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Updated: June 7, 2025
Hercules, journeying through Italy after his victory over Geryon, stops to rest by the bank of the Tiber. While he is taking his repose, the three-headed monster Cacus, a son of Vulcan and a formidable brigand, comes and steals his cattle, and drags them tail-foremost to a secret cavern in the rocks.
Cacus was a huge giant, who inhabited a cave on Mount Aventine, and plundered the surrounding country. When Hercules was driving home the oxen of Geryon, Cacus stole part of the cattle, while the hero slept.
A bas-relief of peculiar interest was discovered at Athienau by General Di Cesnola, and has been represented both by him and by the Italian traveller Ceccaldi. It represents Hercules capturing the cattle of Geryon from the herdsman Eurytion, and gives us reason to believe that that myth was a native Phoenician legend adopted by the Greeks, and not a Hellenic one imported into Phoenicia.
Once she was a maiden as beautiful as morn, till in her pride she sinned a sin at which the sun hid his face; and from that day her hair was turned to vipers, and her hands to eagle's claws; and her heart was filled with shame and rage, and her lips with bitter venom; and her eyes became so terrible that whosoever looks on them is turned to stone; and her children are the winged horse and the giant of the golden sword; and her grandchildren are Echidna the witch-adder, and Geryon the three-headed tyrant, who feeds his herds beside the herds of hell.
Hercules, thinking that Hippolyta had acted treacherously, slew her, and taking her girdle, made sail homewards. This description is thought to apply to Spain, of which Geryon was said to be king.
In the fight that followed, Hercules killed Hippolyte a feat scarcely to be proud of and carried off her girdle, and thus the vanity of the daughter of Eurystheus was gratified. To capture the oxen of Geryon was the tenth labor of Hercules. In the person of Geryon we meet another of those strange beings in which the makers of myths and fairy tales seem to revel.
But Hercules held on. By and by, no Geryon was there, but a huge snake, like one of those which Hercules had strangled in his babyhood, only a hundred times as big; and it twisted and twined about the hero's neck and body, and threw its tail high into the air, and opened its deadly jaws as if to devour him outright; so that it was really a very terrible spectacle!
Recent discoveries of Phoenician artistic remains Phoenician sculpture Statues and busts Animal forms Bas- reliefs Hercules and Geryon Scenes on sarcophagi Phoenicians metal castings Jachin and Boaz Solomon's "Molten Sea" Solomon's lavers Statuettes in bronze Embossed work upon cups and paterae Cup of Praeneste Intaglios on cylinders and gems Phoenician painting Tinted statues Paintings on terra-cotta and clay.
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