The Erymanthian Boar

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The Live Capture Problem

The Erymanthian Boar lived on Mount Erymanthos in Arcadia and was a creature of extraordinary size and ferocity, devastating the surrounding countryside. The Fourth Labor required Hercules to capture it alive and bring it back to Eurystheus. Killing it would have been the straightforward solution. Capturing it alive without injuring it fatally was considerably harder.

Hercules’s solution was environmental rather than physical. He drove the boar with great noise and shouting up onto the mountain, pursuing it into the deep snow fields at higher elevation where winter had left thick drifts. The boar, massive and powerful on open ground, became slow and stuck in the deep snow. Hercules bound it with chains and carried it on his shoulders back to Mycenae.

Eurystheus, upon seeing the boar—alive, enormous, and enraged—reportedly leapt into his bronze jar in terror. Hercules appears to have found this funny.

The Centaur Pholus and the Wine

On the way to the mountain, Hercules stopped at the cave of Pholus, a centaur who was hospitable and wise—different in character from the savage centaurs who would later give Hercules trouble. Pholus had a jar of wine that had been a gift from Dionysus, meant to be shared only if Hercules came by. Hercules came by. The wine was opened.

The smell of the wine attracted other centaurs from across the mountain, who came armed and angry—wine was not something centaurs, as a rule, handled well. A fight broke out. Several centaurs were killed. Chiron, the wisest and most noble of all centaurs, was accidentally struck by one of Hercules’s arrows—the poisoned arrows from the Hydra’s blood. Chiron was immortal and could not die from the wound, but he could not heal either. He eventually chose to give up his immortality to end the pain.

Pholus, examining one of the arrows after the battle and wondering how something so small could kill so effectively, dropped it on his foot. He died immediately. Hercules buried him on the mountain before continuing.

What the Labor Cost

The boar was captured. The labor succeeded. But the route to the mountain had left two exceptional beings dead—Pholus, who had done nothing wrong, and Chiron, who had done nothing wrong either. The Hydra’s poison, which had seemed like a resource when Hercules dipped his arrows in it, was already producing casualties among the innocent.

This is a recurring pattern in the myth cycle: Hercules’s solutions create new problems. The tools that make him effective also make him dangerous to those around him. The Fourth Labor is remembered as the boar in the snow, but its real weight is in what was lost on the way there.