ALCMENE, fearing Hera’s jealousy, exposed her newly-born child in a field outside the walls of Thebes; and here, at Zeus’s instigation, Athene took Hera for a casual stroll. ‘Look, my dear! What a wonderfully robust child!’ said Athene, pretending surprise as she stopped to pick him up. ‘His mother must have been out of her mind to abandon him in a stony field! Come, you have milk. Give the poor little creature suck!’ Thoughtlessly Hera took him and bared her breast, at which Heracles drew with such force that she flung him down in pain, and a spurt of milk flew across the sky and became the Milky Way. ‘The young monster!’ Hera cried. But Heracles was now immortal, and Athene returned him to Alcmene with a smile, telling her to guard and rear him well. The Thebans still show the place where this trick was played on Hera; it is called ‘The Plain of Heracles’.
b. Some, however, say that Herme carried the infant Heracles to Olympus; that Zeus himself laid him at Hera’s breast while she slept; and that the Milky Way was formed when she awoke and pushed him away, or when he greedily sucked more milk than his mouth would hold, and coughed it up. At all events, Hera was Heracles’s foster mother, if only for a short while; and the Thebans therefore style him her son, and say that he had been Alcaeus before she gave him suck, but was renamed in her honour.
c. One evening, when Heracles had reached the age of eight or ten months or, as others say, one year, and was still unweaned, Alcmene having washed and suckled her twins, laid them to rest under a lamb-fleece coverlet, on the broad brazen shield which Amphitryon had won from Pterelaus. At midnight, Hera sent two prodigious azure-scaled serpents to Amphitryon’s house, with strict orders to destroy Heracles. The gates opened as they approached; they glided through, and over the marble floors to the nursery-their eyes shooting flames, and poison dripping from their fangs.
d. The twins awoke, to see the serpents writhed above them, with darting, forked tongues; for Zeus again divinely illumined the chamber. Iphicles screamed, kicked off the coverlet and, in an attempt to escape, rolled from the shield to the floor. His frightened cries, and the strange light shining under the nursery door, roused Alcmene. ‘Up with you, Amphitryon!’ she cried. Without waiting to put on his sandals, Amphitryon leaped from the cedar-wood bed, seized his sword which hung close by on the wall, and drew it from its polished sheath. At that moment the light in the nursery went out. Shouting to his drowsy slaves for lamps and torches, Amphitryon rushed in; and Heracles, who had not uttered so much as a whimper, proudly displayed the serpents, which he was in the act of strangling, one in either hand. As they died, he laughed, bounced joyfully up and down, and threw them at Amphitryon’s feet.
e. While Alcmene comforted the terror-stricken Iphicles, Amphitryon spread the coverlet over Heracles again, and returned to bed. At dawn, when the cock had crowed three times, Alcmene summoned the aged Teiresias and told him of the prodigy. Teiresias, after foretelling Heracles’s future glories, advised her to strew a broad hearth with dry faggots of gorse, thorn and brambles, and burn the serpents upon them at midnight. In the morning, a maid-servant must collect their ashes, take them to the rock where the Sphinx had perched, scatter them to the winds, and run away without looking back. On her return, the palace must be purged with fumes of sulphur and salted spring water; and its roof crowned with wild olive. finally, a boar must be sacrificed at Zeus’s high altar. All this Alcmene did. But some hold that the serpents were harmless, and placed in the cradle by Amphitryon himself; he had wished to discover which of the twins was his son, and now he knew
f.. When Heracles ceased to be a child, Amphitryon taught him how to drive a chariot, and how to turn corners without grazing the goal. Castor gave him fencing lessons, instructed him in weapon drill, in cavalry and infantry tactics, and in the rudiments of strategy. One of Hermes’s sons became his boxing teacher-it was either Autolycus, or else Harpalycus, who had so grim a look when fighting that none dared face him. Eurytus taught him archery; or it may have been the Scythian Teutarus, one of Amphitryon’s herdsmen, or even Apollo. But Heracles surpassed all archers ever born, even his companion Alcon, father of Phalerus the Argonaut, who could shoot through a succession of rings set on the helmets of soldiers standing in file, and could cleave arrows held up on the points of swords or lances. Once, when Alcon’s son was attacked by a serpent, which wound its coils about him, Alcon shot with such skill as to wound it mortally without hurting the boy.
g. Eumolpus taught Heracles how to sing and play the lyre; while Linus, son of the River-god Ismenius, introduced him to the study of literature. Once, when Eumolpus was absent, Linus gave the lyre lessons as well; but Heracles, refusing to change the principles in which he had been grounded by Eumolpus, and being beaten for his stubbornness, killed Linus with a blow of the lyre. At his trial for murder, Heracles quoted a law of Rhadamanthys, which justified forcible resistance to an aggressor, and thus secured his own acquittal. Nevertheless Amphitryon, fearing that the boy might commit further crimes of violence, sent him away to a cattle ranch, where he remained until his eighteenth year, outstripping his contemporaries in height, strength, and courage. Here he was chosen to be a laurel-bearer of Ismenian Apollo; and the Thebans still preserve the tripod which Amphitryon dedicated for him on this occasion. It is not known who taught Heracles astronomy and philosophy, yet he was learned in both these subjects.
h. His height is usually given as four cubits. Since, however, he stepped out the Olympian stadium, making it six hundred feet long, and since later Greek stadia are also nominally six hundred feet long, but considerably shorter than the Olympic, the sage Pythagoras decided that the length of Heracles’s stride, and consequently his stature, must have been in the same ratio to the stride and stature of other men, as the length of the Olympic stadium is to that of other stadia. This calculation made him four cubits and one foot high- yet some hold that he was not above average stature.
i. Heracles’s eyes flashed fire, and he had an unerring aim, both with javelin and arrow. He ate sparingly at noon; for supper his favourite food was roast meat and Doric barley-cakes, of which he ate sufficient (if that is credible) to have made a hired labourer grunt ‘enough!’ His tunic was short-skirted and neat; and he preferred a night under the stars to one spent indoors. A profound knowledge of augury led him especially to welcome the appearance of vultures, whenever he was about to undertake a new Labour. ‘Vultures’, he would say, ‘are the most righteous of birds: they do not attack even the smallest living creature.’
j. Heracles claimed never to have picked a quarrel, but always to have given aggressors the same treatment as they intended for him. One Termerus used to kill travellers by challenging them to a butting match; Heracles’s skull proved the stronger, and he crushed Termerus’s head as though it had been an egg. Heracles was, however, naturally courteous, and the first mortal who freely fielded the enemy their dead for burial.
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1. According to another account, the Milky Way was formed when Rhea forcibly weaned Zeus. Hera’s suckling of Heracles is a myth apparently based on the sacred king’s ritual rebirth from the queen-mother.
2. An ancient icon on which the post-Homeric story of the strangled serpents is based, will have shown Heracles caressing them while they cleansed his ears with their tongues, as happened to Melampus, Teiresias, Cassandra, and probably the sons of Laocoön.. Without this kindly attention he would have been unable to understand the language of vultures; and Hera, had she really wanted to kill Heracles, would have sent a Harpy to carry him off. The icon has been misread by Pindar, or his informant, as an allegory of the New Year Solar Child, who destroys the power of Winter, symbolized by the serpents. Alcmene’s sacrifice of a boar to Zeus is the ancient midwinter one, sullying in the Christmas boar’s head of Old England. Wild olive in Greece, like birch in Italy and North-western Europe, was the New Year tree, symbol of inception, and used as a besom to expel evil spirits; Heracles had a wild-olive tree for his club, and brought a sapling to Olympia from the land of the Hyperboreans. What Teiresias told Alcmene to light was the Candlemas bonfire, still lighted on February 2nd in many parts of Europe: its object being to burn away the old scrub and encourage young shoots to grow.
3. The cake-eating Dorian Heracles, as opposed to his cultured Aeolian and Achaean predecessors, was a simple cattle-king, endowed with the limited virtues of his condition, but making no pretensions to music, philosophy, or astronomy. In Classical times, the mythographers, remembering the principle of mens sana in corpore sano, forced a higher education upon him, and interpreted his murder of Linus as a protest against tyranny, rather than against effeminacy. Yet he remained an embodiment of physical, not mental, health; except among the Celts, who honoured him as the patron of letters and all the bardic arts. They followed the tradition that Heracles, the Idaean Dactyl whom they called Ogmius, represented the first consonant of the Hyperborean tree-alphabet, Birch or Wild Olive, and that ‘on a switch of birch was cut the first message ever sent, namely Birch seven times repeated’ (White Goddess).
4. Alcon’s feat of shooting the serpent suggests an archery trial like that described in the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum: when the candidate for initiation into the archers’ guild was required to shoot at an object placed on his own son’s cap-either an apple or a silver penny. The brothers of Laodameia, competing for the sacred kingship, were asked to shoot through a ring placed on a child’s breast; but this myth must be misreported, since child-murder was not their object. It seems that the original task of a candidate for kingship had been to shoot through the coil of a golden serpent, symbolizing immortality, set on a head-dress worn by a royal child; and that in some tribes this custom was changed to the cleaving of an apple, and in others to the shooting between the recurred blades of a double axe, or through the crest-ring of a helmet; but later, as marksmanship improved, through either a row of helmet-frogs, the test set Alcon; or a row of axe-blades, the test set Odysseus. Robin Hood’s merry men, like the German archers, shot at silver pennies, because these were marked with a cross; the archer-guilds being defiantly anti-Christian.
5. Greek and Roman archers drew the bow-string back to the chest, as children shoot, and their effective range was so short that the javelin remained the chief missile weapon of the Roman armies until the sixth century AD, when Belisarius armed his cataphracts with heavy bows, and taught them to draw the string back to the ear, in Scythian fashion. Heracles’s accurate marksmanship is therefore accounted for by the legend that his tutor was Teutarus the Scythian-the name is apparently formed from teutaein, ‘to practise assiduously’, which the ordinary Greek archer does not seem to have done. It may be because of the Scythians’ outstanding skill with the bow that they were described as Heracles’s descendants: and he was said to have bequeathed a bow to Scythes, the only one of his sons who could bend it as he did.
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