The Twelve Labours of a Man Who Would Not Break

Heracles was born under a curse before he ever drew breath. Zeus, wishing to lie with the mortal woman Alcmene, stretched a single night into three by ordering the sun god Helios not to rise for three days, and disguised himself as her husband Amphitryon to father the child. Alcmene, through what myth calls heteropaternal superfecundation, bore twins to two fathers in one night: Heracles to Zeus, and Iphicles to Amphitryon. Hera, furious at her husband's infidelity, would spend the hero's whole life trying to destroy him for it.

Hera's first stroke of vengeance came before Heracles was even born. Learning that Zeus had sworn a descendant of Perseus born that night would become High King, and knowing that both Heracles and Eurystheus were descended from Perseus, she delayed Alcmene's labour just long enough for Eurystheus to be born first and claim the throne meant for Heracles. It was a bitter irony that would return later: the very Eurystheus whose birth Hera engineered would become the king who commanded Heracles's Twelve Labours.

As an infant, Heracles was already marked by the divine. Hera sent two giant serpents into his nursery; while his twin brother Iphicles wept in terror, eight-month-old Heracles seized a snake in each fist and strangled them, found afterward playing with the corpses as though they were toys. Amphitryon, astonished, summoned the seer Teiresias, who prophesied the boy would defeat countless monsters — an unusual future for any child.

His youth was one of raw, sometimes violent talent. He killed his music tutor Linus with a lyre and was sent to tend cattle on a mountain, where, according to a later allegory invented by the sophist Prodicus, he was visited by two figures — Vice and Virtue — and chose the harder, more glorious path. At eighteen he killed a notorious beast living in the forests of Cithaeron. He grew into a peerless archer, horseman, and wrestler, and in Thebes he married Megara, daughter of King Creon, with whom he had three sons.

Then Hera struck again. In a fit of madness she inflicted upon him, Heracles killed his own children and his wife Megara. Cured of his frenzy with hellebore by Antikyreus, founder of Antikyra, he understood at last what he had done and fled to Delphi. There, guided by an oracle secretly steered by Hera, he was told he must serve King Eurystheus for ten years, completing whatever tasks were demanded of him as penance.