Characters
- Artemis — provides the bronze rattles
- Artemis Stymphalia — local cult goddess linked by Pausanias to the same lake (enrichment)
- Hephaestus — maker of the krotala
- Heracles — shakes the krotala; shoots the rising birds
- Stymphalian Birds — flock nesting in the lakeside wood; flushed and slain
Places
- Dense wood by the lake — nesting cover Heracles will not enter
- Mount Cyllene — haunt of the birds
- Ridge beside the lake — post from which he sounds the rattles
- Sanctuary of Artemis at Stymphalus — Pausanian cult counterpart (enrichment)
Themes
Narrative
The sixth labor was to drive away the birds that flocked at the Stymphalian lake in Arcadia. They sheltered in a wood so dense that Heracles hesitated to enter. Athena gave him bronze rattles (krotala) made by Hephaestus; standing on a ridge beside the lake, he shook them, terrified the birds into flight, and shot them down as they rose.
Apollodorus’s telling is brief and mechanical: the labor is a clearance of a pestilential flock by divine instrument and archery, without the elaborate monster-combat of lion or Hydra. Pausanias’s Arcadian notices—birds associated with Artemis’s local cult at Stymphalus, and images of bird-maidens in the sanctuary—enrich the same geography without rewriting Eurystheus’s assignment. Where later tradition arms the birds with missile feathers, that belongs to secondary color, not to this Apollodorean core.