Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Eurystheus next ordered Heracles to bring the Cerynitian hind alive. She was a doe with golden horns, sacred to Artemis, larger than a bull in Apollodorus’s description, and so swift that the labor became a chase lasting a full year. Heracles pursued her through wilderness and, in Pindar’s related strand, even toward the Hyperborean margins, until at last he overtook her, wounded her lightly with an arrow, caught her, and set her on his shoulders for the road to Mycenae. Artemis and Apollo met him as he went, angry that he had taken the goddess’s sacred animal. He pleaded necessity—the command of the oracle and of Eurystheus—and promised to return the hind unhurt once she had been displayed. Artemis accepted the excuse; he brought the animal to Mycenae, showed her to Eurystheus, and released her as vowed. Unlike the lion and the Hydra, this labor is a test of endurance and piety rather than slaughter: the quarry must be taken alive, and the hero’s success depends on negotiating divine ownership. Pindar’s Olympian aetiology—that from this chase Heracles brought the olive that shades Olympia—belongs to the same sacred hind without changing Apollodorus’s Mycenaean delivery plot, and is kept here as lyric enrichment.