Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Eurystheus, who commands the twelve labors from Mycenae (or Tiryns), cannot bear the sight of the monsters he has ordered. When Heracles first returns wearing the Nemean lion’s skin, the king is so terrified that thereafter he will not admit the hero to the city: labors are announced by the herald Copreus, and trophies are to be shown from outside. When Heracles brings the Erymanthian boar alive, and above all when he leads Cerberus up from Hades, Eurystheus hides in a bronze jar (pithos) sunk in the earth and begs Heracles to take the hound away. The jar-scene, ubiquitous on Attic and other classical vases, becomes the emblem of the weaker man whom Hera’s birth-trick set over Zeus’s son: command without courage, labors ordered from a pit. Catalogue Eurystheus’s repeated panic and the pithos as a story unit apart from any single labor’s combat.