Chapter Ⅲ

The Labours of Heracles

The sky is a trophy wall of the hero's Twelve Labours: the hero, the lion he strangled, the hydra he burned, the dragon he slew — even the crab that pinched his foot.

Hercules — the Kneeling Hero

The Greeks originally called it simply Engonasin — “the Kneeler”.

Drawn kneeling with club raised and the lion's skin on his arm, one foot crushing the head of Draco — the dragon Ladon from the Garden of the Hesperides, his eleventh labour. Curiously, he hangs upside down in the northern sky, forever mid-battle.

The four-star Keystone is his torso. On its edge sits M13, a swarm of several hundred thousand ancient stars — the finest globular cluster of the northern sky, and the target of the famous 1974 Arecibo message to any listening civilisations.

Also in this plate — Corona Borealis: the wedding crown of Ariadne. After she saved Theseus from the Minotaur's labyrinth with her thread — and he abandoned her on Naxos — the god Dionysus married her and threw her crown into the sky: a perfect semicircle of seven stars, its jewel named Alphecca.

Leo — the Nemean Lion

First Labour: a lion whose hide no weapon could pierce.

Arrows bounced off it; swords bent. Heracles cornered it in its cave and strangled it with bare hands, then skinned it using the lion's own claw — the only thing sharp enough. He wore the pelt ever after as armour; Zeus set the lion in the sky as the hardest-won trophy.

Leo is one of the few zodiac figures that truly looks like its animal: a backwards question-mark (“the Sickle”) for the maned head and chest, a triangle for the haunches.

In the sky: its heart is Regulus, “the little king” — the brightest star sitting almost exactly on the ecliptic, so the Moon and planets regularly brush past it. Spring's signature constellation.

Hydra — the Many-Headed Serpent

Second Labour: cut off one head, two grow back.

The swamp-monster of Lerna. Heracles solved the arithmetic with fire: his nephew Iolaus cauterised each neck-stump with a torch before new heads could sprout, and the final immortal head was buried under a boulder. Mid-fight, Hera sent a giant crab to pinch the hero's heel; he crushed it — and the sympathetic goddess made it the faint constellation Cancer. Even the sidekicks got constellations.

In the sky: the largest of all 88 constellations, a chain of faint stars over 100° long — a quarter of the way around the sky — yet holding just one moderately bright star: Alphard, Arabic for “the solitary one”. Riding on its back: Crater (the Cup) and Corvus (the Crow) from Apollo's fable of the lying raven.