Omphale, daughter of Iardanes, was queen of Lydia, the kingdom her late husband Tmolus had bequeathed to her at his death. When the Delphic oracle declared that Heracles must be sold into servitude to be cured of the disease he had incurred, Hermes conducted the sale, and Omphale bought him; he served her as a slave.1
The servitude was a penance for murder. Gone mad once more, Heracles flung Iphitus from the walls of Tiryns; afflicted with a disease for the killing, he went to Delphi, and the oracle answered that his remedy was to be sold, to serve three years, and to pay Eurytus compensation for his son's death. The widely told version trims the term to a single year, but Apollodorus gives the oracle's sentence as three.2
After the oracle Hermes sold him, and Omphale, daughter of Iardanes and queen of Lydia, was his buyer; Eurytus refused the proffered blood-price, yet Heracles served her all the same. He did not idle in her household: during the bondage he seized and bound the mischievous Cercopes at Ephesus, and he killed Syleus in Aulis, the man who forced passing strangers to dig his vineyard, slaying him together with his daughter Xenodoce and burning the vines up by the roots.3
Pausanias keeps an independent memory of the Lydian sojourn. He reports that the corpse the Lydians showed near their river was that of Hyllus, a son of Earth, after whom the river Hyllus was named, and that Heracles, while he dwelt with Omphale, called a son of his own Hyllus after that river — a Lydian Hyllus distinct from the Heraclid leader born to Deianira.4
A terse Latin notice preserves the same arrangement: because of an offence over the Delphic tripod, Hercules was handed into servitude to Queen Omphale by Mercury — Hermes again the agent of the sale.5
The chronology of the service was disputed in antiquity. In his Argonaut catalogue Apollodorus records, on the authority of Herodorus, the variant that Heracles did not sail with the Argo at all but was at that very time serving as a slave at Omphale's court — set against the rival traditions that he sailed and was left behind at Aphetae, or that he reached Colchis.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
