The Second Labour: The Lernaean Hydra

THE Second Labour ordered by Eurystheus was the destruction of the Lernaean Hydra, a monster born to Typhon and Echidne, and reared by Hera as a menace to Heracles.

b. Lerna stands beside the sea, some five miles from the city of Argos. To the west rises Mount Pontinus, with its sacred grove of plane-trees stretching down to the sea. In this grove, bounded on one flank by the river Pontinus-beside which Danaus dedicated a shrine to Athene-and on the other by the river Amymone, stand images of Demeter, Dionysus the Saviour, and Prosymne, one of Hera’s nurses; and, on the shore, a stone image of Aphrodite, dedicated by the Danaids. Every year, secret nocturnal rites are held at Lerna in honour of Dionysus, who descended to Tartarus at this point when he went to fetch Semele; and, not far off, the Mysteries of Lernaean Demeter are celebrated in an enclosure which marks the place where Hades and Persephone also descended to Tartarus. c. This fertile and holy district was once terrorized by the Hydra, which had its lair beneath a plane-tree at the seven-fold source of the river Amymone and haunted the unfathomable Lernaean swamp near by-the Emperor Nero recently tried to sound it, and failed-the grave of many an incautious traveller. The Hydra had a prodigious dog-like body, and eight or nine snaky heads, one of them immortal; but some credit it with fifty, or one hundred, or even ten thousand heads. At all events, it was so venomous that its very breath, or the smell of its tracks, could destroy life.

d. Athene had pondered how Heracles might best kill this monster and, when he reached Lerna, driven there in his chariot by Iolaus, she pointed out the Hydra’s lair to him. On her advice, he forced the Hydra to emerge by pelting it with burning arrows, and then held his breath while he caught hold of it. But the monster twined around his feet, in an endeavour to trip him up. In vain did he batter at its heads with his club: no sooner was one crushed, than two or three more grew in its place.

e. An enormous crab scuttered from the swamp to aid the Hydra, and nipped Heracles’s foot; furiously crushing its shell, he shouted to Iolaus for assistance. Iolaus set one corner of the grove alight and then, to prevent the Hydra from sprouting new heads, seared their roots with blazing branches; thus the flow of blood was checked.

f. Now using a sword, or a golden falchion, Heracles severed the immortal head, part of which was of gold, and buried it, still hissing, under a heavy rock beside the road to Elaeus. The carcass he disembowelled, and dipped his arrows in the gall. Henceforth, the least wound from one of them was invariably fatal.

g. In reward for the crab’s services, Hera set its image among the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and Eurystheus would not count this Labour as duly accomplished, because Iolaus had supplied the firebrands. 1. The Lernaean Hydra puzzled the Classical mythographers. Pausanias held that it might well have been a huge and venomous watersnake; but that ‘Pisander had first called it many-headed, wishing to make it seem more terrifying and, at the same time, add to the dignity of his own verses’. According to the euhemeristic Servius (On Virgil’s Aeneid), the Hydra was a source of underground rivers which used to burst out and inundate the land: if one of its numerous channels were blocked, the water broke through elsewhere, therefore Heracles first used fire to dry the ground, and then dosed the channels.

2. In the earliest version of this myth, Heracles, as the aspirant for kingship, is likely to have wrestled in turn with a bull, a lion, a boar, or scorpion, and then dived into a lake to win gold from the water-monster living in its depth. Jason was set much the same tasks, and the helpful part played by Medea is here given to Athene-as Heracles’s bride-to-be. Though the Hydra recalls the sea-serpent which Perseus killed with a golden falchion, or new-moon sickle, it was a fresh-water monster, like most of those mentioned by Irish and Welsh mythographers-piastres or avancs-and like the one recorded in the Homeric epithet for Lacedaemon, namely cetoessa, ‘of the water-monster’, doubtless haunting some deep pool of the Eurotas. The dog-like body is a reminiscence of the sea-monster Scylla, and of a seven- headed monster (on a late Babylonian cylinder-seal) which the hero Gilgamesh kills. Astrologers have brought the crab into the story so as to make Heracles’s Twelve Labours correspond with the Signs of the Zodiac; but it should properly have figured in his struggle with the Nemean lion, the next Sign.

3. This ritual myth has become attached to that of the Danaids, who were the ancient water-priestesses of Lerna. The number of heads given the Hydra varies intelligibly: as a college of priestesses it had fifty heads; as the sacred cuttle-fish, a disguise adopted by Thetis-who also had a college of fifty priestesses-it had eight shaky arms ending in heads, and one head on its trunk, together making nine in honour of the Moon-goddess; one hundred heads suggest the centuriae, or war bands, which raided Argos from Lerna; and ten thousand is a typical embellishment by Euripides, who had little conscience as a mythographer. On Greek coins, the Hydra usually has seven heads: doubtless a reference to the seven outlets of the river Amymone.

4. Heracles’s destruction of the Hydra seems to record a historical event: the attempted suppression of the Lernaean fertility rites. But new priestesses always appeared in the plane- tree grove-the plane-tree suggests Cretan religious influence, as does the cuttle-fish-until the Achaeans, or perhaps the Dorians, burned it down. Originally, it is clear, Demeter formed a triad with Hecate as Crone, here called Prosymne, ‘addressed with hymns’, and Persephone the Maiden; but Dionysus’s Semele ousted Persephone. There was a separate cult of Aphrodite-Thetis by the seaside.