Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

During Heracles’ servitude under Omphale—or in closely attached Asian wanderings—he falls in with Syleus, a Lydian or Mysian who forces passing strangers to dig his vineyard and then kills them. Heracles is set to the vines with a hoe; instead of orderly digging he uproots the vines wholesale, wrecks the vineyard, kills Syleus (and in some tellings the man’s daughter Xenodoce when she tries to stop him or after a brief union), and moves on. Euripidean fragments play the scene as brutal comedy: the strong man hired as laborer who annihilates the farm. The deed is a roadside justice type-scene—hostile xenia inverted—folded into the Omphale years and catalogued apart from the Cercopes.