he Greek tragedians write of. He passes over also one of the most famous tales about Hercules, how he freed Alcestis from death, which was the subject of another of Euripides' plays (Hamilton 159).
Hercules is a semi-divine personage, with Jupiter for a father (Zeus in Greek mythology) and Alcmene for a mother. Alcmene was afraid of Juno (or Hera's) wrath at her husband's infidelity, and she exposed the child in a field outside the walls of Thebes. Jupiter tricked his wife into breast-feeding the infant, and this made the child immortal. In another version of the story, the infant was carried by Mercury to Mt. Olympus for the same purpose. In both versions, milk spurted when the child either sucked too hard or was pulled away, and this created the Milky Way. Another story holds that Juno sent two serpents to kill the child, and Hercules killed them both with his prodigious strength even though he was still but an infant (Graves 90-91).
The resentment of Juno continued into the adulthood of the hero, and Hercules could not seem to escape from her wrath from time to time. He was a hero to the people of Thebes, and Creon, the king, gave him his daughter in marriage. Juno, however, afflicted Hercules with a sudden madness so that he did not know what he was doing, and in his frenzy he killed both his wife and his children. He then came to his senses and experienced horror at what he had done. He then visited the great cliffs at Delphi to see the oracle of Apollo and to ask how he could purify his sin. He was told that he had to go to Mycenae and for twelve years obey all the commands of his kinsman, the cowardly king Eurystheus. The oracle further stated that once he had completed his many labors, he would be received among the gods. This would be the beginning of the story of the twelve labors of Hercules, requiring the hero to make his way to the distant corners of the earth to accomplish the tasks that would make hi...