Iphicles is the mortal twin of Heracles: Alcmena bore two sons, Heracles by Zeus and Iphicles by Amphitryon, the divine child being the elder by a single night. As the merely human half of that double birth he stands forever in his brother's shadow, yet he leaves his own mark on the saga — a kinsman who fought and bled in Heracles' campaigns and the father of the charioteer Iolaus.1
The two brothers were divided at the cradle. When the twins were eight months old, Hera, bent on destroying the infant Heracles, sent two huge serpents to their bed; Alcmena cried out for Amphitryon's help, but it was Heracles who rose and throttled the snakes in both his hands — the first sign that one child was a god's and one a man's.2
Apollodorus also preserves Pherecydes' colder version of the serpents: it was Amphitryon himself who laid them in the bed, wishing to learn which child was truly his own. When Iphicles fled and Heracles stood his ground, the father knew that Iphicles was his son. In this telling the snakes are not Hera's malice but a paternity test, and Iphicles' flight is the proof of his mortality.3
Iphicles married the younger daughter of Creon of Thebes, but he already had a son, Iolaus, by Automedusa, daughter of Alcathus. That son would become Heracles' devoted charioteer and companion, so that the mortal twin's chief legacy to the saga was the comrade who shared in most of the hero's labours.4
Apollodorus marks Iphicles among the heroes who hunted the Calydonian boar, naming him 'Iphicles, son of Amphitryon, from Thebes' — the very wording that sets him apart from Iphiclus the Aetolian, son of Thestius.5
Iphicles followed his brother to war and did not return. In Heracles' campaign against Hippocoon and his sons at Sparta, Cepheus and his sons fell in the battle, and besides them Iphicles, the brother of Heracles; the city taken and Hippocoon slain, Heracles restored Tyndareus to the throne.6
Pausanias gives a different end, and a tomb to match it. Below the acropolis of Pheneus in Arcadia stood the grave of Iphicles, the brother of Heracles and father of Iolaus: in Heracles' first battle against the Eleans and Augeas, Iphicles was wounded by the sons of Actor — the Molionides, named for their mother Molione — and carried in a swoon to Pheneus, where he was nursed but died. The Pheneatians still sacrificed to him as to a hero.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
