b. Although some call this lion the offspring of Typhon, or of the Chimaera and the Dog Orthrus, others say that Selene bore it with a fearful shudder and dropped it to earth on Mount Tretus near Nemea, beside a two-mouthed cave; and that, in punishment for an unfulfilled sacrifice, she set it to prey upon her own people, the chief sufferers being the Bambinaeaus.
c. Still others say that, at Hera’s desire, Selene created the lion from sea foam enclosed in a large ark; and that Iris, binding it with her girdle, carried it to the Nemean mountains. These were named after a daughter of Asopus, or of Zeus and Selene; and the lion’s cave is still shown about two miles from the city of Nemea.
d. Arriving at Cleonae, between Corinth and Argos, Heracles lodged in the house of a day-labourer, or shepherd, named Molorchus, whose son the lion had killed. When Molorchus was about to offer a ram in propitiation of Hera, Heracles restrained him. ‘Wait thirty days,’ he said. ‘If I return safely, sacrifice to Saviour Zeus; if I do not, sacrifice to me as a hero.
e. Heracles reached Nemea at midday, but since the lion had depopulated the neighbourhood, he found no one to direct him; nor were any tracks to be seen. Having first searched Mount Apesas-so called after Apesantus, a shepherd whom the lion had killed; though some say that Apesantus was a son of Acrisius, who died of a snake-bite in his heel- Heracles visited Mount Tretus, and presently descried the lion coming back to its lair, bespattered with blood from the day’s slaughter. He shot a flight of arrows at it, but they rebounded harmlessly from the thick pelt, and the lion licked its chops, yawning. Next, he used his sword, which bent as though made of lead; finally he heaved up his club and dealt the lion such a blow on the muzzle that it entered its double-mouthed cave, shaking its head- not for pain, however, but because of the singing in its ears. Heracles, with a rueful glance at his shattered club, then netted one entrance of the cave, and went in by the other. Aware now that the monster was proof against all weapons, he began to wrestle with it. The lion bit off one of his fingers; but, holding its head in chancery, Heracles squeezed hard until it choked to death.
f. Carrying the carcass on his shoulders, Heracles returned to Cleonae, where he arrived on the thirtieth day, and found Molorchus on the point of offering him a heroic sacrifice; instead, they sacrificed together to Saviour Zeus. When this had been done, Heracles cut himself a new club and, after making several alterations in the Nemean Games hitherto celebrated in honour of Opheltes, and rededicating them to Zeus, took the lion’s carcass to Mycenae. Eurystheus, amazed and terrified, forbade him ever again to enter the city; in future he was to display the fruits of his Labours outside the gates.
g. For a while, Heracles was at a loss how to flay the lion, until by divine inspiration, he thought of employing its own razor-sharp claws, and soon could wear the invulnerable pelt as armour, arid the head as a helmet. Meanwhile, Eurystheus ordered his smiths to forge him a brazen urn, which he buried beneath the earth. Henceforth, whenever the approach of Heracles was signalled, he took refuge in it and sent his orders by a herald-a son of Pelops, named Copreus, whom he had purified for murder.
i. Heracles was not the only man to strangle a lion in those days. The same feat was accomplished by his friend Phylius as the first of three love-tasks imposed on him by Cyenus, a son of Apollo by Hyria. Phylius had also to catch alive several monstrous man-eating birds, not unlike vultures, and after wrestling with a fierce bull, lead it to the altar of Zeus. When all three tasks had been accomplished, Cyenus further demanded an ox which Phylius had won as a prize at certain funeral games. Heracles advised Phylius to refuse this and press for a settlement of his claim with Cyenus who, in desperation, leaped into a lake; thereafter called the Cyenean lake. His mother Hyria followed him to his death, and both were transformed into swans.
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1. The sacred king’s ritual combat with wild beasts formed a regular part of the coronation ritual in Greece, Asia Minor, Babylonia, Syria; each beast representing one season of the year. Their number varied with the calendar: in a three-seasoned year, they consisted, like Chimaera, of lion, goat, and serpent-hence the statement the lion of Cithaeron was the Chimaera’s child by Orthrus the Dog; or of bull, lion, and serpent, which were Dionysus’s seasonal changes, according to Euripides’s Bacchae; or of lion, horse and dog, like Hecate’s heads. But in a four-seasoned year, they have been bull, ram, lion, and serpent, like the heads of Phanes (see described in Orphic Fragment); or bull, lion, eagle, and seraph, as in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekieli); or, more simply, bull, lion, scorpion, water-snake, the four Signs of the Zodiac which once fell at the equinoxes and solstices. These last four appear, from the First, Fourth, Seventh, Eleventh Labours, to be the beasts which Heracles fought; though boar has displaced the scorpion-the scorpion being retained only is story of Orion, another Heracles, who was offered a princess in marriage if he killed certain wild beasts. The same situation recurs in the story of Cyenus and Phylius-with its unusual substitution of vultures for the serpent-though Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis have given homosexual twist. Theoretically, by taming these beasts, the king rained dominion over the seasons of the year ruled by them. At Thebes, Heracles’s native city, the Sphinx-goddess ruled a two-seasoned year, she was a winged lioness with a serpent’s tail; hence he wore a lion pelt and mask, rather than a bull- mask like Minos. The lion was shown with the other calendar beasts in the new moon ark, an icon which, it seems, gave rise both to the story of Noah and the Flood, and to that of Dionysus and the pirates; Selene (‘the Moon’) is said to have created it.2. Photius denies that Heracles lost his finger in fighting the lion; Ptolemy Hephaestionos says (Nova Historia), that he was poisoned. But it is more probable that he bit it off to placate the ghosts of his children-as Orestes did when pursued by his mother’s Erinnyes. Another two-mouthed cave is mentioned incidentally in Odyssey, as one near which Odysseus first slept on his return to Ithaca at the head of the Bay of Phorcys. Its northern entrance was for men, the southern for gods; and it contained two-handled jars used as hives, stone basins, and plentiful spring-water. There were also stone looms-stalactites?-on which the Naiads wove purple garments. If Porphyry (On the Care of the Nymphs) was right in making this a cave where rites of death and divine rebirth were practised, the basins served for blood and the springs for lustration. The jars would then be burial urns over which souls hovered like bees, and the Naiads (daughters of the Death-god Phorcys, or Orcus) would be Fates weaving garments with royal clan-marks for the reborn to wear. The Nemean Lion’s cave is two-mouthed because this First Labour initiated Heracles’s passage towards his ritual death, after which he becomes immortal and marries the goddess Hebe.
3. The death of three hundred and sixty Cleonaeans suggests a calendar mystery-this being the number of days in the sacred Egyptian year, exclusive of the five set apart in honour of Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Set, and Horus. Heracles’s modifications of the Nemean Games may have involved a change in the local calendar.
4. If the King of Mycenae, like Orion’s enemy Oenopion of Hyria, took refuge in a bronze urn underground and emerged only after the danger had passed, he will have made an annual pretence at dying, while his surrogate reigned for a day, and then reappeared. Heracles’s children were among such surrogates.
5. Apesantus was one of several early heroes bitten in the heel by a viper. He may be identified with Opheltes of Nemea, though what part of Opheltes’s body the serpent bit is not related.
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