Brute Force in a Divine Package
Meet Hercules! After writing about Perseus, I now turn to Hercules, another legendary son of Zeus, also born of a mortal mother. Like Perseus, Hercules belongs to the pantheon of Greek mythological heroes, but where Perseus is celebrated for his wit and cunning, Hercules is all about brute strength and unstoppable physical power. How can you recognise him in art? Look for bulging muscles, a hefty club, and the skin of the Nemean Lion; more on that last detail later.
Hercules is his Greek name; in Roman mythology, he’s known as Heracles. He’s most famous for the epic series of challenges known as the Twelve Labors, a set of nearly impossible tasks, each involving a monstrous creature or a supernatural trial. In this TAB: The Art Bard story, I’ll focus on three of his Labors: his battle with the Nemean Lion, his wrestling match with Antaeus, and his descent into the underworld to capture Cerberus, the terrifying three-headed hound of Hades.
But before we get to those heroic feats, let’s take a moment to look at Hercules’ extraordinary infancy, a childhood that already hinted at the hero he would become. It’s also the story behind nothing less than the creation of the Milky Way!
Here are the topics we’ll explore:
- The Baby Who Bit a Goddess: Hercules and the Milky Way
- The Baby Hercules vs. the Snakes
- The Twelve Labors: why did they happen?
- The First Labor: The Nemean Lion
- The Eleventh Labor: Wrestling with Antaeus on the way to the Garden of the Hesperides
- The Twelfth Labor: Cerberus
- Bonus: Who Pays the Ferryman?
- Bonus: Antaeus, by Chanel
Consider this post both an introduction to Hercules and another crash course in Greek mythology. Let’s begin!
The Baby Who Bit a Goddess: Hercules and the Milky Way
According to Greek myth, Heracles was the illegitimate son of Zeus, king of the gods, and the mortal woman Alcmene. Zeus was married to Hera, queen of the gods, and his countless affairs with mortals enraged her. Heracles, born of one such affair, became a particular target of Hera’s wrath.
Yet Zeus had a bold plan to make his mortal son invincible: he secretly placed the baby at Hera’s breast while she slept, hoping the divine milk would grant him immortality.
But Hera awoke. The infant Heracles bit her nipple with such force that she screamed and pushed him away. As the baby tumbled back, her milk sprayed across the heavens, creating what we now see in the night sky as the Milky Way.
In Rubens’ painting, Zeus watches the scene unfold, his thunderbolts symbols resting at his feet.
The Baby Hercules vs. the Snakes
Another famous story tells of the night when two snakes slithered into Hercules’ cradle. They weren’t there by accident. They were sent by Hera, Zeus’s long-suffering wife, still furious about her husband’s affair with the mortal woman Alcmene, which had produced the illegitimate child Hercules.
Hera’s plan was simple: let the snakes do the dirty work and get rid of the child once and for all. But things didn’t go as she hoped. Hercules, still just a baby, grabbed the snakes with his bare hands and strangled them effortlessly, treating the deadly serpents like harmless toys.
The Twelve Labors: why did they happen?
According to Greek myth, Heracles was condemned to perform twelve nearly impossible tasks, known as the Twelve Labors, as a form of penance. Driven mad by Hera, he had killed his wife and children. Overcome with grief, he sought purification and consulted the Oracle of Delphi, who instructed him to serve King Eurystheus for twelve years. It was Eurystheus who assigned him the twelve labors, each one more dangerous and degrading than the last.
This punishment was part of Hera’s ongoing vendetta. Not only had she caused his madness, but the labors themselves were designed to humiliate and destroy him. Yet instead of breaking him, these trials became the very deeds that secured Hercules’ fame and turned him into a legend.
The First Labor: the Nemean Lion
Hercules’ first task sent him to the hills of Nemea to slay a monstrous lion that had been terrorizing the region. But this was no ordinary beast. The Nemean Lion’s golden coat was invulnerable to weapons; neither sword nor arrow could pierce it. When Hercules discovered this, he did something only he could do. He trapped the lion inside its cave and wrestled it bare-handed. After a brutal struggle, he choked it to death with his immense strength. When the battle was over, he tried to skin the lion. But even in death, its pelt resisted every blade.
Unable to cut through the pelt with his knife, Hercules used the lion’s own claw to flay the beast. Razor sharp, the claw was said to pierce any soldier’s helm or shield. He then draped the invulnerable pelt over his shoulders, wearing the gaping lion’s head like a hood. From that moment on, the lion skin became part of his iconography and a lasting symbol of Hercules’ brute strength.
The Eleventh Labor: wrestling with Antaeus on the way to the Garden of the Hesperides
The wrestling match between Hercules and Antaeus became a legendary detour on his way to the Garden of the Hesperides, where he had to steal the golden apples.
Antaeus, a giant son of Gaia, the Earth goddess, had an unfortunate habit of challenging every traveler to a wrestling match. And winning! His secret was simple: as long as he remained in contact with the ground, and thus with Gaia his mother, the earth itself renewed his strength. Wrestling, after all, is about pinning your opponent down. But Hercules, no stranger to thinking as well as fighting, realized where Antaeus drew his power from. So he did the opposite. He lifted the giant high into the air, breaking his bond with the earth, and crushed him in a powerful embrace.
This scene became a favorite among artists in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. It gave them the perfect excuse to show off: two muscular bodies intertwined in violent motion. The struggle between Hercules and Antaeus offered not just a tale of brute strength, but also a clever mythological riddle and a glorious opportunity to turn male anatomy into art.
The Twelfth Labor: the Cerberus
The Twelfth Labor was the most terrifying of all. Hercules had to descend into Hades, the Greek underworld, and bring back its guardian beast, the fearsome three-headed dog Cerberus.
Cerberus was the creature Hercules was sent to capture, not to kill, but simply to borrow and display. Like a mythical dog-walker, he descended into Hades, wrestled the beast into submission with his bare hands, and dragged it up into the land of the living. For a brief moment, Cerberus was paraded through the court of King Eurystheus as living proof of Hercules’ impossible strength, before being politely returned to his post in the land of the dead.
In the old Greek mythological days, one might have pictured Hercules standing at the brink of the underworld, just like the lone soul in the boat in Joachim Patinir’s haunting painting Charon Crossing the Styx (c. 1520, Prado, Madrid). Charon, the ferryman, guides his boat across the dark waters of the river Styx, the shadowy boundary between life and death. On one side of the river, a narrow, rocky side stream winds upward toward a glowing paradise, guarded by angels. On the other, a broad and inviting channel leads straight into what looks like a pleasant place but is, in fact, the gaping mouth of Hell, or Hades in the Greek tradition.
Charon, the grim ferryman of myth, rows his silent passenger toward a final judgment. But look closely at the right bank. Just before the gate of the underworld crouches a monstrous figure. This is Cerberus, part bulldog, part nightmare. The three-headed hound of Hades sits at the infernal threshold, ensuring that no soul may ever escape. In this Christianized vision of a Greek myth, Cerberus appears like a devil’s watch-dog, trapped in a kind of kennel at the entrance to eternal darkness.
Bonus: Who Pays The Ferryman?
The question of who pays the ferryman has echoed far beyond ancient myth. In Greek tradition, Charon demands a coin from each soul before granting passage across the river Styx. Without payment, there is no crossing, only a restless afterlife on the shadowy banks. The phrase found new life in the 1977 BBC series Who Pays the Ferryman?, set in Crete and centered on Alan Haldane, a British former soldier haunted by the moral debts of war and love. Just as Charon rows through the waters of Patinir’s painting, ferrying a soul toward judgment, the title reminds us that no crossing, whether into Hades or into memory, comes without its price.
🎵 Listen to the theme from Who Pays the Ferryman? by Yannis Markopoulos.🎵
Bonus: Antaeus, by Chanel
The myth of Antaeus did not just inspire Renaissance painters and sculptors. It also found its way into the world of modern fragrance. In 1981, Chanel launched Antaeus, one of its first perfumes created specifically for men. In Chanel’s words: “Named after the mythological Greek giant who was invincible only as long as his feet remained on the ground, Antaeus is an intense yet subtle, smooth and rich fragrance that tells the story of a hero both virile and vulnerable.”
A personal note. This was my very first perfume. I still remember the iconic 1980s advertisement: a sculpted male torso, arms raised in triumph, lifting the Antaeus bottle like a trophy or sacred object.
And it is only now, while writing this story about Hercules and Antaeus, that I realise the Chanel perfume was indeed named after the mythological giant, and that the visual imagery of the advertisement is a direct contemporary echo of the ancient tale. Learning by going.