Heracles
HERR-uh-kleez
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe strongest of the heroes, and the ancestor the Spartan kings claimed. Herodotus gives Leonidas' descent back through twenty generations to Heracles, and it is the first thing he says about him.
That claim is why this story can be told at all. A Spartan king who fights a dragon is not doing something foreign to his line. Heracles killed the Hydra, the Nemean lion and the hound of Hades, and the kings of Sparta traced themselves to him by name.
Hesiod has the Hydra reared by Hera specifically as a grief for Heracles, and killed by him with Iolaus. The pattern of a monster raised against one particular man is older than anything in this account.
Sources
- Hdt. 7.204
- Hes. Theog. 313-318
- Apollod. 2.4-7
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Discussed in the papers
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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