#AFOE HESPERIDES SKIN#
As penance, Hercules hired out to King Eurystheus of Mycenae, who commanded him to perform his famous twelve labors.Īnd so Hercules fought his way to fame and glory, clad in lion skin and armed with club and poisoned arrows, using his strength and prowess to dispatch many a foe. Sometimes he lost, as when in later life, Hera seized him with a madness that caused him to kill his first wife and their children. Sometimes he won-as when he strangled the two snakes the goddess sent to his crib to do him in. But Hera awoke and pushed the baby away, causing her milk to spill across the sky, becoming what the Romans called the Via Lactea-the Milky Way.įrom that auspicious beginning, Hercules grew into a rough-and-tumble character who regularly suffered the torments of the vengeful Hera. The god had big plans for Hercules right from the start when he slipped him onto the breast of his goddess wife Hera while she slept, to drink the milk of immortality. He was born of the great god Zeus and a mortal woman named Alcmene whom Zeus visited one night disguised as her husband. His arms flail out from these two, and his legs from the uppermost pair-and he’s almost bumping heads with Ophiuchus below. Note that he’s upside down, though, with the southernmost pair of stars forming his shoulders.
Look to the west of Vega-the brightest star of the Summer Triangle trio of Vega, Altair, and Deneb-for a butterfly shape of six stars that also looks like a crooked letter “H,” and you’ll have found his torso. Like his western counterparts, Herc plays it cagey, and his medium-bright star pattern can be challenging to make out. But the heavens hold the Greek equivalent of the western gunslinger in the form of Heracles (Hercules, as the Romans called him), who rides high on summer evenings, with exploits enough to make even Wyatt Earp jealous. No figure of the Old West is more iconic than the gunfighter-the lone wolf with the tortured soul, traversing a hostile landscape, selling his skills to the highest bidder for “a few dollars more.” The figures of the sky predated firearms, so nobody up there is packing.
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