Characters
- Ares — father of Cycnus; intervenes; wounded or thunderbolt-parted from Heracles
- Artemis — divine ally; deflects Ares’ spear; heartens Heracles
- Cycnus — son of Ares; murderer of Delphi-bound pilgrims; slain by Heracles
- Heracles — challenger and victor; kills Cycnus; wounds or faces down Ares
- Iolaus — companion and charioteer in the *Shield*
- Pelopia — alternative mothers of Cycnus in the notices
- Poseidon — in some notices associated with Cycnus’s burial or the landscape
Places
- Garden of the Hesperides road — itinerary context for Apollodorus 2.5.11
- Itonus — site of Apollodorus’s later Cycnus combat (doublet)
- Road to Delphi — pilgrimage route Cycnus plagued
- Thessaly — setting of the *Shield* combat
Themes
Narrative
Cycnus, son of Ares by Pelopia or Pyrene, haunted the sacred road in Thessaly—near Pagasae and Trachis in the *Shield*’s geography—robbing and killing travelers who brought offerings to Apollo at Delphi, intending to build his father a temple from their skulls. Heracles and Iolaus met him. Athena encouraged Heracles; Ares stood by his son.
They fought. Heracles drove a spear through Cycnus’s neck and killed him. Ares sprang to avenge the boy; Athena turned the war-god’s spear, and Heracles wounded Ares in the thigh, or—depending on the telling—Zeus parted them with a thunderbolt before father and champion destroyed each other. Cycnus was buried (Poseidon in some notices opened the ground, or Hyllus’s country claimed the tomb); Apollodorus, narrating a Cycnus encounter on the way to the Hesperides, has Heracles kill him when Cycnus challenges, and Ares does not always reopen the fight.
A second Apollodorean notice (2.7.7) has Heracles kill a Cycnus, son of Ares, at Itonus in a separate combat as he passed through Thessaly in the later campaigns. Whether one figure doubled by local tradition or two namesakes, the classical dossier agrees that Heracles overthrew Ares’ brigand son and, at least once, faced the war-god himself and lived.