Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hippocoön and his sons drove Tyndareus from Lacedaemon and seized the kingship. When Heracles, passing through, sought purification or hospitality, they refused him; more sharply, they killed Oeonus, Licymnius’s son (Heracles’s cousin), who struck their dog in self-defense or was set upon in the street. Heracles made war on Hippocoön, was wounded at first and healed, then returned with allies, slew Hippocoön and his many sons, and restored Tyndareus to the Spartan throne. Pausanias shows tombs and local memory of the fight at Sparta. The war explains Tyndareus’s debt to Heracles’s house and plants Heraclean violence inside Laconia before the Dioscuri’s generation fully rules. Catalogue it as a dedicated vengeance campaign, not a numbered labor.