Introduction
Heracles’s Tenth Labour sees him travel to southern Spain, his cousin Eurystheus once again hoping the hero will not return. As with the Amazons the tale is more involved than the earlier labours, since the ancient story-tellers tie our hero into the geography of the Mediterranean.
ON the tiny island of Cadiz at the southern tip of Spain there lived a herd of magnificent red cattle, guarded by a herdsman named Eurytion and his two-headed dog, Orthrus, brother of Cerberus. Their master was Geryon, a giant with three heads and bodies, joined at the hip, and Eurystheus ordered Heracles to steal his entire herd.
As he went, by Crete and the Libyan desert, the heat got to Heracles and a little petulantly he started firing off arrows at the sun. Amused, Helios gave the hero a boat, the capacious golden goblet from which he drank during the night, for a cooler path over the sea.
Just before Cadiz, Heracles was brought up short by a mountain.* Wielding his mighty club, Heracles broke through, leaving Gibraltar on one side and Jebel Musa on the other; to this day, they are called the Pillars of Hercules.*
Some state that this mountain was what remained of the giant Atlas after Perseus turned him to stone with the Gorgon’s head. But that does not fit with the Eleventh Labour, in which Atlas, still very much alive, plays a prominent part.
Hercules is the Roman version of Heracles. The two pillars are generally agreed to be Gibraltar and either Jebel Musa in Morocco or (less frequently) Monte Hacho in the Spanish territory of Ceuta just to the east. Other versions of the myth have Heracles narrow the Strait, rather than clear a path through it, in order to prevent Atlantic sea-monsters from entering the Mediterranean. A pub in Greek Street, Soho, named ‘The Pillars of Hercules’ is referred to in Charles Dickens’s novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.