Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When the pyre on Oeta had consumed the mortal body worn by the poisoned robe, Zeus took Heracles up among the gods. Hera, long his persecutor, was reconciled; in Apollodorus’s close she adopted him as it were into full divine kinship, and he received Hebe—Youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera—as his wife. Hesiod’s *Theogony* already lists that marriage among the settled unions of the gods: Heracles, finished with his labors and his pains, dwells painlessly and has Hebe for bride. Homer’s Odysseus, in the Nekyia, sees a phantom of Heracles still striding among the dead with bow drawn and an air of eternal readiness, while the poet remarks that the man himself feasts with the deathless gods and holds Hebe. The catalogue thus inherits both images: the suffering career ends in fire; the divine Heracles begins in Olympian marriage and everlasting youth. Apotheosis does not erase the earthly line—Hyllus and the Heraclidae remain for the returns to the Peloponnese—but it closes the personal arc that began with Alcmene’s night and Hera’s snakes.