Heracles in Twelve Squares: The Labours at Olympia and Underfoot

Heracles seldom reaches us whole. He comes in fragments: a marble shoulder in a museum case, a lion’s paw on a cracked slab, a club picked out in brown stone on the floor of a Roman villa. Somehow that suits him. His most famous story is itself a set of separate pieces, twelve labours that ancient craftsmen cut into squares and set side by side, so that anyone walking past could take in a whole life of toil one panel at a time.

This tale follows the panels rather than the poems. It starts above a temple door at Olympia and ends on a Roman floor, and along the way it asks a simple question: who decided there were twelve?

Twelve squares above the porches

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia was finished around the middle of the fifth century BCE, and its builders gave Heracles a place of honour. Twelve metopes, near-square marble slabs carved in high relief, showed his labours. They did not run around the outside of the building, where metopes usually sat. They were set above the two inner porches, six over the front entrance and six over the back, so that worshippers stepping into the shade of the columns looked up and met the hero face to face.

Pausanias, who toured Olympia in the second century CE, gave them a few brisk lines:

Over the temple doors is the hunt of the Arcadian boar, and Heracles dealing with Diomedes the Thracian and with Geryon on Erytheia; he is about to take up the load of Atlas, and he clears the dung from the land of Elis.

Pausanias, Description of Greece (our rendering)

He moves on to the back porch, and his tally comes to eleven. Cerberus has slipped out of the list, for reasons nobody can now recover, but excavators found pieces of a Cerberus panel, and the full set can be pieced back together. Most of the surviving fragments are in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia; a few, dug up by a French expedition in 1829, travelled to the Louvre.

The count matters. Earlier poets knew many of the deeds without fixing a number. Homer has Heracles fetch the hound of Hades; Hesiod knows the Nemean lion, the Hydra of Lerna and the cattle of Geryon. The Olympia metopes are the earliest surviving monument to show twelve labours as a set, and many scholars suspect that the temple itself helped settle the canon: two porches, six panels each, and a list that later writers would treat as fixed.

Reading the panels in order

A visitor reading the series from the back of the temple began with the Nemean lion. Heracles is a beardless youth here, standing over the dead animal with his head bowed and propped on his hand, as spent as any labourer at the end of a shift, while Athena looks on. Then came the Hydra, the Stymphalian birds, the Cretan bull, the Ceryneian hind and the belt of the Amazon queen. In the bird panel he holds out his kill to Athena, who sits on a rock to receive it. In the bull panel man and beast strain away from each other in a great crossing X, one of the boldest compositions of its age.

Over the front porch the sequence continued with the Erymanthian boar, the man-eating mares of Diomedes, the triple-bodied Geryon, the apples of the Hesperides, Cerberus and, last of all, the stables of Augeas. The apple panel is the best preserved and the most tender. Heracles stands with the sky resting on a folded cushion across his shoulders while Atlas holds out the golden fruit. Behind the hero, Athena raises one hand to share the weight. The goddess helps carry the heaviest load in the world and seems to do it without effort, a quiet joke cut in marble.

By now the hero wears a beard. The series reads as a life as well as a list, from a weary young man to a seasoned worker who needs the goddess less to comfort him than to direct him. The final panel was chosen with its audience in mind. Augeas was king of Elis, the very region that ran the sanctuary, and in the stable metope Athena points the way with her spear while Heracles levers at the job with a long tool. Pindar, in his tenth Olympian ode, credits Heracles with founding the Olympic Games after his quarrel with Augeas. At Olympia, the labours ended at home.

How ten labours became twelve

Written versions with a complete list come later than the temple, and they do not quite agree with it or with one another. The fullest is in the handbook known as the Library of Apollodorus. There, Heracles kills his own children in a madness sent by Hera and goes to Delphi, where the Pythia tells him to live at Tiryns, serve Eurystheus for twelve years and perform ten labours, after which he will be immortal. The extra two arrive through bookkeeping. Eurystheus refuses to count the Hydra, because Heracles’ nephew Iolaus helped, or the stables, because Heracles asked Augeas for payment. So the hero is sent out again for the apples and for Cerberus, and ten becomes twelve.

Euripides arranges things differently. In his tragedy Heracles the labours come first and the madness after: the hero returns from bringing up Cerberus, saves his family from a usurper, and then kills them himself at the moment of triumph. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the first century BCE, gives all twelve but in an order of his own, and other writers shuffle them again. The canon was firm in its number long before it was firm in its order, which may be why artists, more than authors, seem to have fixed it first.

The labours laid underfoot

Centuries after Olympia, the habit of telling Heracles in squares moved from walls to floors. The best-known grid comes from Llíria, near Valencia in Spain, and is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. Laid in the third century CE, it frames the labours in separate panels around a central scene of Heracles with Omphale, the Lydian queen he later served as a slave. Each panel is a small metope set flat: a hero, a beast, a strip of ground, and a band of plain tesserae to hold it all in place. The mosaicist did what the Olympia sculptors had done, turning a sprawling cycle into a run of repeatable units.

A very different answer survives in Sicily, at the late Roman Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina. In its great three-apsed hall, laid early in the fourth century CE, the labours are not boxed at all. Beasts from across the cycle tumble together in one crowded field, so that the floor reads less like a list than a battlefield after the fight. One approach counts the labours; the other heaps them up.

Both remind us that the twelve were always a design problem as well as a story. How big should the lion be beside the man? Where does the Hydra’s tangle of necks go in a square frame? Stonecutters and floor-makers answered those questions differently from poets, and their answers shaped how people pictured the hero. For the beasts themselves, see the Hydra’s shifting head count and the hound Heracles dragged up from below. The centaurs he fought on his way to the Erymanthian boar have a card of their own in our Bestiary.