Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

On the way home from the Amazons Heracles put in at Troy and found the city in distress from the wrath of Apollo and Poseidon. Those gods, wishing to test Laomedon’s insolence, had taken human form and fortified Pergamum for wages; when the work was done, Laomedon refused to pay. Apollo sent a pestilence; Poseidon sent a sea-monster that, swept up by a flood, seized people of the plain. Oracles declared that deliverance would come if Laomedon exposed his daughter Hesione to be devoured. He fastened her to the rocks by the sea. Heracles, seeing her exposed, promised to save her if Laomedon would give him the mares Zeus had granted in compensation for the rape of Ganymede. Laomedon agreed. Heracles killed the monster and freed Hesione. When the king again withheld the stipulated reward, Heracles put to sea with a threat of war against Troy—a threat fulfilled later, not on this stop. The episode is not a numbered labor but is classically welded to the Amazon voyage in Apollodorus’s itinerary. It doubles Laomedon’s perjury (first against the gods, then against Heracles), supplies the aetiology of Heracles’s lasting enmity with Troy, and stands beside the Homeric memory of the hero’s earlier capture of the city. Hesione’s exposure mirrors, in outline, the Andromeda pattern already catalogued in the Perseus cycle.