By the Gods!

The Seventh Labour of Heracles

“Ummm we’ve done a lion, a hydra, a deer, a boar, some cows, some birds… A bull? Has he fought a bull yet? I bet he can’t do that.” This is the most probable thought process of King Eurystheus when he was deciding what the seventh labour of Heracles would be. After his six previous death-defying tasks, capturing the Cretan bull must have come close to boring Heracles. With all the prime monsters roaming around Greek mythology, a regular bullfight feels uninspired.

Heracles sailed to Crete and demonstrated his heroic manners by asking King Minos (A man with a poor history of bull-human relations) if he could please take the rampaging beastie away. Minos was more than happy to have Heracles tackle his problem by the horns, and gave him the go-ahead in what turned out to be one of Heracles’ most uneventful fights ever.

In some versions of the tale Heracles wrangles the bull with a plain old lasso (not even a magical one like Wonder Woman’s) and rides it all the way back to King Eurystheus. In other descriptions of the tale, he goes all Sam Fisher on it, sneaking up from behind and taking it down with a sleeper hold. In the end, however, the bull comes out on top. Eurystheus wanted to sacrifice the bull to Hera, but she shot that idea down because she believed it would reflect glory on Heracles, so the bull was set free to wander the land. So Heracles was done with one more labour, and ol’ Ferdinand eventually found his way to Marathon where he became known as the Marathonian Bull.

The saddest part of the story? The Greeks’ inability to find a better name for the Cretan/Marathonian bull. Those were just places he lived, and that’s lazy nicknaming.

The Sixth Labour of Heracles

Much like the fifth labour with the stables, Heracles’ next task also sounds like ordinary chores for a farmhand. This time around King Eurystheus told Heracles to get rid of the birds nested around the town of Stympholos. Of course there’s always a catch for poor Heracles, and the reason the Stymphalian people couldn’t just rely on some scarecrows was that the Stymphalian birds were able to shoot their feathers like spears, making them fairly proficient at murder.

Athena really gets the M.V.P. award on this labour, though. She saw that Heracles was in a jam and being a goddess of wisdom, she thought “Know what he needs? Magic castanets.” Mortals like you or I may wonder how that would help with a flock of man-eating, spear-feathered birds, but obviously that’s why no one ever made us gods/goddesses of anything.

Using the bronze krotala (castanets) forged by Hephaestus himself, Heracles scared the Stymphalian birds from their roosts, and from his safe vantage point he shot them down with his hydra-arrows. There’s no authority on what Heracles did with the flock of dead birds, but I bet the results were delicious.

Aphrodite

The Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility was, of course, the one, the only, the sexy: Aphrodite. Unlike her Roman counterpart, Venus, with whom she was identified, Aphrodite was not only a goddess of sexual love, but also of the affection that sustains social life: the type affection you might have for your best friend, your community do-gooders, and your dog. Make no mistake, the sexual aspect was still important; I’m sure Aphrodite was the subject of many inappropriate thoughts for the blossoming teenagers of ancient Greece. 

The meaning of her name is uncertain, though the ancient Greeks came to believe it referred to foam. This belief may have arisen through the story of her birth. When Kronos, the Titan, castrated his father, Ouranos, with a sickle, (ouch) he cast the immortal dong/unit/member/thing into the sea, where it flowed amid the foam. Aphrodite was born from this strange union of floating member and foam, and washed up on the beaches of Cyprus. Cyprus is pretty far from Greece, and indeed there is evidence that suggests she was a West-Asian goddess brought to Greece by sea-traders. She was married to Hephaestus, the crippled smith-god, but made it with half of the guys on Olympus, and some important mortals (Adonis and Anchises).