Heracles ' human stepfather Amphitryon was also a grandson of Perseus, and since Amphitryon's father ( Alcaeus ) was older than Eurystheus ' father ( Sthenelus ), he might have received the kingdom, but Sthenelus had banished Amphitryon for accidentally killing ( a familiar mytheme ) the eldest son in the family ( Electryon ).

In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dante, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon.

Hippolytus mytheme: Iole, daughter of the king of Oechalia, was beloved by Heracles, sacked her city, killed her family, and took her away by force as his concubine.

Yet Janda ( 2010 ) considers the connection with " foam " genuine, identifying the myth of Aphrodite rising out of the waters after Cronus defeats Uranus as a mytheme of Proto-Indo-European age.

The mytheme of the Judgement of Paris naturally offered artists the opportunity to depict a sort of beauty contest, with three beautiful female nudes trying to appease a male judge, but the myth, at least since Euripides, rather concerns a choice among the gifts that each goddess embodies.

The decipherment of Hittite mythical texts, notably the Kingship in Heaven text first presented in 1946, with its castration mytheme, offers in the figure of Kumarbi an Anatolian parallel to Hesiod's Uranus-Cronus conflict.

Some scholars think, due to her thread-spinning and winding associations, that she was a weaving goddess such as Arachne, and they support the assertion with the mytheme of the Hanged Nymph ( see weaving in mythology ).

In the study of mythology, a mytheme is the essential kernel of a myth — an irreducible, unchanging element, a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways —" bundled " was Claude Lévi-Strauss's image — or linked in more complicated relationships, like a molecule in a compound.

Lev Manovich also uses the terms seme and mytheme in his book, The Language of New Media to describe aspects of culture that computer images enter into dialog with.

Robert Graves suggested that Aphrodite had been substituted for Artemis in this retelling of the mytheme of the eponymous Erymanthus.

The mytheme of Endymion being not dead but endlessly asleep, which was proverbial ( the proverb-Endymionis somnum dormire, " to sleep the sleep of Endymion ") ensured that scenes of Endymion and Selene were popular subjects for sculpted sarcophagi in Late Antiquity, when after-death existence began to be a heightened concern.

The mytheme of Garuda carrying off an elephant that was battling a Crocodile appears in two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata ( I. 1353 ) and the Ramayana ( III. 39 ).

He can foretell the future, but, in a mytheme familiar to several cultures, will change his shape to avoid having to ; he will answer only to someone who is capable of capturing him.

The mytheme of the staff that Joseph of Arimathea set in the ground at Glastonbury, which broke into leaf and flower as the Glastonbury Thorn is a common miracle in hagiography.

Alternatively, the derivation pēnē and lepō ( λέπω ), " peel ", because of the shroud-unweaving mytheme, has been suggested.

They were exposed on Mount Cithaeron, but, in a familiar mytheme, were found and brought up by a shepherd.

For the mytheme of a woman taking revenge on the man who does not answer her feelings by falsely accusing him of sexual abuse, see also Phaedra, Stheneboea, Tenes, Phoenix and Eunostus.

Danaë was childless and to keep her so, he imprisoned her in a bronze chamber open to the sky in the courtyard of his palace: This mytheme is also connected to Ares, Oenopion, Eurystheus, etc.

The version of the Golden Legend did not relate how Erasmus fled to Mount Lebanon and survived on what ravens brought him to eat, an interesting pre-Christian mytheme.

If such a mytheme is set into action as ritual, it is usual to see a pair of sacrificial children laid in the earth to encourage the green growth.

The unitary mytheme, by contrast, is the equivalent in myth of the phonemes, morphemes, and sememes into which structural linguistics divides language, the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system.

This idea is somewhat disputed by Roman Jakobson, who takes the mytheme to be a concept or phoneme which is without significance in itself but whose significance might be shown by sociological analysis.

Extending one night into three, Zeus slept with Alcmene ( his great-granddaughter ) ( thereby conceiving Heracles ) and recounted Amphitryon's victories against the Teleboans.

It is said that after Heracles was apotheosised, Hyllus, having pursued and killed Eurystheus, cut off Eurystheus ' head and gave it to Alcmene, who gouged out the eyes with weaving pins.

The Heracleidae fell into disagreement about where to take Alcmene's body, with some wishing to take her corpse back to Argos, and others wishing to take it to Thebes to be buried with Amphitryon and Heracles ' children by Megara.

A statue in the Galleria Borghese depicts Cerberus with three heads sitting by the side of Hades, while a bronze sculpture depicting Heracles ' twelfth labour shows the demi-god leading a two-headed Cerberus from the underworld.

Details of the individual episodes may be found in the article on the Labours of Heracles, but Hera was connected with all of the opponents Heracles had to overcome.

For his second labour, to slay the Lernaean Hydra, Heracles took with him his nephew, Iolaus, as a charioteer.

When Heracles returned with the Erymanthian Boar, Eurystheus was frightened and hid again in his jar and begged Heracles to get rid of the beast ; Heracles obliged.

Striking a deal with Augeias, Heracles proposed a payment of a tenth of Augeias ' cattle if the labour was completed successfully.

When Alcmene was pregnant with Heracles, Hera tried to prevent the birth from occurring by tying Alcmene's legs in knots.

Heracles throttled a single snake in each hand and was found by his nurse playing with their limp bodies as if they were a child's toys.

When Heracles took the cattle of Geryon, he shot Hera in the right breast with a triple-barbed arrow: the wound was incurable and left her in constant pain, as Dione tells Aphrodite in the Iliad, Book V. Afterwards, Hera sent a gadfly to bite the cattle, irritate them and scatter them.

Hera then sent a flood which raised the water level of a river so much that Heracles could not ford the river with the cattle.

** Perseus Classics Collection: Greek and Roman Materials: Text: Hesiod ( Greek texts and English translations for Works and Days, Theogony, and Shield of Heracles with additional notes and cross links.

Heracles was the son of the affair Zeus had with the mortal woman Alcmene.

Once the oath was sworn, Hera hurried to Alcmene's dwelling and slowed the birth of the twins Heracles and Iphicles by forcing Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, to sit crosslegged with her clothing tied in knots, thereby causing the twins to be trapped in the womb.

But with divine milk, Heracles had acquired supernatural powers.

Heracles, heartbroken, searched for a long time but Hylas had fallen in love with the nymphs and never showed up again.

On his way back to Mycenae from Iberia, having obtained the Cattle of Geryon as his tenth labour, Heracles came to Liguria in North-Western Italy where he engaged into battle with two giants, Albion and Bergion or Dercynus, sons of Poseidon.

Heracles happened to arrive ( along with Telamon and Oicles ) and agreed to kill the monster if Laomedon would give him the horses received from Zeus as compensation for Zeus ' kidnapping Ganymede.

* Heracles visited Evander with Antor, who then stayed in Italy.

* Heracles rivaled with Lepreus and eventually killed him.