Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Deianeira, fearing Iole’s rival beauty, anointed a robe with Nessus’s supposed love-charm—actually hydra-poisoned blood—she gave it to Lichas, Heracles’s herald, to carry to her husband at the Euboean sacrifice after the sack of Oechalia. Lichas innocently presented the gift. As Heracles put on the robe and approached the altar fire, the poison bit; the cloth clung and burned his flesh. In agony he seized Lichas by the foot (or throat), dashed him against a rock, and hurled him into the sea. The herald’s body, in Sophocles’s messenger-speech, is flung broken into the waves; later local lore points to Lichades islands as named from him. Lichas dies as the unwitting link between Deianeira’s error and Heracles’s mortal torment—neither guilty plotter nor lover, but the courier crushed for the gift he bore. Catalogue his death apart from Deianeira’s suicide and the Oeta pyre.