Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The tenth labor was to fetch the red cattle of Geryon from Erytheia, an island near Ocean later called Gadira. Geryon, son of Chrysaor by Callirrhoe daughter of Ocean, had the body of three men grown together at the waist and parted in three below. Eurytion herded his cattle; Orthrus (Orthos), the two-headed hound begotten by Typhon on Echidna, watched them. Journeying through Europe, Heracles destroyed many wild beasts, set foot in Libya, and at Tartessus raised two pillars opposite each other at the boundaries of Europe and Libya. Scorched by the Sun on the road, he bent his bow at Helios; the god, admiring his hardihood, gave him the golden goblet in which the Sun himself crosses Ocean. In that cup Heracles crossed to Erytheia and lodged on Mount Abas. Orthrus rushed him; he clubbed the dog dead. Eurytion came to help and was killed. Menoetes, pasturing the cattle of Hades nearby, reported to Geryon. The triple-bodied king met Heracles by the river Anthemus as the hero drove the herd away, joined battle, and was shot dead. Heracles embarked the cattle in the goblet, sailed back to Tartessus, and returned the cup to Helios. On the long drive home he passed Abderia into Liguria, where Ialebion and Dercynus, sons of Poseidon, tried to rob him of the cattle and were killed. Through Tyrrhenia he came to Rhegium; there a bull broke away, swam to Sicily, and reached the plain of Eryx, king of the Elymi and son of Poseidon, who mixed it with his own herds. Heracles left the herd with Hephaestus, recovered the bull, and when Eryx refused to yield it without a wrestling match, beat him three times, killed him, and rejoined the cattle. At the creeks of the Ionian Sea, Hera sent a gadfly among the cows; they scattered into the Thracian mountains. Heracles recovered some and drove them to the Hellespont; the rest ran wild thereafter. Blaming the river Strymon, he filled it with rocks and made it unnavigable. He delivered the cattle to Eurystheus, who sacrificed them to Hera. The labor thus joins a western Ocean crossing—Helios’s cup as the vessel of the impossible voyage—with the killing of Orthrus, Eurytion, and Geryon, and a cattle-drive that seeds Italian and Thracian aetiologies before the Mycenaean sacrifice to the goddess who had harried the herd.