The Twelfth Labour: The Capture Of Cerberus

HERACLES’S last, and most difficult, Labour was to bring the dog Cerberus up from Tartarus. As a preliminary, he went to Eleusis where he asked to partake of the Mysteries and wear the myrtle wreath. Nowadays, any Greek of good repute may be initiated at Eleusis, but since in Heracles’s day Athenians alone were admitted, Theseus suggested that a certain Pylius should adopt him. This Pylius did so and when Heracles had been purified for his slaughter of the Centaurs, because no one with blood-stained hands could view the Mysteries, he was duly initiated by Orpheus’s son Musaeus, Theseus acting as his sponsor. However, Eumolpus, the founder of the Greater Mysteries, had decreed that no foreigners should be admitted, and therefore the Eleusinians, loth to refuse Heracles’s request, yet doubtful whether his adoption by Pylius would qualify him as a true Athenian, established the Lesser Mysteries on his account; others say that Demeter herself honoured him by founding the Lesser Mysteries on this occasion.
b. Every year, two sets of Eleusinian Mysteries are held: the Greater in honour of Demeter and Core, and the Lesser in honour of Core alone. These Lesser Mysteries, a preparation for the Greater, are a dramatic reminder of Dionysus’s fate, performed by the Eleusinians at Agrae on the river Ilissus in the month Anthesterion. The principal rites are the sacrifice of a sow, which the initiates first wash in the river Cantharus, and their subsequent purification by a priest who bears the name Hydranus. They must then wait at least one year until they may participate in the Greater Mysteries, which are held at Eleusis itself in the month Boedromion; and must also take an oath of secrecy, administered by the mystagogue, before being prepared for these. Meanwhile, they are refused admittance to the sanctuary of Demeter, and wait in the vestibule throughout the solemnities.
c. Thus cleansed and prepared, Heracles descended to Tartarus from Laconian Taenarum; or, some say, from the Acherusian peninsula near Heracleia on the Black Sea, where marks of his descent are still shown at a great depth. He was guided by Athene and Hermes-for whenever, exhausted by his Labours, he cried out in despair to Zeus, Athene always came hastening down to comfort him. Terrified by Heracles’s scowl, Charon fortied him across the river Styx without demur; in punishment of which irregularity he was lettered by Hades for one entire year. As Heracles stepped ashore from the crazy boat, all the ghosts fled, except Meleager and the Gorgon Medusa. At sight of Medusa he drew his sword, but Hermes reassured him that she was only a phantom; and when he aimed an arrow at Meleager, who was wearing bright armour, Meleager laughed. ‘You have nothing to fear from the dead,’ he said, and they chatted amicably for awhile, Heracles offering in the end to marry Meleager’s sister Deianeira.
d. Near the gates of Tartarus, Heracles found his friends Theseus and Peirithous fastened to cruel chairs, and wrenched Theseus free, but obliged to leave Peirithous behind; next, he rolled away the stone under which Demeter had imprisoned Ascalaphus; and then, wishing to gratify the ghosts with a gift of warm blood, slaughtered one Hades’s cattle. Their herdsman, Menoetes, or Menoetus, the son Ceuthonymus, challenged him to a wrestling match, but was seized around the middle and had his ribs crushed. At this, Persephone, who came out from her palace and greeted Heracles like a brother, intervened and pleaded for Menoetes’s life.
e. When Heracles demanded Cerberus, Hades, standing by his wife’s side, replied grimly: ‘He is yours, if you can master him without using your club or your arrows.’ Heracles found the dog chained to the gate of Acheron, and resolutely gripped him by the throat-from which rose three heads, each maned with serpents. The barbed tail flew up strike, but Heracles, protected by the lion pelt, did not relax his grip until Cerberus choked and yielded.
f. On his way back from Tartarus, Heracles wove himself a wreath from the tree which Hades had planted in the Elysian Fields as a mere memorial to his mistress, the beautiful nymph Leuce. The outer leaves of the wreath remained black, because that is the colour of the Underworld, but those next to Heracles’s brow were bleached silver-white by his glorious sweat. Hence the white poplar, or aspen, is sacred to him: colour signifying that he has laboured in both worlds.
g. With Athene’s assistance, Heracles recrossed the river Styx safely, and then half- dragged, half-carried Cerberus up the chasm in Troezen, through which Dionysus had conducted his mother Semele. In the temple of Saviour Artemis, built by Theseus over the mouth this chasm, altars now stand sacred to the infernal deities. At Troezen also, a fountain discovered by Heracles and called after him is shown front of Hippolytus’s former palace.
h. According to another account, Heracles dragged Cerberus, born with adamantine chains, up a subterrene path which leads to the gloomy cave of Acone, near Mariandyne on the Black Sea. As Cerberus resisted averting his eyes from the sunlight, and barking furiously with all three mouths, his slaver flew across the green fields and gave birth to poisonous plant aconite, also called hecateis, because Hecate was the first to use it. Still another account is that Heracles came back to the upper air through Taenarum, famous for its cave-like temple with an image of Poseidon standing before it; but if a road ever led thence to the Underworld, it has since been blocked up. Finally, some say that reemerged from the precinct of Laphystian Zeus, on Mount Laphystius, where stands an image of Bright-eyed Heracles.
i. Yet all agree at least that, when Heracles brought Cerberus to Mycenae, Eurystheus, who was offering a sacrifice, handed him a slave’s portion, reserving the best cuts for his own kinsmen; and that Heracles showed his just resentment by killing three of Eurystheus’s sons: Perimedes, Eurybius, and Eurypilus.
j. Besides the aconite, Heracles also discovered the following simples: the all-heal heracleon, or ‘wild origanum’; the Siderian heracleon, with its thin stem, red flower, and leaves like the coriander’s, which grows near lakes and rivers, and is an excellent remedy for all wounds inflicted by iron; and the hyoscyamos, or henbane, which causes vertigo and insanity. The Nymphaean heracleon, which has a club-like root, was named after a certain nymph deserted by Heracles, who died of jealousy; it makes men impotent for the space of twelve days.

1. This myth seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed Heracles descending to Tartarus, where Hecate the Goddess of the Dead welcomed him in the form of  a three-headed monster-perhaps with one head for each of the seasons-and, as a natural sequel to her gift of the golden apples, led him away to the Elysian Fields. Cerberus, in fact, was here carrying off Heracles; not contrariwise. The familiar version is a logical result of his elevation to godhead: a hero must remain in the Underworld, but a god will escape and take his jailer with him. Moreover, deification of a hero in a society which formerly worshipped only the Goddess implies that the king has defied immemorial custom and refused to die for her sake. Thus the possession of a golden dog was proof of the Achaean High King’s sovereignty and escape from matriarchal tutelage. Menoetes’s presence in Tartarus, and Heracles’s theft of one of Hades’s cattle, shows that the Tenth Labour is another version of the Twelfth: a harrowing of Hell. To judge from the corresponding Welsh myth, Menoetes’s father, though purposely ‘nameless’, was the alder-god Bran, or Phoroneus, or Cronus; which agrees with the context of the Tenth Labour (White Goddess).
2. The Greater Eleusinian Mysteries were of Cretan origin, and held in Boedromion (‘running for help’) which, in Crete, was the first month of the year, roughly September, and so named, according to Plutarch (Theseus), to commemorate Theseus’s defeat of the Amazons, which means his suppression of the matriarchal system. Originally, the Mysteries seem to  have been the sacred king’s preparation, at the autumnal equinox, for his approaching death at midwinter-hence the premonitory myrtle wreath-in the form of a sacred drama, which advised him what to expect in the Underworld. After the abolition of royal male sacrifices, a feature of matriarchy, the Mysteries were open to all judged worthy of initiation; as in Egypt, where the Book of the Dead gave similar advice, any man of good repute could become an Osiris by being purified of all uncleanness and undergoing a mock death. In Eleusis, Osiris was identified with Dionysus. White poplar leaves were a Sumerian symbol of renascence and, in the tree-calendar, white poplar stood for the autumnal equinox.
3. The Lesser Mysteries, which became a preparation for the Greater, seem to have been an independent Pelasgian festival, also based on the hope of rebirth, but taking place early in February at Candlemas, when the trees first leaf-which is the meaning of Anthesterion.
4. Now, since Dionysus was identified with Osiris, Semele must be Isis; and we know that Osiris did not rescue Isis from the Underworld, but she, him. Thus the icon at Troezen will have shown Semele restoring Dionysus to the upper air. The goddess who similarly guides Heracles is Isis again; and his rescue of Alcestis was probably deduced from the same icon-he is led, not leading. His emergence in the precinct of Mount Laphystius makes an interesting variant. No cavern exists on the summit, and the myth must refer to the death and resurrection of the sacred king which was celebrated there-a rite that helped to form the legend of the Golden Fleece.
5. Aconite, a poison and paralysant, was used by the Thessalian witches in the manufacture of their flying ointment: it humbed the feet and hands and gave them a sensation of being off the ground. But since it was also a febrifuge, Heracles, who drove the fever-birds from Stymphalus, became credited with its discovery.
6. The sequence of Heracles’s feats varies considerably. Diodorus Siculus and Hyginus arrange the Twelve Labours in the same order as Apollodorus, except that they both place the Fourth before the Third, and the Sixth before the Fifth; and that Diodorus places the Twelfth before the Eleventh. Nearly all mythographers agree that the killing of the Nemean Lion was the First Labour, but in Hyginus’s sequence of ‘the Twelve Labours of Heracles set by Eurystheus’ (Fabula), it is preceded by the strangling of the serpents. In one place, Diodorus Siculus associates the killing of Antaeus and Busiris with the Tenth Labour; in another, with the Eleventh. And while some writers make Heracles sail with the Argonauts in his youth (Silius Italicus); others place this adventure after the Fourth Labour (Apollonius Rhodius); and others after the Eighth (Diodorus Siculus). But some make him perform the Ninth (Valerius Flaccus: Argonautica) and Twelfth Labours, and break the horns of both bulls before he sailed with the Argonauts; and others deny that he sailed at all, on the ground that he was then serving as Queen Omphale’s slave (Herodotus, quoted by Apollodorus).
7. According to Lycophron, Heracles was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries before setting out on the Ninth Labour; but Philochorus (quoted by Plutarch: Theseus) says that Theseus had him initiated in the course of its performance, and was rescued by him from Tartarus during the Twelfth Labour (Apollodorus). According to Pausanias, Theseus was only seven years old when Heracles came to Troezen, wearing the lion pelt; and cleared the Isthmus of malefactors on his way to Athens, at the time when Heracles was serving Omphale (Apollodorus). Euripides believed that Heracles had fought with Ares’s son Cycnus before setting out on the Eighth Labour (Alcestis); Propertius, that he had already visited Tartarus when he killed Cacus; and Ovid (Fasti), that Cheiron died accidentally when Heracles had almost completed his Labours, not during the Fourth.
8. Albricus lists the following Twelve Labours in this order, with allegorical explanations: defeating the Centaurs at a wedding; killing the lion; rescuing Alcestis from Tartarus and chaining Cerberus; winning the apples of the Hesperides; destroying the Hydra; wrestling with Achelous; killing Cacus; winning the mares of Diomedes; defeating Antaeus; capturing the boar; lifting the cattle of Geryon; holding up the heavens.
9. Various Labours and bye-works of Heracles were represented on Apollo’s throne at Amyclae (Pausanias); and in the bronze shrine of Athene on the Spartan acropolis (Pausanias). Praxiteles’s gable sculptures on the Theban shrine of Heracles showed most of the Twelve Labours, but the Stymphalian Birds were missing, and the wrestling match with Antaeus replaced the cleansing of Augeias’s stables. The evident desire of so many cities to be associated with Heracles’s Labours suggests that much the same ritual marriage-task drama,  as a preliminary to coronation, was performed over a wide area.