The Third Labour: The Ceryneian Hind

HERACLES’ Third Labour was to capture the Ceryneian Hind, and bring her alive from Oenoe to Mycenae. This swift, dappled creature had bronze hooves and golden horns like a stag, so that some call her a stag. She was sacred to Artemis who, when only a child, saw five hinds, larger than bulls, grazing on the banks of the dark-pebbled Thessalian river Anaurus at the foot of the Parrhasian Mountains; the sun twinkled on their horns. Running in pursuit, she caught four of them, one after the other, with her own hands, and harnessed them to her chariot; the fifth fled across the river Celadon to the Ceryneian Hill, as Hera intended, already having Heracles’s Labours in mind. According to another account, this hind was a masterless monster which used to ravage the fields, and which Heracles, after a severe struggle, sacrificed to Artemis on the summit of Mount Artemisium.

b. Loth either to kill or wound the hind, Heracles performed this Labour without exerting the least force. He hunted her tirelessly for one whole year, his chase taking him as far as Istria and the Land of the Hyperboreans. When, exhausted at last, she took refuge on Mount Artemisium, and thence descended to the river Ladon, Heracles pinned her forelegs together with an arrow, which passed between bone and sinew, drawing no blood. He then caught her, laid her across his shoulders, and hastened through Arcadia to Mycenae. Some, however, say that he used nets; or followed the hind’s track until he found her asleep underneath a tree. Artemis came to meet Heracles, rebuking him for having ill-used her holy beast, but he pleaded necessity, and put the blame on Eurystheus. Her anger was thus appeased, and she let him carry the hind alive to Mycenae.
c. Another version of the story is that this hind was one which Taygete the Pleiad, Alcyone’s sister, had dedicated to Artemis in gratitude for being temporarily disguised as a hind and thus enabled to elude Zeus’s embraces. Nevertheless, Zeus could not long be deceived, and begot Lacedaemon on her; whereupon she hanged herself on the summit of Mount Amyclaeus, thereafter called Mount Taygetus. Taygete’s niece and namesake married Lacedaemon and bore him Himerus, whom Aphrodite caused to deflower his sister Cleodice unwittingly, on a night of promiscuous revel. Next day, learning what he had done, Himerus leaped into the river, now sometimes known by his name, and was seen no more; but oftener it is called the Eurotas, because Lacedaemon’s predecessor, King Eurotas, having suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Athenians-he would not wait for the full moon before giving battle-drowned himself in its waters. Eurotas, son of Myles, the inventor of water mills, was Amyclas’s father, and grandfather both of Hyacinthus and of Eurydice, who married Acrisius.

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1. This Third Labour is of a different order from most of the others. Historically it may record the Achaean capture of a shrine where Artemis was worshipped as Elaphios (‘hind- like’); her four chariot-stags represent the years of the Olympiad, and at the close of each a victim dressed in deer-skins was hunted to death. Elaphios, at any rate, is said to have been Artemis’s nurse, which means Artemis herself (Pausanias). Mythically, however, the Labour seems to concern Heracles the Dactyl, identified by the Gauls with Ogmius (Lucian: Heracles), who invented the Ogham alphabet and all bardic lore. The chase of the hind, or roe, symbolized the pursuit of Wisdom, and she is found, according to the Irish mystical tradition, harboured under a wild-apple tree (White Goddess). This would explain why Heracles is not said by anyone, except the ill-informed Euripides, to have done the roe any harm: instead he pursued her indefatigably without cease, for an entire year, to the Land of the Hyperboreans, experts in these very mysteries. According to Pollux, Heracles was called Melon (‘of apples’), because apples were offered to him, presumably in recognition of his wisdom; but such wisdom came only with death, and his pursuit of the hind, like his visit to the Garden of the Hesperides, was really a journey to the Celtic Paradise. Zeus had similarly chased Taygete, who was a daughter of Atlas and therefore a non-Hellenic character.

2. In Europe, only reindeer does have horns, and reports of these may have come down from the Baltic by the Amber Route; reindeer, unlike other deer, can of course be harnessed.
3. The drowning of Taygete’s son Himerus, and of her father-in-law Eurotas, suggests that early kings of Sparta were habitually sacrificed to the Eurotas water-monster, by being thrown, wrapped in branches, into a deep pool. So, it seems, was Tantalus, another son of Taygete (Hyginus: Fabula). Lacedaemon means ‘lake demon’, and Laconia is the domain of Lacone (‘lady of the lake’), whose image was rescued from the Dorian invaders by one Preugenes and brought to Patrae in Achaea (Pausanias). The story behind Taygete’s metamorphosis seems to be that the Achaean conquerors of Sparta called themselves Zeus, and their wives Hera. When Hera came to be worshipped as a cow, the Lelegian cult of Artemis the Hind was suppressed. A ritual marriage between Zeus as bull and Hera as cow may have been celebrated, as in Crete.
4. Nights of promiscuous revel were held in various Greek states, and during the Alban Holiday at Rome: a concession to archaic sexual customs which preceded monogamy.