ABSTRACT
As if the twelve labours had not presented Herakles with enough monstrous opponents, the format is extended to a large number of his other exploits. The story of the infant Herakles strangling the snakes prefigures both the labours proper and the motif of Hera’s enmity, while other tales from his youth further establish his physical prowess, though pointing to a tendency to excess which we will be exploring in Chapters 3-4. Apart from the encounter with Nessos, which is clearly embedded in the complex of stories surrounding Herakles’ death, the battles of Herakles’ adulthood are only really distinguished from the labours by their accidental nature – instead of being tasks set by Eurystheus, they are encounters with opponents who simply got in the way, and are sometimes referred to by the Greek term parerga, ‘secondary works’. Many of the opponents in question are transgressive in some way, so that Herakles’ ultimate victory quite clearly represents the triumph of civilized values; some are disturbing by their very nature, being the hybrid centaurs or shape-shifting deities.
