Heracles

The tale of Heracles

Heracles was the son of Zeus and the mortal princess Alcmene, and Zeus's wife Hera hated him from the day he was born. When he was a baby in his cradle she sent two serpents to kill him. His nurse found him laughing, a strangled snake in each fist.

Hera never stopped. When Heracles was a grown man with a family of his own, she struck him with madness, and he killed his own wife and children without knowing what he did. When he woke, he begged the oracle of Delphi for a way to atone. The answer was to serve his cousin, King Eurystheus of Tiryns, and do whatever labours he set. They became the Twelve Labours.

The Twelve Labours

1. The Nemean lion, whose golden hide no weapon could pierce. Heracles strangled it with his bare hands and wore its skin as armour ever after.
2. The Hydra of Lerna, a swamp serpent that grew two heads for every one cut off. His nephew Iolaus burned each neck shut as Heracles cut.
3. The Ceryneian hind, sacred to Artemis, chased for a whole year.
4. The Erymanthian boar, caught alive in deep snow.
5. The stables of Augeas, thirty years of dung, cleaned in one day by turning two rivers through them.
6. The Stymphalian birds, man-eating birds scared up with a bronze rattle and shot down.
7. The Cretan bull, wrestled and carried back to Greece.
8. The mares of Diomedes, horses that ate human flesh.
9. The belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.
10. The cattle of Geryon, a giant with three bodies, at the edge of the world.
11. The golden apples of the Hesperides, fetched by the Titan Atlas while Heracles held up the sky in his place.
12. Cerberus, the three-headed hound of the underworld, carried up into daylight and then returned.

Death and a seat on Olympus

Heracles died by poison, not by any monster. His wife Deianira, tricked by a dying centaur, gave him a shirt soaked in blood she thought was a love charm. It was poisoned with the venom of the Hydra Heracles himself had killed. He built his own funeral pyre on Mount Oeta and climbed onto it. As the flames rose, Zeus carried him up to Olympus, where he became a god and at last made peace with Hera.

Heracles in Battle of Myths

Heracles is a cost 4 Greek warrior and guardian. His ability, Twelve Labors, wraps him in a shield, then slams every enemy beside him for heavy damage and stuns them. With every Greek hero he shares Glory: whenever an enemy falls, the Greeks grow stronger and heal.

Did you know?

• The Romans called him Hercules, the name most people know today.
• The "Pillars of Hercules" are the two rocks on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, said to mark his journey to the edge of the world.