Olympus Read online

  Alcmene

  Perseus had three sons. One became the king, the second sired a boy called Amphitryon while the third fathered a girl called Alcmene.

  Amphitryon and Alcmene fell in love but, following a disagreement, Amphitryon fought and accidentally killed Alcmene’s father, as a result of which he had to leave Mycenae and take refuge in the city of Thebes. Alcmene followed her beloved and married him as soon as Creon, the king of Thebes, ritually cleansed Amphitryon of the crime of killing his own uncle.

  On the couple’s wedding night, Zeus took the form of Amphitryon and made love to the bride first and then the real Amphitryon made love to her. As a result of this, Alcmene bore two children, one divine and one mortal: Heracles, the son of Zeus, and Iphicles, the son of Amphitryon.

  Heracles was named on Athena’s advice in the hope that Hera would not hate a child named after her. Athena then took the infant Heracles and, without revealing his identity, asked Hera to nurse him. As goddess of the household, Hera loved doing this, but to her irritation the child suckled so hard that the pain was unbearable.

  She yanked him away from her breast, but by then he had consumed enough of Hera’s milk to become very strong.

  Hera was extremely upset at how she had been tricked by Zeus and Athena and swore to make Heracles’ life miserable, even though he was named after her and she had nursed him. She sent serpents to kill the infant Heracles in his cradle. But the child simply caught hold of the snakes, squeezed the life out of them and shook them around like a rattle.

  Heracles grew up to be a great warrior, skilled in the art of fighting with a sword, a lance, a club, a bow, on the ground and on a horse-drawn chariot. He was even taught music but he hated it so much that he accidentally killed his teacher with a musical instrument.

  In his youth, Heracles went hunting and killed a lion. The beast had been ravaging the kingdom of King Thespius and had proved notoriously difficult to catch. A very pleased Thespius sent all fifty of his daughters to make the young man happy. Instead of choosing one, Heracles made love to all of them, for he was as virile as he was strong.

  The Greek Heracles is the same as the Roman Hercules.

  The story of Heracles suckling Hera’s milk forcefully echoes the story of Krishna sucking milk and eventually the life out of the demon Putana’s breasts. Like Heracles, Krishna faces many threats to his life when he is a child and he grows up to be strong and virile, loved by many women, leading many scholars to suggest that the Krishna lore was inspired by the story of Heracles.

  The drops of milk that spurted as Hera pulled Heracles away from her breasts turned into the Milky Way.

  Megara

  King Creon was happy with Heracles whose heroic deeds had brought great fame to the city. He was even happier when Heracles got rid of the Misyans, who were forcing the Thebans to pay them annual tribute. And so he let Heracles marry his daughter, Megara. Heracles and Megara had many children, and lived happily.

  However, Hera could not bear to see Heracles happy. Every night she whispered in his ears that he was an ordinary human, not a hero, not worthy of being called a son of Zeus. She told him how his father Amphitryon had been thrown out of Mycenae for killing his uncle, and how Amphitryon’s cousin, the mediocre Eurystheus, was the ruler of his ancestral kingdom, wielding more power than Heracles ever would. Slowly, she made Heracles feel insecure and invalid, and drove him mad. And in his madness, Heracles picked up his club and smashed the heads of his own children. A horrified Megara, unable to understand what was happening, picked up her youngest child and tried to run away. But Heracles picked up his bow and shot her and his youngest son dead.

  When the madness waned and sanity returned, Heracles realized what he had done. Inconsolable in his grief, he went to the oracle at Delphi for advice, where he was told that the only way to be cleansed of his terrible crime was to fulfil ten tasks assigned to him by his uncle, Eurystheus, ruler of Mycenae.

  The madness of Heracles mirrors the madness of Nala and Yudhishtira, described in the Mahabharata, who cannot control themselves while gambling and end up losing their entire fortune. The Greeks blamed this on the Olympians, while the Mahabharata blames karma (the outcome of past deeds) and kala (the whimsical nature of time).

  In some stories, Megara is not killed and she marries Heracles’s nephew, Iolaus, son of Iphicles.

  Iolaus served as charioteer, companion and lover of Heracles. This was part of a socially acknowledged erotic relationship between an adult male (the erastes) and a younger male (the eromenos) usually in his teens.

  In Euripides’ play Heracles, dated 400 BCE, Heracles returns from Hades and finds Lycus trying to kill his father, wife and children. He slays Lycus and rescues his family, but then Hera drives him mad. He thinks he is killing Eurystheus and his soldiers, when he is in fact murdering his own family members. In the play, Theseus tries to argue that even gods do unspeakable things, but Heracles remains inconsolable.

  A hero was needed to destroy the old remnants of chaos and establish Olympian order. Hera chose Eurystheus while Zeus chose Heracles. Hera therefore hated Heracles.

  The tension between Heracles and Hera is perhaps a reflection of the rise of the patriarchal male gods of Olympus who overshadow old goddesses like Gaia, Rhea and Hecate. Hera tries to delay Heracles’ birth, makes his birth difficult, sends snakes to kill him and eventually drives him so mad that he kills his wife and children. He fights back with the help of Zeus and Athena, drinks her milk and acquires superhuman powers, and ultimately ends up winning her admiration through his courage, resilience and persistence.

  Any task requiring great effort is called a ‘Herculean’ feat.

  Creon, king of Thebes, is brother-in-law (and uncle) of Oedipus, and father-in-law of Heracles. He must not be confused with Creon, king of Corinth, who wishes to be Jason’s father-in-law.

  Eurystheus

  Where Heracles was strong and smart, Eurystheus was weak and dull, but as fate decreed, the extraordinary Heracles was powerless before the ordinary Eurystheus. In fact, Eurystheus was so insecure before Heracles that he first hid in a great bronze jar. And later, he refused to see Heracles, choosing instead to send him the list of tasks through a messenger, Copreus.

  The first task was to kill the Nemean lion. This was no ordinary lion, as Heracles discovered when his arrows did not even scratch the lion. So Heracles had to wrestle the mighty beast with his bare hands; he used the creature’s own claws to rip out its entrails. Heracles then used the lion’s impenetrable skin as his cloak and its scalp as headgear.

  His second task was to kill the Hydra, a monster that lived in a swamp and had multiple heads. Each time a head was cut off, two more appeared. Finally Heracles came up with a solution. After he chopped off a head, his nephew Iolaus would use a torch to burn the severed neck thus cauterizing the wound, not letting it sprout new heads. Thus he was able to cut off all the heads of the monster, without letting new ones appear.

  For his third task he had to capture the golden-horned Ceryneian hind or deer that was sacred to Artemis, alive. So he chased the deer until it was too exhausted to run, then picked it up, threw it over his shoulders and brought it before Eurystheus.

  Heracles’ fourth task was to trap the wild boar of Arcadia, also known as the Erymanthian boar. Heracles succeeded in his task by driving the beast into snow.

  For his next task, he was told to clean the Augean stables, which were the dirtiest stables in the world, full of dung and rotting hay. Heracles cleaned them in a day by simply diverting two rivers through them.

  The sixth task was to rid a lake of the bronze-beaked Stymphalian birds which had made the lake so filthy that no one could drink its water. Heracles used bronze kettledrums given to him by Athena to create a loud noise for such a long time that the birds could not even hear their own mating calls. They were so frightened that they took flight and refused to return.

  His seventh task was to capture the Cretan bull. Heracles easily subdued i