#greeceart

Michel Struharova

Heracles accomplished many more feats and labours during his lifetime. He served on campaigns, made war and dispatched numerous robbers and wild beasts. The are countless narratives and legends in which these doings can be found in various forms. But the hero’s death is associated with his fatal marriage to Deianeira, a match which he had decided on during his descent into the underworld, where he met her brother Meleager and promised to marry his sister. That agreement, made in a place like the underworld, proved to be decisive. It so happened that when traveling together, Heracles and Deianeira had to cross the river Euenus, where the ferryman was the Centaur Nessus, who lived nearby. Nessus rowed Heracles across first, and then came back for Deianeira. He attempted to ravish her - but Heracles, hearing her cries from the opposite bank, fitted an arrow to his bow and wounded the Centaur in the heart. Nessus decided to take his revenge. He told Deianeira that if she wanted to keep Heracles forever, she should make a potion out of his blood.

Themis, the goddess of justice, looked after the moral order among gods and men. She protected the weak and ill-treated. Themis possessed the gift of divination, and had her own oracle at Delphi before it was taken over by Apollo, to whom she passed on her oracular skills. Themis was the daughter of Uranus and Mother Earth, and the sister of Cronus, Rhea, Mnemosyne, Oceanus and the other Titans.

The Hydra of Lernaea had been wreaking havoc among the crops and flocks of the area. Even the breath emitted by its snake’s heads was so poisonous that it could kill anyone standing nearby. Heracles fired burning arrows at the monster to drive it out of its lair, and as soon as it appeared he began to cut off its head’s with an axe. His efforts were in vain, since it sprouted two heads for every one he cut off. Heracles called for the help of his nephew, Lolaos of Thebes. Lolaos set fire to a nearby forest, and as Heracles smited the heads of the Hydra he cauterised the necks with a fiery torch to prevent more heads from sprouting. After cutting off the central head - which the Greeks believed to be immortal - Heracles buried it and turned it into a huge rock. The blood of the Lernaean Hydra contained a very powerful poison, and the tip of any arrow dipped in it became fatal.

Demi - gods were those born of a god and a mortal mother. Some were destined to become known on a panhellenic scale, while others remained local heroes. The heroes were protected by the gods; they were magnificent beings and endowed with many advantages: power, virility, intelligence, magnanimity and ingenuity. Sometimes they appear as enlightened leaders who leave their throne to guide a war with a holy purpose to victory, such as Odysseus, and other times they were brave young men such as Heracles, fighting to make sure that good prevails.

When Cronus castrated the sky with a sickle, the blood that dripped to Earth gave birth to Erinnyes (the Furies): Ellecto,Tisiphone and Megaera. Cruel, implacable goddesses, they exercised control over conscience and persecuted every offence. Sometimes they inflicted punishment in the personification of remorse after an unjust act and sometimes like terrible figures with a death-like appearance, they hunted down and punished all hideous crimes and incest. The Erinnyes were a form of “divine justice” who above and beyond the justice dispensed by Zeus, and punished all those who went against the rules of ethics.

Heracles was a demi-god, endowed with supernatural gifts but also with human weaknesses. He belonged to the Perseid family and was born in Thebes, supposedly to a mortal father, Amphitryon, and Alcemene. However, his real father was Zeus, who took advantage of Amphitryon’s absence one night to disguise himself as a mortal man and sleep Alcmene. Heracles was born with his twin brother Iphicles: he is held by the myth to be the true son of Amphitryon, since he was conceived the following evening, on his father's return.

The Giant Atlas was responsible for holding up the sky on his shoulders. Heracles offered to relieve him of his burden for a while, on the condition that Atlas went and picked three golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides. Atlas fetched the apples, but was unwilling to resume his burden, offering instead to take the precious fruit to Eurystheus. Once again, the demi-god was forced to use all his cunning: he asked Atlas to hold up the dome of the heavens for a moment while he, unused to such weights, put a cushion on his shoulders. Atlas, unsuspecting, shouldered the burden - only to discover that Heracles had snatched up the apples which Atlas had laid down and taken to his heels. Eurystheus got his apples,but did not know what to do with them. So he gave them to Athena, who took them back to the Garden; such fruit, she knew, should not be kept anywhere but in a divine garden.