy Perseus (‘destroyer’). The Achaeans eventually triumphed, and their descendants claimed Heracles as a member of the usurping House of Perseus. Hera’s detestation of Heracles is likely to be a later invention; he was worshipped by the Dorians who overran Elis and there humbled the power of Hera.

2. Diodorus Siculus writes of three heroes named Heracles: an Egyptian; a Cretan Dactyl; and the son of Alcmene. Cicero raises this number to six (On the Nature of the Gods); Varro to forty-four (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid). Herodotus says that when he asked for Heracles’s original home, the Egyptians referred him to Phoenicia. According to Diodorus Siculus, the Egyptian Heracles, called Som, or Chon, lived ten thousand years before the Trojan War, and his Greek namesake inherited his exploits. The story of Heracles is, indeed, a peg on which a great number of related, unrelated, and contradictory myths have been hung. In the main, however, he represents the typical sacred king of early Hellenic Greece, consort of a tribal nymph, the Moon-goddess incarnate; his twin Iphicles acted as his tanist. This Moon-goddess has scores of names: Hera, Athene, Auge, Iole, Hebe, and so forth. On an  early Roman bronze mirror Juppiter is shown celebrating a sacred marriage between ‘Hercele’ and ‘Juno’; moreover, at Roman weddings the knot in the bride’s girdle consecrated to Juno was called the ‘Herculean knot’, and the bridegroom had to untie it (Festus). The Romans derived this tradition from the Etruscans, whose Juno was named ‘Unial’. It may be assumed that the central story of Heracles was an early variant of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic which reached Greece by way of Phoenicia. Gilgamesh has Enkidu for his beloved comrade, Heracles has Iolaus. Gilgamesh is undone by his love for the goddess Ishtar, Heracles by his love for Deianeira. Both are of divine parentage. Both harrow Hell. Both kill lions and overcome divine bulls; and when sailing to the Western Isle Heracles, like Gilgamesh, uses his garment for a sail. Heracles finds the magic herb of immortality as Gilgamesh does, and is similarly connected with the progress of the sun around the Zodiac.

3. Zeus is made to impersonate Amphitryon because when the sacred king underwent a rebirth at his coronation, he became titularly a son of Zeus, and disclaimed his mortal parentage. Yet custom required the mortal tanist-rather than the divinely-born king, the elder of the twins-to lead military expeditions; and the reversal of this rule in Heracles’s case suggests that he was once the tanist, and Iphicles the sacred king. Theocritus certainly makes Heracles the younger of the twins, and Herodotus, who calls him a son of Amphitryon, surnames him ‘Alcides’-after his grandfather Alcaeus, not ‘Cronides’ after his grandfather Cronus. Moreover, when Iphicles married Creon’s youngest daughter, Heracles married an elder one; although in matrilineal society the youngest was commonly the heiress, as appears in all European folktales. According to Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles), Iphicles humbled himself shamefully before Eurystheus; but the circumstances, which might throw light on this change of roles between the twins, are not explained. No such comradeship as existed between Castor and Polydeuces, or Idas and Lynceus, is recorded between Heracles and Iphicles. Heracles usurps his twin’s functions and prerogatives, leaving him an ineffective and spiritless shadow who soon fades away, unmourned. Perhaps at Tiryns, the tanist usurped all the royal power, as sometimes happens in Asiatic states where a religious king rules jointly with a war-king, or Shogun.

4. Hera’s method of delaying childbirth is still used by Nigerian witches; the more enlightened now reinforce the charm by concealing imported padlocks beneath their clothes.

5. The observation that weasels, if disturbed, carry their young from place to place in their mouths, like cats, gave rise to the legend of their viviparous birth. Apuleius’s account of the horrid performance of Thessalian witches disguised as weasels, Hecate’s attendants, and Pausanias’s mention of human sacrifices offered to the Teumessiau Vixen, recall Cerdo (‘weasel’ or ‘vixen’), wife of Phoroneus, who is said to have introduced Hera’s worship into the Peloponnese. The Theban cult of Galinthias is a relic of primitive Hera-worship, and when the witches delayed Heracles’s birth they will have been disguised as weasels. This myth is more than usually confused; though it appears that Zeus’s Olympianism was resented by conservative religious opinion in Thebes and Argolis, and that the witches made a concerted attack on the House of Perseus.