Completer of the Twelve Labors, Mightiest of Demigods
The illegitimate son of Zeus and a mortal woman, and the strongest man in Greece. Driven mad by Hera, he killed his own wife and children, and completed twelve impossible labors to atone. After death he was raised to Olympus as a god and even married Hera’s daughter — reconciling with the queen who persecuted him all his life was his final labor.
He strangled the invulnerable Nemean Lion, slew the nine-headed Hydra, cleaned thirty years of filth from the stables in a single day (by diverting a river), fetched the golden apples at the world’s end, and finally descended to the underworld to capture the three-headed hound Cerberus alive. With each labor, the definition of "impossible" was rewritten.
Hera put two serpents in his cradle. When the nurse rushed in, the eight-month-old Heracles was holding a dead snake in each fist, laughing happily. The seer prophesied on the spot: this child will rid the world of monsters.
His wife Deianira, deceived into thinking it a love charm, gave him a robe soaked in the Hydra’s venomous blood. The poison burned into his bones, past all cure. Heracles built his own pyre; his mortal part burned away and his divine part rose to Olympus — apotheosis by the most painful means possible.
On the death of Heracles, Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis has his wife Deianira deceived into thinking the robe a love charm (the version used here); an earlier oral tradition holds that Deianira sent the poisoned robe as deliberate revenge — very different motives, the same end.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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