![]() To atone for this act, he became indebted to King Eurystheus. Hercules, in a fit of rage and delusion caused by Hera, killed his family. He was in debt to King Eurystheus of Tiryns, a kingdom in Mycenae. The story of Hercules retrieving two golden apples from the Garden of Hesperides is only one of the twelve labors Hercules was required to do by the Oracle of Delphi. The 12 Labors of Hercules Relief sculpture from the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece depicts Athena helping Hercules hold up Earth while Atlas gives him the Golden Apples Because much of Western European history and language comes from the ancient Romans, today Hercules is the name for this Greek hero that most of us recognize. Like many Greek gods and demi-gods, the Romans gave them Latin names. The story of Heracles was one of their favorites. When the empire of ancient Rome absorbed the ancient Greek empire, they also absorbed many of the Greek myths and gods. It signified that he would gain fame and glory because of Hera. It was because of his constant battles with Hera that the boy took the name ‘Heracles’ which means ‘Glory of Hera’. ![]() But with his god-like strength the toddler strangled the snakes and survived. She even sent poisonous serpents to murder the young Hercules as he lay in his cradle at age two. Even before his birth the jealous goddess, Hera wife of Zeus, tried to kill Hercules. The name given to him by his mother, Alcmenes, was Alcaeus. The complaint is that the true Greek name of the demigod son of Zeus is Heracles (pronounced like Hair-a-kleez). Some people are quick to correct the use of Hercules when retelling one of the ancient Greek myths about this popular hero. It was fate – or maybe it was one of Athena’s clever plans – that I write a musical version of this story. Around that same time, I was given a commission to write a story about a ‘hero’. After over forty years, I was browsing in a used book store and came across a copy of the same book I’d read all those years ago and again found the myth of Hercules. Unlike so many of the other Greek myths, including the ones about Hercules, this myth involved cunning and cleverness rather than brute strength and divine intervention. It was a collection of Greek myths but was written in a very fun and modern way – the book was published in the 1920’s so the word ‘modern’ is relative. However, Eurystheus declared that two of them were performed unlawfully (the slaying of the Hydra and the cleaning of the Augean stables) and ordered Heracles to perform two more.The decision to write and produce, “Hercules and the Golden Apple”, a musical about this particular part of the Greek myths of Hercules sprang from a book I read many years ago. ![]() Heracles performed the first ten labors in the space of eight years and one month. They are enumerated in Euripides, 4 Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, and the Greek Anthology, 5 though none of them can be considered to have arranged them in anything like a chronological order. The selection of these twelve from the great number of feats ascribed to Heracles is probably the work of the Alexandrines. Hesiod mentions several of the feats of Heracles distinctly, but knows nothing of their number twelve. 2 On his return from Troy, he was cast, through the influence of Hera, on the coast of Cos, but Zeus punished Hera, and carried Heracles safely to Argos. 1 The Iliad further alludes to his fight with a sea-monster, and his expedition to Troy, to fetch the horses which Laomedon had refused him. that he was ordered to bring Cerberus from the lower world. Homer only knows that Heracles during his life on earth was exposed to infinite dangers and sufferings through the hatred of Hera, that he was subject to Eurystheus, who imposed upon him many and difficult tasks, but Homer mentions only one, viz. The accounts of the twelve labors of Heracles are found only in the later writers, for Homer and Hesiod do not mention them.
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