Mythlok Perspective

In Mythlok’s Perspective, Steal the Mares of Diomedes stands apart from Heracles’ more straightforward monster battles because the real enemy is corrupted power. Like the Nemean Lion represents physical terror, the mares represent violence deliberately cultivated by authority. The difference is important: Heracles does not simply defeat strength; he takes control of strength that has been turned destructive. That makes this labor less about conquest and more about what happens when power is allowed to feed itself.

Stealing the Mares of Diomedes

Introduction

Stealing the Mares of Diomedes is traditionally counted as the eighth of the Twelve Labors of Heracles, the Greek hero better known in Roman tradition as Hercules. Instead of destroying a monster, Heracles is ordered to capture four dangerous horses belonging to Diomedes, king of the Bistones in Thrace, and bring them back alive to Mycenae.

The mares are infamous because they are fed human flesh. In the most influential surviving account, the Bibliotheca attributed to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Heracles travels to Thrace with companions, overpowers the grooms guarding the animals, and drives the horses toward the sea. When the Bistones pursue him, Heracles leaves the mares with his companion Abderus while he fights their king. The horses escape Abderus’ control and drag him to his death. Heracles then defeats Diomedes, brings the mares to Eurystheus, and completes the labor.

The story is darker than many of Heracles’ other labors because the danger is not simply physical. The horses have been turned from symbols of strength and nobility into instruments of violence. The labor therefore places Heracles against a combination of uncontrolled nature, political brutality, and a society portrayed by Greek tradition as hostile and lawless.

Characters Involved

Heracles is the central hero of the story and the servant of King Eurystheus, who commands the Twelve Labors. The eighth labor tests a different kind of strength from the Nemean Lion or the Lernaean Hydra. Heracles must capture living creatures, keep them under control, defeat their master, and transport them across a great distance. His success depends on physical power, tactical judgment, and the ability to respond when his plans go wrong.

Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, is the authority who orders Heracles to bring the mares back. His role is important because the task is deliberately framed as a capture rather than a killing. Heracles must prove that he can control something that cannot simply be destroyed.

Diomedes of Thrace is the owner of the mares and king of the Bistones. He should not be confused with the Greek warrior Diomedes, son of Tydeus, from the Iliad. The Thracian Diomedes is described in Pseudo-Apollodorus as a son of Ares and Cyrene. His horses are fed human flesh, making their master’s cruelty inseparable from the horror of the animals themselves.

The Mares of Diomedes are generally described as four animals. Names commonly associated with them are Podargos, Xanthos, Lampon, and Deinos, although ancient sources are not entirely consistent about their names or even whether they should always be described as mares. Their defining characteristic is their consumption of human flesh. Later traditions also associate them with fire-breathing, but this detail should not be treated as universal across the ancient tradition.

Abderus is Heracles’ companion in the version preserved by Pseudo-Apollodorus. He is described as the son of Hermes and a native of Opus in Locris. After Abderus is killed by the horses, Heracles establishes Abdera beside his grave, giving the tragedy a permanent geographical memory.

Source Texts

The story of Steal the Mares of Diomedes does not survive as one completely fixed narrative. Ancient authors preserve different versions of the encounter, which is important when describing the myth accurately.

The fullest surviving account appears in the Bibliotheca, attributed to Pseudo-Apollodorus. It identifies the task as the eighth labor and describes Heracles sailing with volunteers, overpowering the horse keepers, taking the mares to the sea, and fighting the Bistones. Abderus is killed while guarding the horses, Diomedes is defeated, Abdera is founded, and the mares are eventually brought to Eurystheus. Eurystheus releases them, after which they reach Mount Olympus and are destroyed by wild beasts.

Diodorus Siculus provides another important version. His account emphasizes the confrontation with Diomedes and the mares’ eventual taming after consuming their master. Other ancient references appear in Euripides, Hyginus and later authors. The differences between these sources demonstrate that the Twelve Labors were not always transmitted as a single standardized story.

Modern scholarship, particularly the Oxford Handbook of Heracles, identifies three major traditions surrounding the labor. In one, Heracles uses one of Diomedes’ grooms as bait. In another, he captures the horses with companions and leaves them with Abderus while he fights Diomedes. In a third, Heracles uses Diomedes himself to distract the horses. These variations explain why modern retellings sometimes disagree about exactly how the king dies and how the mares are subdued.

Objective

The objective of the eighth labor was straightforward: Heracles had to steal the Mares of Diomedes and bring them to Mycenae. The difficulty lay in accomplishing that task without killing the animals. This distinction separates the labor from several earlier challenges. Heracles could destroy the Nemean Lion or defeat the Hydra, but the mares had to be captured alive. He therefore needed to enter the territory of the Bistones, overcome the horses’ handlers, secure the animals, survive the resistance of Diomedes and his people, and transport the mares back to Eurystheus.

The journey to Thrace also expanded the geographical scale of the Twelve Labors. Heracles was no longer dealing with a threat close to the familiar Greek world. He was entering a distant region that Greek literature frequently portrayed as a dangerous frontier. At the heart of the mission was control. Heracles had to take an animal associated with uncontrollable appetite and bring it back into the human world without becoming its victim.

Challenges

The first challenge was the mares themselves. These were not ordinary horses that could simply be bridled and led away. Their diet of human flesh made them exceptionally dangerous, and the fact that they were kept under restraint by their handlers suggests how difficult they were to control.

The second challenge was Diomedes and the Bistones. Heracles was not stealing the animals from an abandoned stable. He was entering the territory of a powerful ruler and provoking a military response. In Pseudo-Apollodorus, the Bistones pursue Heracles after he takes the horses, forcing him to fight while the animals remain under the care of Abderus.

The third challenge becomes personal when Abderus is killed. The horses drag him to his death while Heracles is away fighting. This episode gives the labor an emotional dimension that is absent from a simple monster-slaying story. Heracles wins, but his victory comes with an irreversible loss.

The final challenge is transportation. Capturing the mares is only half the task. Heracles still has to get them back to Mycenae. Their eventual calming after consuming human flesh allows him to complete the journey, but the different ancient versions show that Greek storytellers imagined several ways in which this could happen.

Outcome

Heracles defeats Diomedes and the Bistones and eventually brings the mares to Eurystheus. In the Pseudo-Apollodorus tradition, Diomedes is killed during the battle and his body is given to the horses, after which they become tame. Heracles then returns with them to Mycenae.

The death of Abderus creates another important outcome. Heracles founds Abdera beside his companion’s grave, turning personal grief into a lasting memorial. Later traditions also associate Abdera with athletic contests established in his honor.

The final fate of the mares also varies. In Pseudo-Apollodorus, Eurystheus releases them, and they eventually reach Mount Olympus, where wild beasts destroy them. Diodorus preserves a different tradition concerning their later history. The important point is that the horses do not remain a permanent threat after Heracles completes the labor.

The story therefore ends with more than the completion of a royal command. Diomedes’ violent system collapses, the mares are removed from his control, Abderus is commemorated, and Heracles moves one step closer to completing his larger cycle of labors.

Symbolism

The Mares of Diomedes can be read as symbols of violence that has been deliberately cultivated. The horse was strongly associated with power, status, warfare, speed, and nobility in the ancient Greek imagination. Turning such an animal into a man-eater represents a reversal of its expected role.

Diomedes is equally important. His cruelty is reflected in the creatures he controls. The king feeds human beings to his horses, while those same horses eventually consume their master in one of the myth’s clearest examples of poetic justice. Violence created as an instrument of power ultimately turns back upon the person who created it.

The myth also reflects Greek ideas about civilization and barbarism. Thrace is repeatedly presented in Greek literature as a distant and dangerous region, and the Bistones are portrayed through the Greek cultural lens as warlike outsiders. This should be understood as part of the mythology’s worldview rather than as an objective description of historical Thracian society.

Abderus adds another layer to the story. His death demonstrates that heroic victories have costs. Heracles may defeat the king and capture the mares, but he cannot undo the death of his companion. The founding of Abdera transforms that loss into memory.

At another level, the labor is about mastery rather than destruction. Heracles succeeds because he can bring an uncontrollable force under temporary control. The mares therefore fit a recurring pattern in Heracles’ mythology: the hero confronts something that exists outside accepted boundaries and forces it back into an ordered world.

Modern Influence

The Mares of Diomedes remain a powerful subject for artists and storytellers because the image of flesh-eating horses is immediately striking. Their unusual combination of beauty, strength, domestication, and predatory behavior has made them particularly adaptable to visual interpretations of Greek mythology.

The episode has appeared repeatedly in European art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several works depicting Hercules and the Mares of Diomedes, including a 1608 etching by Antonio Tempesta and a late-sixteenth-century German plaquette depicting Hercules and the carnivorous horses.

A particularly notable later interpretation is John G. de la Mothe Borglum’s bronze The Mares of Diomedes, produced in 1902–1904 and cast in 1905. The Metropolitan Museum notes that Borglum intended the group to communicate intense controlled action, with its connection to Greek mythology becoming secondary to the sculptor’s interest in movement. The work was acquired by the Museum in 1906. It is more accurate to describe it as a major early work by Borglum rather than claim that it was the first American sculpture acquired by the Metropolitan Museum.

Modern fantasy, literature, games, and educational retellings continue to use the mares because their story is unusually flexible. They can represent monstrous animals, uncontrolled violence, corrupted power, or the consequences of treating living beings as weapons. Contemporary adaptations may simplify the ancient narrative, but the central image remains recognizable: Heracles facing four horses whose greatest danger comes not from their appearance but from what they have been made to become.

The enduring appeal of Steal the Mares of Diomedes lies in that reversal. Heracles is not simply stronger than the horses. He must understand the source of their violence, survive the consequences of confronting it, and bring the creatures under control. That makes the eighth labor one of the more psychologically complex episodes in the Twelve Labors and one that continues to invite new interpretations.

Sources

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2026, May 25). Heracles: Myth, significance, labors, meaning, & facts. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Heracles

Perseus Digital Library. (n.d.). Apollodorus, Library, Book 2, Chapter 5, Section 8. Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0022:text:Library:book=2:chapter=5:section=8

Theoi Greek Mythology. (n.d.). Heracles and the Mares of Diomedes. https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/Z26.1H.html

Pantheon.org. (n.d.). The mares of Diomedes. Encyclopedia Mythica. https://pantheon.org/articles/m/mares_of_diomedes.html

Apollodorus. (1921). The library (J. G. Frazer, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published ca. 1st–2nd century CE)

Diodorus Siculus. (1935). The library of history: Books IV–VIII (C. H. Oldfather, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Pindar. (1997). Nemean odes, Isthmian odes, fragments (W. H. Race, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Leventhal, M. (1979). The new Heracles poem of Pindar. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 83, 49–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/311075