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Updated: June 6, 2025
Eurystheus enjoined upon him a succession of desperate adventures, which are called the twelve "Labors of Hercules." The first was the fight with the Nemean lion. The valley of Nemea was infested by a terrible lion. Eurystheus ordered Hercules to bring him the skin of this monster. After using in vain his club and arrows against the lion, Hercules strangled the animal with his hands.
These, however, were far less interesting than the four great public games, sacred to the gods, which were the Pythian, at Delphos, sacred to Apollo; the Isth'mian, at Corinth, to Neptune; the Nemean, at Nemea, to Hercules; and the Olympic, at Olympia in E'lis, to Jupiter.
However, by his dexterity in dealing personally with men and managing political affairs, and by his general favor, he excused and obliterated this fault, and brought in Cleonae to the Achaean association, and celebrated the Nemean games at Cleonae, as the proper and more ancient place for them.
This festival was ever after celebrated thus; and when the people gathered together there to see the racing and boxing, they loved to recall the memory of the brave lion slayer, and of the seven kings who had first celebrated the Nemean games.
The remaining four show Hercules wrestling with Antæus, taming the Nemean lion, extirpating the Hydra, and bending to his will the bull of Crete. Labor, appointed for a punishment to Adam, becomes a title to immortality for the hero. The dignity of man is reconquered by prowess for the Greek, as it is repurchased for the Christian by vicarious suffering.
For whatever he wished to spend beyond the necessities of life, it evidently was in a direction in which the city too would gain some honor. For example, when he served in the cavalry, he purchased horses, not only fine ones, but racers, with which he won at the Isthmian and Nemean games, so that the city was proclaimed and he crowned.
We thought it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it is the Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating war is quite unproductive unless you are thinking about its nature and causes so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and control it and end it.
With these I speedily flayed it off, and cast it about my limbs, for my defence against the brunt of wounding war. 'Friend, lo even thus befel the slaying of the Nemean Lion, that aforetime had brought many a bane on flocks and men. It is still dangerous for an Australian native to approach the women of the tribe while they are celebrating their savage rites.
And thus, as Hephæstus is lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the Python slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living men to stone.
And besides, if I am not mistaken, in Procles's history of the Isthmian games I met with this passage; at first a pine garland crowned the conqueror, but when this game began to be reckoned amongst the sacred, then from the Nemean solemnity the parsley was received. And this Procles was one of Xenocrates's fellow-students at the Academy.
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