Characters
- Amphitryon — arranges tutors; sends Heracles to Cithaeron after Linus’s death
- Artemis — arms and aids Heracles against the Minyans; gives a robe
- Autolycus — wrestling tutor
- Castor — arms tutor
- Clymenus — father of Erginus; his death occasioned the original Theban tribute
- Creon — king of Thebes; gives Megara to Heracles
- Erginus — Minyan king of Orchomenus; exacts tribute; killed by Heracles
- Eurytus — archery tutor
- Fifty daughters of Thespius — sent successively to Heracles’s bed; mothers of his Thespian sons
- Hephaestus — gives a golden breastplate
- Heracles — pupil who kills Linus; slayer of the Cithaeronian lion; guest of Thespius; liberator of Thebes; husband of Megara
- Linus — music teacher; brother of Orpheus; struck and killed by Heracles with the lyre
- Megara — daughter of Creon; wife of Heracles; mother of his Theban sons
- Minyan heralds — mutilated by Heracles
- Orpheus — brother of Linus (genealogical note)
- Rhadamanthys — lawgiver cited for Heracles’s acquittal
- The Hours — gives a sword
- Therimachus, Creontiades, Deicoon — sons of Heracles and Megara (Apollodorus)
- Thespius — king of Thespiae; hosts Heracles; father of fifty daughters
Places
- Mount Cithaeron — pasture and hunting ground; lair of the lion
- Mount Helicon — Minyan seat of Erginus
- Mycenae / Argolid — not yet the theater of the labors
- Ocean’s streams — realm of Thespius; site of the fifty-nights hospitality
- Thebes — home after the birth; scene of Linus’s death, the Minyan war, and marriage to Megara
Themes
Narrative
As Heracles grew, Amphitryon arranged teachers for the arts of war and song. He learned chariot-driving from Amphitryon himself, wrestling from Autolycus, archery from Eurytus, arms from Castor, and music from Linus, brother of Orpheus. When Linus struck him for a fault, Heracles flew into a rage and killed his master with the lyre. Brought to trial for murder, he was acquitted under a law attributed to Rhadamanthys: that a man may justly strike back against one who initiates unjust violence. Fearing further outbreaks, Amphitryon sent him to tend cattle on Mount Cithaeron.
There, at eighteen, Heracles killed the lion of Cithaeron that had been harrying the herds of Amphitryon and of Thespius, king of Thespiae. He dressed himself in the beast’s skin and used its gaping jaws as a helmet. Thespius entertained him for fifty nights (or fifty days), sending a different daughter to his bed each night so that all fifty might bear children by the hero; Heracles, thinking he lay always with the same woman, unknowingly fathered a house of Thespian sons. Apollodorus’s main line treats this as hospitality during the lion-hunt, not a separate erotic romance.
Returning toward Thebes, he met heralds of Erginus, king of the Minyans of Orchomenus, who were exacting from Thebes a yearly tribute of one hundred cattle in payment for a former killing of Erginus’s father Clymenus. Heracles mutilated the heralds—cutting off their ears, noses, and hands—and hung the trophies about their necks, bidding them take that tribute to Erginus. War followed. Armed by Athena and leading the Thebans, Heracles killed Erginus, forced Orchomenus to double tribute the other way, and freed Thebes. Creon rewarded him with marriage to his daughter Megara; by her Heracles had sons (Therimachus, Creontiades, and Deicoon in Apollodorus’s list). He also received from Hermes a sword, from Apollo a bow and arrows, from Hephaestus a golden breastplate, and from Athena a robe—divine gifts that arm the hero on the threshold of the madness and the labors.
This unit gathers the substantial early deeds between cradle and household catastrophe; the killing of Megara’s children belongs to the next Apollodorean entry.