But before tackling Cerberos, Herakles, directed by Persephone, went to find Theseus. He and Peirithoös were seated, not far from the palace gate, side by side and completely naked, on their Chairs of Forgetfulness, staring into the darkness, oblivious of why they were there or even who they were.
‘Theseus!’ said Herakles. ‘I’ve come to release you and take you back to the upper world.’
Theseus stared at him blankly.
‘Get up!’ said Herakles sharply.
Theseus took no notice. Herakles slapped his face.
‘Get up, I said.’
Theseus tried to rise but couldn’t. He was stuck fast to the chair. Herakles took hold of his hands and pulled, but couldn’t move him. He heard the laughter of Hades.
‘You see the problem, nephew. Now solve it!’
Herakles grasped Theseus by his upper arms and pulled again. There was a tearing sound and Theseus cried out in pain, but he was still stuck to the chair. Herakles crouched down, passed his arms under Theseus’ armpits and clasping his hands at the back, rose to his full height with all the force of his thigh muscles, at the same time exerting the full power of his mighty arms and chest. Screaming with pain, Theseus came free, leaving the skin and much of the flesh of his buttocks on the chair. Recovering his memory at the same moment, but immediately conscious only of his raw and bleeding bottom and that Herakles had caused it, he tried to wrestle with his rescuer until Herakles, holding him tightly, explained all the circumstances.
‘You are free to return with me to the upper world,’ he said. ‘Hades and Persephone have generously remitted your punishment.’
‘And my friend Peirithoös?’
‘I’m afraid not. He must stay where he is. He seems quite content, however, as you were until I freed you.’
They both took leave of Peirithoös, who remained lost in forgetfulness and took no notice of their words or Theseus’ warm embrace. Then Herakles took Theseus’ arm and led him away. He could see nothing in the darkness and walked with difficulty owing to the excruciating pain in his backside and the years he had spent sitting down without using his legs. But Persephone met them and applied a herbal salve to his buttocks which instantly dried up the blood and soothed the pain. One storyteller suggests that as a result of this experience all Theseus’ later descendants were born with unusually flat bottoms, but in the light of our modern knowledge of genetics, this seems unlikely.
By the time they reached the entrance to the underworld Theseus had recovered the strength in his legs and was ready to help Herakles subdue Cerberos, but Herakles could not accept the offer, for fear Eurystheus would discount the Labour. The moment he saw the pair of them approaching, Cerberos went into watchdog mode, barking furiously from all three of his slavering jaws, raising his serpent tail with its hissing head. The usual method recommended for evading Cerberos was to throw him three honey cakes laced with poppy seed and while he was devouring them and becoming temporarily drowsy, slip past. But on this occasion there was no question of slipping past.
Putting down his club, bow and knapsack, wrapping his lion skin round himself as protection against the dog’s teeth, Herakles went straight into the attack. He flung his arms round all three necks and, just as he had done with Antaios, lifted the huge creature clear of the ground and squeezed. Snapping viciously but vainly at the lion skin, snarling and at last gagging as his three throats became more and more restricted, Cerberos aimed his serpent tail at Herakles’ right leg, but Theseus, watching closely by the light of the gas flares beside the gate, was quick enough to seize the snake behind its head and prevent it striking. And with that, threatened with suffocation before and behind, Cerberos went limp.
‘Good dog!’ said Herakles and slowly relaxed his grip.
‘Fair enough, nephew,’ said the deep voice of Hades, echoing round his kingdom. ‘I saw that you had a little help from your friend, but you need not mention that to your contemptible cousin. You are a credit to your father and your whole family. Take the dog now, but don’t omit to bring him back or there will be trouble!’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Herakles, ‘I shall be back with Cerberos as soon as my cousin has released me from my Labours, and if he does not I shall be back anyway, and so will he, since I will have pulled him out of his urn and made dog food of him. And my thanks also to the great goddess your wife.’
‘Kaló taxídi (safe journey)!’ said the sweet voice of Persephone.
And so, with Cerberos quite relaxed in his arms and Theseus following with the club, bow and knapsack, Herakles passed through the gateway labelled NO EXIT. As they came to the bank of the River Styx, Charon was just unloading a boat-full of shades, shouting abuse at them as they swarmed ashore. But when he saw Herakles and Theseus with Cerberos, he fell silent, staring with horror and disbelief and shaking all over with terror.
‘No, no!’ he said, as Herakles stepped into the boat. ‘That dog …’
‘This dog will have you by the balls, Charon, unless you take us all three quicker than a kingfisher flies to the other side. Though I daresay you’ve never seen a kingfisher fly along this gruesome river of yours.’
And when, straining desperately at his oar, in constant fear of Cerberos, in constant danger of swamping the boat, so low it lay in the water, Charon had delivered them to the other bank and was gasping with exhaustion and relief, he could only roll his yellow eyes and grind his rotten teeth as Herakles waved goodbye and remarked:
‘I shall be back with Cerberos one of these days or nights. Something for you to look forward to.’
They took a different passage out of the underworld from the one Herakles had entered by, emerging near Troezen, where Theseus was born. It was more convenient for Tiryns and besides Theseus had a good-sized house there, where he celebrated his release from Hades and entertained his rescuer. Cerberos, once he had surrendered to Herakles, accepted him happily as his new master and behaved towards him with almost excessive obedience and anxiety to please, so that, although just setting eyes on him terrified the people of Troezen and those on the road to Tiryns, he hardly needed the three great bronze collars and chains which Theseus’ armourer made for him.
But when Herakles finally reached the palace at Tiryns and led Cerberos into the presence of Eurystheus, the dog began to growl savagely, lashing his serpent tail and straining at the chain, his six great eyes bulging and his red jaws foaming. Was it just the sight of Eurystheus’ head poking pitifully out of his urn that provoked him? So it seemed, but the truth was that at Troezen Herakles had taken the trouble to borrow a large urn from Theseus, put a slave inside it, and encouraged Cerberos to behave in this way. He didn’t want, after all the trouble he had been to, to fail to frighten his cousin nearly out of his wits. So when Cerberos leapt at the urn, Herakles pretended to be trying to haul him off, while actually gaving him enough chain to knock it over and, as Eurystheus shrank into the bottom of it like a snail into its shell, allowing Cerberos to get one of his heads into the opening and shower the king with stinking saliva.
The Labours were over, Herakles had completed his penance. He led Cerberos back to the underworld, paid his respects to Hades and Persephone, and took affectionate leave of the monstrous three-headed dog with the serpent tail who, after all, as Hades admitted, was more bark than bite, more spin than substance, given that his services as a sentry were almost entirely ceremonial. As for Eurystheus, he never did recover fully from his encounter with Cerberos. His hands shook, he had incessant tics in his neck and his left eye and, having dislocated his spine by curling up inside the urn, could only walk slowly and painfully on two sticks. He was, one might say, Cerberos’ only known victim.
11. THE FORD
His Labours completed, the accounts of Herakles’ subsequent adventures become repetitious and confused as everyone tries to get in on the hero’s super-celebrity. To take only one example, he again kills an innocent victim – this time a young man instead of a wife – in a fit of madness. Again he is
ordered by the oracle at Delphi to undergo a penance, this time as a slave for a year, or possibly three, to a Lydian queen called Omphale, whose kingdom he cheerfully clears of bandits, enemies and a huge serpent, in the meantime fathering children with both the queen and at least one of her maids. The main variation in this episode is that he and Omphale indulge in some cross-dressing and role-swapping, with Omphale wearing his lion skin and appropriating his club and bow, while Herakles, dolled up in women’s clothes, bracelets and necklaces, sits among her maids teasing out wool and spinning thread, or being combed and manicured by them. Lydia being on the eastern side of the Aegean, in Asia, this looks like an early example of the West attributing perverse and effeminate practices to the East, what Edward Said, in his once fashionable late twentieth-century book Orientalism, characterised as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. These days, of course, the East retaliates with Occidentalism, as Muslim mullahs preach the decadence and sexual licence of the West.
For the last episodes of Herakles’ life we leave the wild mountains of Arcadia and cross the Corinthian Gulf to the Greek mainland, where Aitolia, an equally wild land of mountains, lakes and marshes, shares the south-western corner with Akarnania. This region is best known in modern times for the city of Mesologgion (Mesolongi), where Lord Byron died of fever in 1824 and the Greeks sustained a siege by the Turks which ended in 1826 with the last defenders blowing up themselves, their enemies and the city. Two years later, as Greek independence dawned, the Turks gave it up again without a struggle.
In Herakles’ time there was an Aitolian king called Oeneus, who ruled the city of Kalydon and had a beautiful daughter called Deïaneira. She was an Amazonian girl, a skilled chariot driver, javelin thrower and archer. There is no record of her actually taking part in any battles, but she was fully prepared to. Herakles, relieved to have finished with Omphale and his experiments with transvestism, and thinking now of settling down to a quieter life, liked the sound of Deïaneira. He was still remembering with pleasure and regret how well he and Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons, had fitted. And by marrying the king’s daughter he would become the heir to Oeneus’ kingdom.
He made his way to Kalydon, where he found that Deïaneira’s hand was to be the prize for a knock-out competition, a series of wrestling matches between her numerous suitors. The arrival of Herakles, however, caused all the other suitors, except one, to withdraw immediately. His opponent in this premature final was an almost equally formidable person, the river-god Acheloös, the river itself being the largest in Greece, flowing from the mighty Pindos mountains into the Ionian Sea. The god sometimes appeared as a serpent, sometimes as a bull and sometimes as a man. Even when he took the form of a man streams of water constantly poured out of his unkempt hair and beard and small aquatic creatures – frogs, newts, water-snails – nestled in his ears and nose and whiskers. Deïaneira had no doubt which contestant she preferred, though her father, since his kingdom was bordered by the river and he needed the god’s goodwill to avoid floods or drought, wanted Acheloös to win.
The match was held in the plateia, the town square, in front of a huge crowd of spectators, and before it began, the contestants were invited to state their qualifications as potential husbands.
‘If I win the lady’s hand,’ said Herakles, ‘she will have Zeus for a father-in-law and she will be the wife of the man who strangled the Nemean Lion, cut off the Hydra’s heads, caught the Arcadian Stag and the Erymanthean Boar, drove away the Stymphalian Birds, killed the Cretan Bull, cleaned Augeias’ cowsheds, captured the man-eating mares of Diomedes, carried off the girdle of the Queen of the Amazons and the cattle of Geryon, fetched the golden apples of the Hesperides and tamed the watchdog of Hades. I hardly need to mention, do I, all the other services I have performed all over the known world and even beyond it?’
‘But perhaps you do need to mention,’ said Acheloös, ‘that you murdered your first wife and her children. You may claim that this was a one-off fit of madness, but it was evidently not, since more recently, raving again, you threw your young friend Iphitos off the tower of Tiryns. I wonder how King Oeneus and his lovely daughter Deïaneira view their prospects with such a son-in-law. You are besides a stranger to this region and a vagabond. You have never been able to settle anywhere, except when doing penance for one of your killings, whereas I am not only a local god, the local god, but the Father of all Greek rivers. As for your claim to be the son of Zeus, you are either no such thing or your mother committed adultery.’
‘Enough of this!’ said Herakles. ‘I’m not here to listen to insults to my mother and I thank you, Acheloös, for making me so angry that I shall easily tear your head off.’
And without waiting for the match to be started officially, Herakles threw off his lion skin and grappled Acheloös, throwing him on his back. Acheloös turned immediately into an enormous spotted snake and swiftly wound himself round the hero’s legs, whereupon Herakles gripped him behind the head.
‘I strangled two snakes in my cradle,’ he said, ‘and I still wear their skins from time to time. Do you want to end up draped round my privates?’
Acheloös’ reply was to turn himself into a bull and, rising between Herakles’ legs, charge round the plateia with Herakles perched on his back. But for all his bucking and prancing and swerving, scattering spectators, narrowly missing trees and stone walls, he could not shake his opponent off. Herakles simply rode the bull, holding on to its horns, as if he had acquired an enormous motorbike long before any such machine was invented, laughing and shouting with delight.
‘Keep it up, Acheloös, old cow! This is the best ride I ever had.’
At last, exhausted, Acheloös stopped dead, arched his back and dropped his head so as to toss his rider. Herakles, taken by surprise, shot forward, but the strength with which he gripped the horns was so great that one of them broke off and, somersaulting gracefully, he landed on his feet with the broken horn still in his right hand. He held it up as Acheloös prepared to charge at him.
‘Do you want to give me the other one too?’ he said. ‘A pretty sort of bull you’ll be with no horns. You look silly enough with one.’
That settled the contest. Acheloös turned himself into a man and slunk away back to his riverbed, holding his right hand to the side of his head as if to cover a painful and shameful injury.
Herakles and Deïaneira were married and lived happily together in Kalydon, where Herakles as usual cleared the neighbourhood of brigands, dragons and marauding tribes, but also turned farmer and enjoyed cultivating olives and vines and breeding cattle and sheep. Acheloös did not punish the kingdom with floods or drought, wishing everyone to forget his ignominious defeat with a broken horn. Besides, he was a mature and generous-minded river and accepted that he had lost in a fair contest. It seemed for some years as if Oeneus had gained an ideal son-in-law and as if Herakles had at last won through to a prosperous and well-deserved retirement. Alas, though, his superhuman strength was also his weakness.
He was banqueting one night in the palace with his father-in-law and several of the chief citizens of Kalydon. They were celebrating a plentiful harvest and the birth of another son to Herakles and Deïaneira, who already had a son and a daughter. The toasts went round again and again and everyone, especially Herakles, was very loud and flushed.
‘Here’s to you, Herakles!’ shouted one of the citizens. ‘You’ve brought us the luck of your ancestors, the fortunate gods.’
‘I don’t think they eat so well on Olympos,’ said another, gnawing the last flesh off a bone and throwing the bone on the floor. ‘All they get is the smoke from our sacrifices. We keep the best bits for ourselves.’
‘And our Ganymedes is just as pretty as theirs,’ said another, as a handsome fair-haired boy called Eunomos, a relation of the king’s, went round pouring warm water over their greasy hands.
‘To our Ganymedes!’ said another and they all raised their goblets and drank
.
But in pouring the water over Herakles’ hands, Eunomos, made nervous by all this attention, missed his aim and splashed water over Herakles’ legs.
‘Less Ganymedes than a careless ape,’ said Herakles angrily and cuffed the boy on the side of his head.
Eunomos fell to the floor, breaking his pitcher, spilling the rest of the water, and lay there in a puddle amongst the broken sherds without moving. Herakles, sorry to have reacted too violently, reached down to help him up, but the boy still didn’t move. He was dead.
The merry banquet ended abruptly. All rose from their couches, those who had not said anything inauspicious blaming those who had for angering the gods and inviting retribution. But Herakles refused to blame anyone but himself.
‘It was I who hit him,’ said Herakles, ‘I, who lost my temper and forgot my own strength. This poor boy to whom I did so much harm in return for so little will be for ever on my conscience. I sentence myself once again to exile and penance.’
King Oeneus and the others tried to change his mind, but Herakles was immovable and Deïaneira, who loved him passionately and feared that if he went away for years on further adventures she would surely lose him to other women, insisted on accompanying him into exile. Their two sons and their daughter Makaria – Herakles’ only known daughter – remained behind in their grandfather’s care.
In those times when you killed somebody, whether by mistake or on purpose, you went to some other city to be purified before making whatever amends to the family and society in general were imposed by Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. Herakles had been through this process more often than most. On this occasion he decided to go to the city of Trachis in Boeotia where a relative of his stepfather Amphitryon was king. From Trachis, once he had been purified, he could double back to Delphi to hear what penance he should undergo.
Soon after leaving Kalydon he and Deïaneira, travelling on foot, came to the other great river, the Evenos, that formed the boundary of Aitolia to the east, as the Acheloös did to the west. It had been raining heavily during the two or three days since the death of Eunomos and the river was very full. Herakles, carrying their baggage, his usual backpack and weapons plus two or three extra bags containing his wife’s clothes, jewellery and other belongings, forded the swollen river by himself, but since a centaur called Nessos was earning a meagre living by carrying travellers across, Herakles thought it only fair to hire Nessos to carry Deïaneira. Unfortunately Nessos was not one of the philosophical, professorial centaurs like Chiron or Herakles’ old friend Pholos, but one of the greedy, lustful sort, and when he was halfway across the river and saw that Herakles had reached the other side, he suddenly turned round and carried Deïaneira back to the bank he had just left.
Arcadian Nights Page 18