Their claws and beaks were sharp as metal and their feathers flew like darts. Heracles scared them out of their nests with a rattle and then killed them with the poison arrows he had made from the Hydra 's blood. This savage bull, kept by King Minos of Crete, was said to be insane and breathe fire. Heracles wrestled the mad beast to the ground and brought it back to King Eurystheus.
Unfortunately, the king set it free, and it roamed Greece, causing terror wherever it went. King Diomedes , leader of the Bistones, fed his bloodthirsty horses on human flesh. Heracles and his men fought and killed King Diomedes and fed the king to his man-eating horses. This made the horses tame, so that Heracles was able to lead them to King Eurystheus. Heracles went to the land of the Amazons , where the queen Hippolyta or Hippolyte welcomed him and agreed to give him her girdle for Eurystheus's daughter.
But Hera spread the rumor that Heracles came as an enemy. In the end he had to conquer the Amazons and steal the golden belt. Geryon , a winged monster with three human bodies, had a herd of beautiful red cattle. He guarded his prized herd with the help of a giant and a vicious two-headed dog. Heracles killed Geryon, the giant, and the dog and brought the cattle to King Eurystheus.
The Hesperides were nymphs. In their garden grew golden apples protected by Ladon , a dragon with a hundred heads. Heracles struck a bargain with Atlas , who held up the earth. Heracles shouldered the earth while Atlas, the nymphs' father, fetched the apples from Erytheia. Heracles was ordered to capture Cerberus , the three-headed guard dog of the underworld, without using weapons. Heracles wrestled down the dog's wild heads, and it agreed to go with him to King Eurystheus.
Cerberus was soon returned unharmed to Hades. Eurystheus, surprised that Heracles had survived the adventure, became very fearful of Heracles. Next, Eurystheus sent Heracles to kill the Hydra. The Hydra lived in a swampy area near Lerna, and Heracles came to its den.
He engaged the Hydra by grabbing at one of the heads and hacking at it with his sword until the head was severed from the body. This head he buried beneath a giant rock.
Eurystheus then sent Heracles to capture the Cerynitian Hind, a deer with golden horns which was sacred to the goddess Artemis. Because the deer was sacred to Artemis, Heracles could not kill it; he had to capture it alive. For a year he tracked the deer, which was the fastest deer in the world, around the forests of the Peloponnese. He finally captured it in Arcadia when it had paused for a little rest by creeping up behind it and surprising it.
On his way back to Tiryns, Heracles encountered Apollo and Artemis hunting. Artemis was not happy to find her sacred deer so constrained, but after he explained his task, Artemis allowed Heracles to take the deer so long as it remained unharmed and it would be released after he was finished with it.
When the Cerynitian Hind had been released, Heracles now had to capture the Erymanthian Boar, which was ravaging the countryside around Mount Erymanthus and doing a lot of damage to the crops.
On his way to find the Erymanthian Boar, Heracles met Pholus, a centaur who, unlike his fellow centaurs, was quite well mannered. Pholus hosted Heracles like a proper guest and offered him some wine.
This wine was noticed by the other centaurs, however, who are notorious for loving wine but also for being unable to hold their liquor. When the centaurs smelled the wine, they went crazy and started attacking Heracles and Pholus in order to steal it.
This is yet another example of Heracles hurting anyone who gets too close to him. In this case it was an accident, but it was no less deadly for Pholus. After this unfortunate incident, Heracles caught up with the Erymanthian Boar and trapped it by driving it into deep snow. He brought the boar back alive to Tiryns to show to Eurystheus. But Eurystheus was so frightened of the enormous beast that he hid in a large storage jar called a pithos and only peeked out a little so he could verify that Heracles had completed his task.
At this point, word had spread throughout Greece that Jason was looking for the greatest Greek heroes to go with him on an expedition for the Golden Fleece. Heracles took a break from his labors to join the crew. However, he did not make the entire journey to Colchis [ map ] if he had would there be any use for Jason?
Unable to find Hylas, Heracles returned to Tiryns for his next labor. The next task Eurystheus had for Heracles was to clean the Augeian stables in one day. Heracles came to Augeias and told him that he could clean out the stables in one day if he paid the right sum, one tenth of his cattle.
Augeias agreed and Heracles set to work. He diverted the courses of two rivers so they flowed right through the stables and washed away the years of filth. Augeias had not believed Heracles could perform the task, so he refused to pay the outrageous sum.
Heracles was livid, but at this point there was nothing he could do, so he went back to Tiryns. Next Heracles was sent to clear away the Stymphalian birds. Lake Stymphalus was overrun by a flock of man-eating birds. Heracles decided that a loud noise would be just the thing, so he crashed a few shields together to scare the birds into taking flight. Also, this specific hind was sacred to Artemis, goddess of the hunt;.
Eurystheus assigned this Labor specifically to get Herc in trouble with the goddess. So when Hercules finally caught it, he had to fast-talk his more divine cousin into not smiting him. Which he did. Because he's Hercules. Much like the Cerynian Hind, capturing a boar — even a giant boar with big tusks and anger issues — doesn't sound that impressive, given what Hercules accomplished in his other Labors.
But let me tell you this: Eurystheus was the King of Tiryns, while the boar was rampaging at Mt. That's a distance of kilometers, or just over 83 miles. The average boar weighs lbs. My point is that Hercules carried a lb. Not impressed? Why don't you grab your average 5-gallon, lbs. Labor 6: Head to Lake Stymphalia in Arcadia and go take care of the crazy birds there whose beaks were like spears, who could shoot their blade-like feather at people like some kind of videogame, and whose poop was pure poison.
Sounds insane, doesn't it? Not really. The only reason the Birds are listed this high is because one version of the story says that Hercules shot them all down with his bow and his Hydra-poisoned arrows, and even playing mythological Duck Hunt still requires some skill.
But the other version of the story is that Hercules made a rattle, shook it, and scared all the birds away. Let's pretend it was the arrows and move on. For his 10th Labor, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to bring him some cattle. The catch: The cattle were basically located at the edge of the world. Also, the cattle were owned by Geryon, a three-head, six-armed giant who had no intention of giving them up. But Hercules had a harder time getting to Geryon than Geryon himself. He had to cross the Libyan desert, where he was so pissed off by the heat he shot an arrow at the sun, which somehow prompted sun-god Helios to give Hercules a boat.
Upon finally arriving at Geryon's island, Hercules conked his two-headed watch dog on the head, did the same to his herdsman, and then shot a single poisoned arrow into Geryon himself, killing him pretty much instantly.
Getting the cattle back to Eurystheus was also more difficult than seizing them, because an enraged Hera kept sending gadflies to sting them and make them wander off. But this Labor was less a Labor and more… a Hassle. Unlike Geryon's cattle, these horses were centrally located and not guarded by a three-headed giant. They were just owned by Diomedes, who was kind of an asshole, but a regular mortal.
The problem with the mares is that Diomedes had bred them to eat human flesh, and would usually feed his guests to them. But rather than an actually fight with awesome, man-eating horses, Hercules just picked up Diomedes by the scruff of his neck, and tossed him to his own horses to eat. And then the horses were completely chill after that. Basically, Herc tossed a dude over a fence, and then herd a bunch of essentially normal horses.
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