Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Iphicles.
The gallery
Heracles Strangling the Snakes (Attic red-figure stamnos)
Attributed to the Berlin Painter, c. 480–470 BCE
On this Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci, the painter stages the very moment that separates the divine twin from the mortal one. The naked infant Heracles, kneeling on his bed, has seized in each hand a serpent sent by Hera, while his twin Iphicles—also a naked child—flees in terror, the act of cowardice by which, in Pherecydes' version, Amphitryon learns which son is his own. Alcmene, Amphitryon, and Athena gather around the bed, framing the scene as a domestic prophecy of the hero to come. Standing about 51 cm high, the vase is one of the finest surviving images to name and depict Iphicles, and is held in the Louvre (G 192).
Heracles and Iphicles (Héraclès enfant étouffant les serpents)
François Lenormant, 1875
This nineteenth-century line drawing, published by the antiquarian François Lenormant, faithfully unrolls the painted frieze of the Louvre stamnos (G 192) so the whole scene can be read at once. At its centre the infant Heracles throttles the two serpents; to one side his twin Iphicles bolts away in fright toward the sheltering arms of their mother Alcmene, while Amphitryon and Athena complete the family group. As the illustration that heads Iphicles' own entry, it preserves the canonical contrast of the brave child and the fearful one—the founding test of the twins distinguished in Apollodorus' Bibliotheca.