b. Many suitors came to Oeneus’s palace in Pleuron, demanding the hand of lovely Deianeira, who drove a chariot and practised the art of war; but all abandoned their claims when they found themselves in rivalry with Heracles and the River-god Achelous. It is common knowledge that immortal Achelous appears in three forms: as a bull, as a speckled serpent, and as a bull-headed man. Streams of water flow continually from his shaggy beard, and Deianeira would rather have died than marry him.
c. Heracles, when summoned by Oeneus to plead his suit, boasted that if he married Deianeira, she would not only have Zeus for a father-in-law, but enjoy the reflected glory of his own Twelve Labours. Achelous (now in bull-headed form) scoffed at this, remarking that he was a well-known personage, the father of all Greek waters, not a footloose stranger like Heracles, and that the Oracle of Dodona had instructed all visitants to offer him sacrifices. Then he taunted Heracles: ‘Either you are not Zeus’s son, or your mother is an adulteress!’ Heracles scowled. ‘I am better at fighting than debating,’ he said, ‘and I will not hear my mother insulted!’
d. Achelous cast aside his green garment, and wrestled with Heracles until he was thrown on his back, whereupon he deftly turned into a speckled serpent and wriggled away. ‘I strangled serpents in my cradle!’ laughed Heracles, stooping to grip his throat. Next, Achelous became a bull and charged; Heracles nimbly stepped aside and, catching hold of both his horns, hurled him to the ground with such force that the right horn snapped clean off. Achelous retired, miserably ashamed, and hid his injury under a chaplet of willow-branches. Some say that Heracles returned the broken horn to Achelous in exchange for the horn of Goat Amaltheia; and some, that it was changed into Amaltheia’s by the Naiads, and that Heracles presented it to Oeneus as a bridal gift. Others say that in the course of his Twelfth Labour, he took the horn down to Tartarus, filled by the Hesperides with golden fruit and now called the Cornucopia, for Plutus, Tyche’s assistant.
f. On the advice of an Oracle, Heracles now sent word to his friend Thespius: ‘Keep seven of your sons in Thespiae, send three to Thebes and order the remaining forty to colonize the island of Sardinia.’ Thespius obeyed. Descendants of those who went to Thebes are honoured there; and descendants of those who stayed behind in Thespiae, the so-called Demuchi, governed the city until recently. The forces led to Sardinia by Iolaus included Thespian and Athenian contingents, this being the first Greek colonial expedition in which kings came of different stock from the common people. After defeating the Sardinians in battle, Iolaus divided the island into provinces, planted olive-trees, and made it so fertile that the Carthaginians have since been prepared to undergo immense troubles to come in its possession. He founded the city of Olbia, and encouraged the Athenians to found that of Ogryle. With the consent of the sons of Thespius, who regarded Iolaus as their second father, he called the colonists after himself, Iolarians; and they still sacrifice to Father Iolaus, as Persians do to Father Cyrus. It has been said that Iolaus returned to Greece, by way of Sicily, where some of his supporters settled and awarded him hero rites; but according to the Thebans, who should know, none of the colonists ever came back.
g. At a feast three years later, Heracles grew enraged with young kinsman of Oeneus, variously named Eunomus, Eurynomus, Eunomus Archias, or Chaerias, the son of Architeles, who was reluctant to pour water on Heracles’s hands, and clumsily splashed it on his legs. Heracles boxed the boy’s ears harder than he intended, and killed him. Even if forgiven by Architeles for this accident, Heracles decided due penalty of exile, and went away with Deianeira, ant Hyllus, to Trachis, the home of Amphitryon’s nephew Ceyx.
h. A similar accident had occurred at Phlius, a city which lies east of Arcadia, when Heracles returned from the Garden of Hesperides. Disliking the drink set before him, he struck Cyathus, the cupbearer, with one finger only, but killed him none the less. A chapel to Cyathus’s memory has been built against Apollo’s Phlian temple.
i. Some say that Heracles wrestled against Achelous before the murder of Iphitus, which was the cause of his removal to Trachis; others, that he went there when first exiled from Tiryns. At all events, he came with Deianeira to the river Evenus, then in full flood, where the Centaur Nessus, claiming that he was the gods’ authorized ferryman and chosen because of his righteousness, offered, for a small fee, to carry Deianeira dry-shod across the water while Heracles swam. He agreed, paid Nessus the fare, threw his club and bow over the river, and plunged in. Nessus, however, instead of keeping to his bargain, galloped off in the opposite direction with Deianeira in his arms; then threw her to the ground and tried to violate her. She screamed for help, and Heracles, quickly recovering his bow, took careful aim and pierced Nessus through the breast from half a mile away.
j. Wrenching out the arrow, Nessus told Deianeira: ‘If you mix the seed which I have spilt on the ground with blood from my wound, add olive oil, and secretly anoint Heracles’s shirt with the mixture, you will never again have cause to complain of his unfaithfulness.’ Deianeira hurriedly collected the ingredients in a jar, which she sealed and kept by her without saying a word to Heracles on the subject.
k. Another version of the story is that Nessus offered Deianeira wool soaked in his own blood, and told her to weave it into a shirt for Heracles. A third version is that he gave her his own blood-stained shirt as a love-charm, and then fled to a neighbouring tribe of Locrians, where he died of the wound; but his body rotted unburied, at the foot of Mount Taphiassus, tainting the country with its noisome smell-hence these Locrians are called Ozolian. The spring beside which he died still smells foetid and contains dots of blood.
l. By Deianeira, Heracles had already become the father of Hyllus, Ctesippus, Glenus, and Hodites; also of Macaria, his only daughter.
1. The story of Meleager’s sisters is told to account for a guinea-fowl cult of Artemis on Leros.
2. Deianeira’s love of war reveals her as a representative of the pre-Olympian Battle- goddess Athene, with whose sacred marriages in different localities this part of the Heracles legend is chiefly concerned.
3. Heracles’s contest with Achelous, like that of Theseus with the Minotaur, should be read as part of the royal marriage ritual. Bull and Serpent stood for the waxing and the waning year- ‘the bull who is the serpent’s father, and the serpent whose son is the bull’-over both of which the sacred king won domination. A bull’s horn, regarded from earliest times as the seat of fertility, enroyalled the candidate for kingship who laid hold of it when he wrestled either with an actual bull, or with a bull-masked opponent. The Babylonian hero Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s mortal twin, and devotee of the Queen of Heaven, seized the Bull of Heaven by the horns and killed it with his sword; and the winning of a cornucopia was a marriage-task imposed on the Welsh hero Peredur in the Mabinogion. In Crete, the bull cult had succeeded that of the wild-goat, whose horn was equally potent. But it seems that the icon which showed this ritual contest was interpreted by the Greeks as illustrating Heracles’s struggle with the River Achelous: namely the dying and draining of the Paracheloitis, a tract of land, formed of the silt brought down by the Achelous, which had slowly been joining the Echinachan Isles to the mainland; and the consequent recovery of a large area of farmland. Heracles was often credited with engineering feats such as these (Strabo; Diodorus Siculus). The sacrifice ordered by the Dodonian Oracle will hardly have been to the river Achelous; more likely it was prescribed for Achelois, the Moon-goddess ‘who drives away pain’.
4. Eunomus and Cyathus will have been boy-victims: surrogates for the sacred king at the close of his reign.
5. Nessus’s attempted rape of Deianeira recalls the disorderly scenes at the wedding of Peirithous, when Theseus (the Athenian Heracles) intervened to save Hippodameia from assault by the Centaur Eurytion. Since the Centaurs were originally depicted as goat-men, the icon on which the incident is based probably showed the Queen riding on the goat-king’s back, as she did at the May Eve celebrations of Northern Europe, before her sacred marriage; Eurytion is the ‘interloper’, a stock-character made familiar by the comedies of Aristophanes, who still appears at Northern Greek marriage festivities. The earliest mythical example of the. interloper is the same Enkidu: he interrupted Gilgamesh’s sacred marriage with the Goddess of Erech, and challenged him to battle. Another interloper is Agenor, who tried to take Andromeda from Perseus at his wedding feast.
6. The first settlers in Sardinia, Neolithic Libyans, managed to survive in the mountainous parts; subsequent immigrants-Cretans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Jews-attempted to hold the coastal districts, but malaria always defeated them. Only during the last few years has the mortality been checked by spraying the pools where the malarial mosquito breeds.
7. ‘Ozolian’ (‘smelly’), a nickname given to the Locrians settled near Phocis, to distinguish them from their Opuntian and Epizephyrian kinsfolk, probably referred to their habit of wearing undressed goat-skins which had a foetid smell in damp weather. The Locrians themselves preferred to derive it from ozoi, ‘vine shoots’ (Pausanias), because of the first vinestock planted in their country.
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