Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The fourth labor was to bring the Erymanthian boar alive. That beast ravaged Psophis from its mountain. On the way Heracles lodged with the centaur Pholus, son of Silenus by a Melian nymph. Pholus set roast meat before his guest but ate his own raw. When Heracles asked for wine, Pholus said the jar was common property of the centaurs; Heracles urged him to open it nonetheless. At the smell the centaurs came armed to Pholoë. Heracles fought them—first with brands, then with arrows—and drove the survivors to Malea, where they took refuge with Chiron, who had been driven from Mount Pelion by the Lapiths and now dwelt there. In the confusion Heracles shot at the fleeing centaurs; an arrow passed through Elatus’s arm and lodged in Chiron’s knee. Distressed, Heracles drew it out and applied a drug Chiron himself supplied, but the wound from the Hydra-poisoned shaft would not heal. Chiron, immortal yet in agony, withdrew into his cave; later, when Heracles sought Prometheus’s release, Zeus would allow Chiron to give up his immortality to the Titan and so escape the pain. The rest of the centaurs scattered; Pholus, drawing an arrow from a corpse in wonder at its smallness, dropped it on his own foot and died at once. Heracles buried him. He then found the boar, drove it from a thicket with shouts into deep snow, snared it exhausted, and carried it to Mycenae. When Eurystheus saw him approaching with the beast on his shoulders, the king hid in his bronze pithos and ordered—through the closed defense—that the animal be got rid of.