Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Linus.
The gallery
Heracles and Linus
Attic red-figure kylix painter, c. 480 BC
Attic red-figure kylix: young Heracles turns on his music-master Linus with the stool or lyre that will kill him. The cup is the clearest archaic image of the Thracian (or Theban) Linus — brother of Orpheus in some genealogies — whose pedagogy ends in the hero’s rage.
Herakles and Linos
Attic red-figure stamnos painter, c. 480–470 BC
Boston MFA stamnos 66.206: Heracles and Linos locked in the music-lesson murder that Apollodorus and later mythographers retell. Museum clay keeps the singing-master distinct from Pope Linus — a mythic death, not a papal name.