The fight of Heracles and the Nemean lion is one of his most famous feats.

Hercules and the Nemean lion, Gandhara, India, 1st century.

Heracles was said to have subdued the Nemean lion using pankration, and was often depicted in ancient artwork doing that.

Bacchylides begins his ode with the tale of Heracles fighting the Nemean lion, employing the battle to explain why pancration tournaments are now held during the Nemean games.

Also included as the offspring of Echidna by Typhon, by some, are the Sphinx and the Nemean lion.

The Nemean lion ( Greek: Λέων τῆς Νεμέας ( Léōn tēs Neméas ); ) was a vicious monster in Greek mythology that lived at Nemea.

The Nemean lion was sent to Nemea in the Peloponnesus to terrorize the city.

The first of Heracles ' twelve labours, set by King Eurystheus ( his cousin ) was to slay the Nemean lion.

According to one version of the myth, the Nemean lion took women as hostages to its lair in a cave near Nemea, luring warriors from nearby towns to save the damsel in distress.

There he met a boy who said that if Heracles slew the Nemean lion and returned alive within 30 days, the town would sacrifice a lion to Zeus ; but if he did not return within 30 days or he died, the boy would sacrifice himself to Zeus.

File: Herakles Nemean lion BM B621. jpg | Oinochoe, 520-500 BC, from Vulci

simple: Nemean lion

Furthermore the Nemean lion was said to be fathered by Zeus as well.

According to some sources, it was he rather than Typhon that sired, with Echidna, further chthonic monstrous creatures: the Chimera, the Sphinx, the Lernaean Hydra, and even, Hesiod says, the Nemean lion, and Cerberus.

* The Nemean Lion was a gigantic lion with impenetrable skin.

When the other children saw the skin of the Nemean lion, they ran from it in terror, thinking that it was alive.

No, even Amphitryon's bronze-hearted son, who defeated the savage Nemean lion, loved a boy — charming Hylas, whose hair hung down in curls.

After slaying the Nemean lion, Eurystheus sent Heracles to slay the Hydra, which Hera had raised just to slay Heracles.

While there are different genealogies, in one version the Chimera mated with her brother Orthrus and mothered the Sphinx and the Nemean lion ( others have Orthrus and their mother, Echidna, mating ; most attribute all to Typhon and Echidna ).

* Nemean lion, a creature from Greek mythology

File: Met, gandhara, hercules and the nemean lion, 1st century. JPG | Hercules and the Nemean lion.

The first of Hercules ' twelve labours, set by his cousin King Eurystheus, was to slay the Nemean lion.

Here in Greek mythology Heracles overcame the Nemean Lion of the Lady Hera, and here during Antiquity the Nemean Games were played, in three sequence, ending about 235 BCE, celebrated in the eleven Nemean odes of Pindar.

Nemea was famous in Greek myth as the home of the Nemean Lion, which was killed by the hero Heracles, and as the place where the infant Opheltes, lying on a bed of parsley, was killed by a serpent while his nurse fetched water for the Seven on their way from Argos to Thebes.

* Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games page ( in Modern Greek )

They were said to have been founded by Heracles after he defeated the Nemean Lion ; another myth said that they originated as the funeral games of a child named Opheltes.

The Seven founded the Nemean Games in his memory, according to its aition, or founding myth, accounting for the crown of victory being made of parsley or the wild form of celery and for the black robes of the judges, interpreted as a sign of mourning.

According to one version of the myth, the Nemean lion took women as hostages to its lair in a cave near Nemea, luring warriors from nearby towns to save the damsel in distress.

Very little mention is made in Christie's work about this part of his life, but in " The Nemean Lion " ( 1939 ) Poirot himself refers to a Belgian case of his in which " a wealthy soap manufacturer poisoned his wife in order to be free to marry his secretary ".

Ode 13 of the Bacchylides is a Nemean ode performed to honor the athlete Pytheas of Aegina for winning the pancration event of the Nemean games.

When Polybus died without heirs, Adrastus succeeded him on the throne of Sicyon, and during his reign he is said to have instituted the Nemean Games.

While she is speaking her ward, Opheltes is killed by a snake ; in Book 6, the Argives perform games for the dead child, instituting the Nemean Games.

Berenice is said to have participated in the Nemean Games ( between 245 and 241 BC ) and to have competed in Olympic games at some unknown date.

So to ease their minds, and free them from any superstitious thoughts or forebodings of evil, Timoleon halted, and concluded an address suitable to the occasion, by saying, that a garland of triumph was here luckily brought them, and had fallen into their hands of its own accord, as an anticipation of victory: the same with which the Corinthians crown the victors in the Isthmian games, accounting chaplets of parsley the sacred wreath proper to their country ; parsley being at that time still the emblem of victory at the Isthmian, as it is now at the Nemean sports ; and it is not so very long ago that the pine first began to be used in its place .” “” ( Plutarch, Life of Timoleon ).</ ref > Victors could also be honored with a statue or an ode.

Leaning on his knobby club which is draped with the pelt of the Nemean Lion, he holds the apples of the Hesperides in his right hand, but conceals them behind his back like a baseball pitcher with a knuckleball.

This is the case of “ The Nemean Lion ”, first published in the Strand Magazine in November 1939 and later collected in The Labours of Hercules ( 1947 ).

In some cases ( such as The Nemean Lion ) the connection is a highly tenuous one, while in others the choice of case is more or less forced upon Poirot by circumstances.

Poirot is reacquainted with Miss Carnaby, the companion from the episode of the Nemean Lion, who Poirot praises as one of the most successful criminals he ever met.

In The Nemean Lion, he sided with the criminal, Miss Amy Carnaby, and saved her from having to face justice by blackmailing his client Sir Joseph Hoggins, who himself was plotting murder and was unwise enough to let Poirot discover this.

Theseus overpowered the Minotaur with his strength and stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword ( according to one scholium on Pindar's Fifth Nemean Ode, Theseus strangled it ).

Tetradrachm of Rhegion with the Nemean Lion.

In 208 BC Philip of Macedonia was honoured by the Argives with the presidency at the Nemean games, and Quintius Flamininus proclaimed at the Nemea the freedom of the Argives.

As with the Nemean Games, the Isthmian Games were held both the year before and the year after the Olympic Games ( the second and fourth years of an Olympiad ), while the Pythian Games were held in the third year of the Olympiad cycle.

Pindar, in his 11th Nemean Ode, hints at a group of Peloponnesians, the children of the fighters at Troy, occupying Tenedos, with Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, landing straight on the island ; specifically he refers to a Spartan Peisandros and his descendant Aristagoras, with Peisandaros having come over with Orestes.

Image: Hercules with Nemean Lion-Labor-1-Girolamo Muziano-1565-Sala di Ercole-Villa d ' Este, Tivoli. jpg | Hercules slaying Nemean Lion – First Labor ( 1565 ), Villa d ' Este, Tivoli.

Thus several amphoras of this group show Heracles with Geryon or the Nemean Lion, and increasingly Theseus and the Minotaur, as well as the birth of Athena.

The title Cypria, associating the epic with Cyprus, demanded some explanation: the epic was said in one ancient tradition to have been given by Homer as a dowry to his son-in-law, a Stasinus of Cyprus mentioned in no other context ; there was apparently an allusion to this in a lost Nemean ode by Pindar.