Chapter 13: Herakles
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♠ ApB 2.6.3 – Apollodoros, Bibliotheke (Library)
but Hercules served Omphale as a slave, and in the course of his servitude he seized and bound the Cercopes at Ephesus. Greek Text
♠ DS 4.31.7 – Diodoros Siculus, Library of History
As for the Cercopes, for instance, as they are called, who were robbing and committing many evil acts, some of them he put to death and others he took captive and delivered in chains to Omphalê. Greek Text
♠ Nonnos p. 375 Westermann [Narrationes 39] – Mythographoi. Scriptores poeticae historiae Graeci, ed. A. Westermann. Braunschweig 1843.
♠ Souda: Kerkopes
♦ Athens, National Museum Perachora 2542: Middle Corinthian cup fragment with Herakles (named) and one of suspended Kerkopes (with name, possibly to be restored as Eurybatos)
Digital LIMC and link to entries in printed LIMC
♦ Berlin, Antikensammlung F766: Corinthian pinax with Herakles and Kerkopes
♦ Berlin, Antikensammlung F767: Corinthian pinax with Herakles and one of Kerkopes, who may be suspended from Herakles’ arm
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Antike Denkmäler vol. 1 (1891) pl. 7.22
Digital LIMC and link to entry in printed LIMC
♦ Olympia, Museum B975: bronze shield-band with Herakles holding club while balancing pole (ending in snake heads), from which the two Kerkopes are suspended
E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder. Olympische Forschungen 2 (1950) pl. 56
Digital LIMC and link to entries in printed LIMC
♦ Paestum, Museum: metope from Heraion at Foce del Sele with Herakles with club carrying Kerkopes on a pole
Digital LIMC and link to entries in printed LIMC
♦ Palermo, Museo Nazionale Archeologico 3920B: metope from Temple C at Selinous with Herakles with a club, carrying the bound Kerkopes
Digital LIMC and link to entry in printed LIMC
♦ Oxford, Ashmolean Museum V249: Attic black-figure lekythos with pleading woman (nymph Theia, mother of Kerkopes?), Herakles in lionskin and with club, carrying two Kerkopes by a pole, and old man (Okeanos, father of Kerkopes and of Theia?)
P. Gardner, Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Ashmolean Museum (1893) pl. 8
Beazley Archive Pottery Database
Digital LIMC and link to entry in printed LIMC
♠ Pherekydes 3F77 FGrH – Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 1, p. 81, ed. F. Jacoby. 2d ed. Leiden 1957.
♠ Kratinos, Archilochoi fr 13 PCG – Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. R. Kassel and C. Austin. Berlin.
♠ Hdt 7.216 – Herodotos, Historiae
The course of the path is as follows: it begins at the river Asopus as it flows through the ravine, and this mountain and the path have the same name, Anopaea. This Anopaea stretches along the ridge of the mountain and ends at Alpenus, the Locrian city nearest to Malis, near the rock called Blackbuttock and the seats of the Cercopes, where it is narrowest. Greek Text
♠ Xenosagoras, Peri Neson (About the Islands) 240F28 – Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 2, ed. F. Jacoby, 2d ed. Leiden 1957.
♠ Met 14.90-100 – Ovid, Metamorphoses
The father of the gods abhorred the frauds
and perjuries of the Cercopians
and for the crimes of that bad treacherous race,
transformed its men to ugly animals,
appearing unlike men, although like men.
He had contracted and had bent their limbs,
and flattened out their noses, bent back towards
their foreheads; he had furrowed every face
with wrinkles of old age, and made them live
in that spot, after he had covered all
their bodies with long yellow ugly hair.
Besides all that, he took away from them
the use of language and control of tongues,
so long inclined to dreadful perjury;
and left them always to complain of life
and their ill conduct in harsh jabbering. Greek Text
♠ Lyk 688-93 – Lykophron, Alexandra
Thereafter the island that crushed the back of the Giants and the fierce storm of Typhon, shall receive him journeying alone: an island boiling with flame, wherein the king of the immortals established an ugly race of apes, in mockery of all who raised war against the sons of Cronus. Greek Text
♠ Zenobios 1.5 – Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum 1 p. 2, ed. E. L. Leutsch and F. G. Schneidewin. Göttingen 1839.
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Artistic sources edited by R. Ross Holloway, Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor Emeritus, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown Univ., and by Frances Van Keuren, Prof. Emerita, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Univ. of Georgia, April 2025
Literary sources edited by Elena Bianchelli, Retired Senior Lecturer of Classical Languages and Culture, Univ. of Georgia, November 2023.
