Madness Of Heracles

HERACLES’ defeat of the Minyans made him the most famous of heroes; and his reward was to marry King Creon’s eldest daughter Megara, or Megera, and be appointed protector of the city; while Iphicles married the youngest daughter. Some say that Heracles had two sons by Megara; others that he had three, four, or even eight. They are known as the Alcaids.
b. Heracles next vanquished Pyraechmus, King of the Euboeans, an ally of the Minyans, when he marched against Thebes; and created terror throughout Greece by ordering his body to be torn in two by colts and exposed unburied beside the river Heracleius, at a place called the Colts of Pyraechmus, which gives out a neighing echo whenever horses drink there.

c. Hera, vexed by Heracles’s excesses, drove him mad. He first attacked his beloved nephew Iolaus, Iphicles’s eldest son, who managed to escape his wild lunges; and then, mistaking six of his own children for enemies, shot them down, and flung their bodies into a fire, together with two other sons of Iphicles, by whose side they were performing martial exercises. The Thebans celebrate an annual festival in honour of these eight mail-clad victims. On the first day, sacrifices are offered and fires burn all night; on the second, funeral games are held and the winner is crowned with white myrtle. The celebrants grieve in memory of the brilliant futures that had been planned for Heracles's sons. One was to have ruled Argos, occupying Eurystheus’s palace, and Heracles had thrown his lion pelt over his shoulders; another was to have been king of Thebes, and in his right hand Heracles had set the mace of defence, Daedalus’s deceitful gift; a third was promised Oechalia, which Heracles afterwards laid waste; and the choicest brides had been chosen for them all-alliances with Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. So dearly did Heracles love these sons that many deny now his guilt, preferring to believe that they were treacherously slain by his guests: by Lycus, perhaps, or as Socrates has suggested, by Augeias.
d. When Heracles recovered his sanity, he shut himself up in a dark chamber for some days, avoiding all human intercourse and then, after purification by King Thespius, went to Delphi, to enquire what he should do. The Pythoness, addressing him for the first time as Heracles, rather than Palaemon, advised him to reside at Tiryns; to serve Eurystheus for twelve years; and to perform whatever Labours might be set him, in payment for which he would be rewarded with immortality. At this, Heracles felt into deep despair, loathing to serve a man whom he knew to be far inferior to himself, yet afraid to oppose his father Zeus. Many friends came to solace him in his distress; and, finally, when the passage of time had somewhat alleviated his pain, he placed himself at Eurystheus’s disposal.
e. Some, however, hold that it was not until his return from Tartarus that Heracles went mad and killed the children; that he killed Megara too; and that the Pythoness then told him: ‘You shall no longer be called Palaemon! Phoebus Apollo names you Heracles, since from Hera you shall have undying fame among men!’-as though he had done Hera a great service. Others say that Heracles was Eurystheus’s lover, and performed the Twelve Labours for his gratification; others again, that he undertook to perform them only if Eurystheus would annul the sentence of banishment passed on Amphitryon.
f. It has been said that when Heracles set forth on his Labours, Hermes gave him a sword, Apollo a bow and smooth-shafted arrows, leathered with eagle feathers; Hephaestus a golden breast-plate; and Athene a robe. Or that Athene gave him the breast-plate, but Hephaestus bronze greaves and an adamantine helmet. Athene and Hephaestus, it is added, rivalised with one another throughout in benefiting Heracles: she gave him enjoyment of peaceful pleasures; he, protection from the dangers of war. The gift of Poseidon was a team of horses; that of Zeus, a magnificent and unbreakable shield. Many were the stories worked on this shield in enamel, ivory, electrum, gold, and lapis lazuli; moreover, twelve serpents’ heads carved about the boss dashed their jaws whenever Heracles went into battle, and terrified his opponents. The truth, however, is that Heracles scorned armour and, after his first Labour, seldom carried even a spear, relying rather on his club, bow and arrows. He had little use for the bronze-tipped club which Hephaestus gave him, preferring to cut his own from wild-olive: first on Helicon, next at Nemea. This second club he later replaced with a third, also cut from wild-olive, by the shores of the Saronic Sea: the club which, on his visit to Troezen, he leaned against the image of Hermes. It struck root, sprouted, and is now a stately tree.
g. His nephew Iolaus shared in the Labours as his charioteer, or shield-bearer.

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1. Madness was the Classical Greek excuse for child-sacrifice; the truth being that the sacred king’s boy-surrogates were burned alive after he had lain hidden for twenty four hours in a tomb, shamming death, and then reappeared to claim the throne once more.
2. The death of Pyraechmus, torn in two by wild horses, is a familiar one. Heracles’s title Palaemon identifies him with Melicertes of Corinth, who was deified under that name; Melicertes is Melkarth, the Lord of the City, the Tyrian Heracles. The eight Alcaids seem to have been members of a sword-dancing team whose performance, like that of the eight morris-dancers in the English Christmas Play, ended in the victim’s resurrection. Myrtle was the tree of the thirteenth twenty-eight day month, and symbolized departure; wild-olive, the tree of the first month, symbolized inception. Electryon’s eight sons may have formed a similar team at Mycenae.
3. Heracles’s homosexual relations with Hylas, Iolaus, and Eurystheus, and the accounts of his lustrous armour, are meant to justify Theban military custom. In the original myth, he will have loved Eurystheus’s daughter, not Eurystheus himself. His twelve Labours, Servius points out, were eventually equated with the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac; although Homer and Hesiod do not say that there were twelve of them, nor does the sequence of Labours correspond with that of the Signs. Like the Celtic God of the Year, celebrated in the Irish Song of Amergin, the Pelasgian Heracles seems to have made a progress through a thirteen-month year. In Irish and Welsh myth the successive emblems were: stag, or bull; flood; wind; dew-drop; hawk; flower; bonfire; spear; salmon; hill; boar; breaker; sea-serpent. But Gilgamesh’s adventures in the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic are related to the signs of the Zodiac, and the Tyrian Heracles had much in common with him. Despite Homer and Hesiod, the scenes pictured on ancient shields seem not to have been dazzling works of art, but rough pictograms, indicative of the owner’s origin and rank, scratched on the spiral band which plated each shield.
4. The occasion on which the twelve Olympians heaped gifts on Heracles was doubtless his sacred marriage, and they will have all been presented to him by his priestess- bride-Athene, Auge, Iole, or whatever her name happened to be-either directly, or by the hands of attendants. Here Heracles was being armed for his Labours, that is to say, for his ritual combats and magical feats.