"On His Knees" was given the name of the hero Hercules when the Greeks placed their heroes and divinities among the stars, but his pictures in the modern maps do not seem to accord with the description of his posture in this ancient poem. His foot now rests upon Draco, the Sky Dragon, which probably is here imagined as old Laden, the sleepless dragon which once coiled around the tree of golden apples.
Hercules, the great grandson of Perseus, was the greatest of all the heroes. He possessed every high quality of mind and character and was endowed with such great physical strength that his life was filled with constant adventure. Armed with a huge club, he performed the most remarkable deeds, the most wonderful of these being his "Twelve Labors." Some of these labors or adventures were so thrilling that the Greeks named constellations in honor of them as well as of the hero, and they have ever since been proverbs among men. There are many allusions to these throughout literature—
"Thogh I had hadde—al the strengthe of Ercules."
—CHAUCER.
Leo, who leads the zenith constellations across the sky, was the same ferocious lion which Hercules encountered and killed in the valley of Nemea; he also killed the Crab now in Cancer, and the hundred-headed Hydra whose constellation is seen in the south from March to June. Some writers see in Sagitta, the Arrow; Aquila and Cygnus, the Birds; Draco, the Dragon and other constellations, memorials of the adventures of Hercules.
This huge giant gave promise of a career while very young. When no more than eight months old, two monstrous snakes appeared and pushed their hissing heads between the bars of his cradle. Springing to his feet, he seized the reptiles by their necks, strangled them and threw them dead at the feet of his terror-stricken parents.
"The mighty infant showed them to his sire,
And smil'd to see the wreathing snakes expire;"
—Idylliums of Theocritus (FAWKE'S Trans.)
When Hercules grew to manhood his cousin, who ruled the Perseidæ, commanded him to perform ten difficult tasks, which were later increased to twelve. Hercules was at first unwilling to obey but the oracle at Delphi informed him that he would become an immortal hero if he performed the tasks, and afterwards be given a just reward. For a while Hercules was so despondent that he eventually became mad, but finally throwing off his depression, he accomplished all he set out to do with such cleverness and foresight and with exhibitions of such amazing strength, that not only did the gods carry him up to Mount Olympus after his death but gave him as a wife the lovely cupbearer, Hebe. His gigantic figure is now among the stars and many of the creatures in his adventures have been placed far above the earth in honored positions in the heavens. Let us now go back for a moment and review some of these awe-inspiring accomplishments of Hercules.
The lion and the hydra have already been mentioned. The watersnake was particularly difficult to kill for it possessed the distressing faculty of being able to immediately grow two living heads in the place of each one destroyed, thus increasing not only the snake but the number of poisonous fangs. This seemingly insurmountable difficulty was finally overcome when Hercules thought of searing each stump with a hot iron as soon as it was severed, thus killing the root from which the head was born. As seen on his constellation in the sky, this watersnake is more conspicuous for length than for his number of heads, for his faint starry outline covers one-fourth of the southern heavens and takes four months in passing any one place. It was during the struggle with this creature that Juno induced the crab to crawl out of the swamp and seize the mighty giant's toes, afterward placing the crab on the Dark Sign, Cancer, which lies just west of Leo.