Heracles

Family: Greek · Role: ancestor of the Heracleidai · First appears: Book 1 · §1–8

Before Heracles son of Amphitryon was born in Hellas, Phenicians had sailed to Thasos and established a temple there, “full five generations of men” earlier. Heracles was the son of Amphitryon and Alcmene, whom the account describes as both of Egyptian descent; it places his birth about nine hundred years before the events under discussion and says he lived to old age in Hellas. In one account, Zeus, after Heracles urgently entreated him, appeared wearing a ram’s fleece. The Thebans also held an annual ceremony in which they covered Zeus’s image with a ram’s skin and brought Heracles’s image before it.

In Hylaia, Heracles recovered his missing mares by agreeing to lie with the woman who kept them; he gave her his bow and girdle before departing. He was also said to have driven Geryones’s cattle into the land later inhabited by the Scythians, and to have fathered Skythes with the woman there. Heracles was counted as an ancestor of the Heracleidai: they were descended from him and the slave-girl of Iardanos, and received government by oracle. His descendants included Hyllos, while the kings of the Scythians were said to descend from Skythes; the Heracleidai also claimed Eryx because Heracles had won its land.

Traditions further placed Heracles among Jason’s companions, saying he was left behind in the gulf of Magnesia after being sent to fetch water. Much later, at the Isthmus, the sons of Heracles agreed that if Hyllos lost single combat, they would leave the Peloponnese and not attempt to return for a hundred years. The account also identifies Leonidas as of Heracles’s race and calls Leotychides “the son of Hyllos, the son of Heracles.”