Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Diomedes of Thrace.
The gallery
Hercules and Diomedes
Vincenzo de' Rossi, c. 1550s
A marble statue group from Vincenzo de' Rossi's cycle of the Labours of Hercules in the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. It seizes the climactic moment of Heracles' eighth labour: the hero hoists the Thracian king Diomedes overhead before casting him to his own man-eating mares. The Mannerist torsion of the two intertwined nude bodies and the king's flailing, upended pose dramatise the reversal by which the tyrant who fed strangers to his horses becomes their final meal.
Diomedes Devoured by his Horses (Diomède dévoré par ses chevaux)
Gustave Moreau, 1865
Oil on canvas (140 x 95.5 cm), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. Moreau translates the eighth labour of Heracles into a brooding Symbolist tableau: the Thracian king Diomedes, son of Ares, sprawls on the ground as his own once man-eating mares fall upon him, while Heracles looms impassively at the right. The lurid palette and the writhing tangle of horseflesh and human limbs turn the myth's poetic justice — the cruel king fed to the beasts he kept — into a meditation on retribution and the savagery beneath royal power.
Hercules and the Mares of Diomedes (detail of the Labours of Hercules mosaic)
Unknown, 201–250 CE
A Roman floor mosaic panel in opus tessellatum, part of a Twelve Labours cycle now in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid (3rd century CE). This compartment depicts the eighth labour, Heracles' confrontation with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of Thrace. Rendered in the spare, emblematic style of provincial Roman floor decoration, the scene compresses the whole episode into a single recognisable vignette of the hero and the deadly horses, one panel within the standard canonical sequence of Heracles' deeds.
Diomedes Devoured by his Horses
Gustave Moreau, 1866
A watercolour (19.1 x 17.1 cm, private collection) in which Moreau revisits the subject of his 1865 oil. The intimate sheet again shows the Thracian king Diomedes thrown down and torn by his own carnivorous mares as Heracles completes the eighth labour. The jewel-like, densely worked technique characteristic of Moreau's watercolours intensifies the nightmarish atmosphere, concentrating the myth's theme of the tyrant undone by his own cruelty into a small, glowing field of colour.