The Eighth Labour: The Mares Of Diomedes

EURYSTHEUS ordered Heracles, as his Eighth Labour, to capture the four savage mares of Thracian King Diomedes-it is disputed whether he was the son of Ares and Cyrene, or born of an incestuous relationship between Asteria and her father Atlas-who ruled the warlike Bistones, and whose stables, at the now vanished city of Tirida, were the terror of Thrace. Diomedes kept the mares tethered with iron chains to bronze mangers, and fed them on the flesh of his unsuspecting guests. One version of the story makes them stallions, not mares, and names them Podargus, Lampon, Xanthus, and Deinus.

b. With a number of volunteers, Heracles set sail for Thrace, visiting his friend King Admetus of Pherae on the way. Arrived at Tirida, he overpowered Diomedes’s grooms and drove the mares down to the sea, where he left them on a knoll in charge of his mignon Abderus, and then turned to repel the Bistones as they rushed in pursuit. His party being outnumbered, he overcame them by ingeniously cutting a channel which caused the sea to flood the low-lying plain; when they turned to run, he pursued them, stunned Diomedes with his club, dragged his body around the lake that had now formed, and set it before his own mares, which tore at the still living flesh. Their hunger being now fully assuaged-for, while Heracles was away, they had also devoured Abderus-he mastered them without much trouble.
c. According to another account Abderus, though a native of Opus in Locris, was employed by Diomedes. Some call him the son of Hermes; and others the son of Heracles’s friend, Opian Menoetius, and thus brother to Patroclus who fell at Troy. After founding the city of Abdera beside Abderus’s tomb, Heracles took Diomedes’s chariot and harnessed the mares to it, though hitherto they had never known bit or bridle. He drove them speedily back across the mountains until he reached Mycenae, where Eurystheus dedicated them to Hera and set them free on Mount Olympus. They were eventually destroyed by wild beasts; yet it is claimed that their descendants survived until the Trojan War and even until the time of Alexander the Great. The ruins of Diomedes’s palace are shown at Cartera Come, and at Abdera athletic games are still celebrated in honour of Abderus-they include all the usual contests, except chariot-racing; which accounts for the story that Abderus was killed when the man-eating mares wrecked a chariot to which he had harnessed them.

1. The bridling of a wild horse, intended for a sacrificial horse feast, seems to have been a coronation rite in some regions of Greece. Heracles’s mastery of Arion-a feat also performed by Oncus and Adrastus (Pausanias)-is paralleled by Bellerophon’s capture of Pegasus. This ritual myth has here been combined with a legend of how Heracles, perhaps representing the Teans who seized Abdera from the Thracians (Herodotus), annulled the custom by which wild women in horse-masks used to chase and eat the sacred king at the end of his reign; instead he was killed in an organized chariot crash. The omission of chariot- racing from the funeral games at Abdera points to a ban on this revised sacrifice. Podargus is called after Podarge the Harpy, mother of Xanthus, an immortal horse given by Poseidon to Peleus as a wedding present; Lampus recalls Lampon, one of Eos’s team. Diodorus’s statement that these mares were let loose on Olympus may mean that the cannibalistic horse cult survived there until Hellenistic times.
2. Canals, tunnels, or natural underground conduits were often described as the work of Heracles.