Five tasks down, five tasks to go. But you may be asking yourself, "Isn't this series called the *twelve* labors of Heracles?"
Oh it is, and your math isn't wrong. So find out how it all shakes out on this episode of...
When we left Heracles last week he had just diverted some rivers to clean a stable.
But now he was on to more heroic work: beating up birds.
Specifically labor number six, getting rid of the Stimphalades, monstrous birds with iron feathers and razor claws
who could fling their feathers like arrows.
Heracles had no idea how he could possibly chase off so many. But then Athena came to him and handed him a pair of bronze
castanets.
He went high up on a hill and began to make a terrible racket with the clackers and the startled Birds took flight.
He fired his bow after them as they flew, and they never again returned to the troubled area. And he definitely kept those castanets,
so I'll just write them here on the old character sheet and oh, you know, has he leveled up?
I mean, he's been cleaning stables and scaring birds, you know, I'll just bump him up one and we'll figure out his feats later.
Okay, onward! With only four tasks to go,
he headed off for Minos, where the king had offered Poseidon a sacrifice of whatever animal first came out of the sea.
But when a beautiful bull walked out of the waves, the king thought he could trick Poseidon by hiding it in his flock.
Needless to say this did not go well, and the bull was now rampaging all over the island.
But an angry bull was nothing to Heracles, who just wrestled it to the ground and packed it up to go.
That was a fast one!
So then it was on to the man-eating horses of Diomedes. The
wicked king of the Bastonians had been feeding people to his horses.
So Heracles gathered up a posse and rode off to take him out.
He and his band overpowered the guards at the stables and broke the great bronze chains holding the horses.
But just as they were about to get away to their ships, a great force of Bastonians fell upon them.
Heracles handed the horses to a young man and set about with his mighty Club, crushing the troops that intercepted them. Now
unfortunately, in the time that that took, the horses ate the young man, but you know
At least that made them calm enough to round up! Now on to the ninth labour,
which should have gone smoothly, for Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons was impressed by Heracles and his band.
She was ready to give him her sword belt as a gift, the very object
he was searching for. But vengeful Hera, disguised as an Amazon, told the Amazon warriors that Heracles was going to kidnap their queen.
So they rushed to fight him and gave him his most grievous battle yet. Many fell on both sides, until at last,
Hippolyta offered the belt for peace, something she was planning on giving him anyway.
Amazonian misunderstandings concluded, this just left the cattle of the giant Geryon, a monster with three heads, three bodies,
six arms and six legs.
Geryon was at the edge of the world, so far away Eurystheus figured even if Heracles somehow managed all the other challenges,
he'd never get to Geryon in time.
But as Heracles crossed the Libyan desert,
he became so infuriated by the heat that he loosed an arrow at the Sun, which inadvertently
got the attention of Helios, and admiring his courage lent Heracles the chariot
he used to cross the sky every day. And so in one night,
Heracles and his companions got to the land of Geryon. To celebrate his arrival,
Heracles cleft a great mountain in two, creating the Pillars of Heracles, or what we know today as the Strait of Gibraltar.
But in doing so, you could say his arrival didn't exactly go unnoticed.
Geryon's two-headed dog raced out and attacked Heracles, who dispatched it with a stroke of his club.
Then Geryon's servants rushed to take him on, but that ended with the same result.
Finally Geryon himself came, but Heracles downed him with one of his Hydra poisoned arrows and made away with his cattle.
At last, his labors done, Heracles returned to the court of Eurystheus, who just for the record is
conveniently hiding in a pot buried halfway in the ground, because now he's afraid of Heracles due to this guy actually
doing all of the ludicrous things he sent him out to do. But Heracles found him and as he recounted his adventures and
Eurystheus is ticking them off of the quest log,
he stops him and asks Heracles to repeat what he just said about the Hydra and the stables. Then,
popping his face over the rim of the pot,
he shakes his head and says that the Hydra didn't count since Heracles had help, and the stables didn't count because he'd cleaned them for
pay. So now to make amends, he's got to do two more tasks!: steal the apples of the Hesperides,
and capture Cerebus, guardian of the underworld.
Disappointing for Heracles, but pretty good for us since we put the number 12 in these episode titles. Both new labors
of course were
impossible tasks, ones Heracles couldn't possibly succeed at.
After all, the apples lay in the garden where the nymphs of the West danced, and who knew
where that was?! Not to mention, the apples themselves could only be retrieved by a relation of the Hesperides,
which for all of Heracles's divine blood, he was not. And even if he could do that, going down to Hades afterward
isn't really a picnic. But determined to fulfill the Oracle, Heracles began to wander, searching for news of the garden.
so he wandered into the mountains and then it was....
SIDE QUEST TIME!
So this is going to be a call back from an episode a while ago,
but get this: Heracles encountered Prometheus chained to the rock.
So he was all like, "Yo, daddy Zeus,
"I'll trade you Chiron's immortality if you'll free Prometheus!" and his boss dad responded,
"Alright son, good deal."
and so he fulfilled his promise to Chiron to find some way for him to die, and
also freed Prometheus, who then told him how to get to the garden. You know what, that was pretty clutch.
I'm gonna give him a point of inspiration for that one.
So, sidequest complete, Heracles continued his journey, and eventually saw a strange figure holding up the sky. It was Atlas.
Knowing that Atlas was related to the Hesperides, Heracles made him an offer:
He would hold up the sky if Atlas would go pick him some apples.
Atlas, super-pumped, did just that, but then decided he didn't really want to keep holding up the heavens for all of eternity.
So he said,
you know what
he would just go deliver the apples while Heracles kept holding up the sky. But Heracles, quick-witted as he was strong, said, "Sure,
sounds great!,
But let me just adjust my cloak a little bit so that it could better pad
my shoulders." One deception check later,
Heracles handed the sky back to Atlas and then he ran off with the apples, leaving Atlas stuck to keep holding up the firmament.
This now left only the last and most terrifying task:
capturing the very guardian of Hell. To
prepare for this, Heracles went to some priests and asked them for their knowledge of the underworld. And then with that knowledge, and
guided by Hermes,
he climbed down a great cleft in the earth to the realm from which few come back. And at last, he stood before
Hades himself and requested that he might, you know, borrow his dog?
Hades, amused by this, said he totally could if he could simply master the beast
Without the use of weapons or metal armor. There, I'm just gonna erase that for a second...
So Heracles faced the three-headed, dragon-tailed, snake-backed guardian of the underworld,
with nothing but his cloak for a shield. The dog lashed with its tail, but Heracles parried with the lion skin, which was impenetrable
but also not metal, so super legal. He got closer. The jaws snapped at him,
but again rules lawyering pretty hard, blocked it with the lion hide.
Then at last he was close enough and sprang upon the monster and pinned it to the ground until it was subdued,
leading it away on a great chain and thus completing the 12 labors of Heracles.
Oh good call, Zoey! Now that we've maxed out Heracles, we can totally play the Argonauts module.
Ooh, I call dibs on Orpheus! Or Hulk if we're playing The Avengers mod.
Legendary thanks to patrons Ahmed Ziad Turk and Kyle Murgatroyd.