Heracles and the Stymphalian Birds
Heracles Stop 4 of 9
In brief
- For his sixth labor, Heracles had to drive away a flock of man-eating birds with bronze beaks and claws nesting at Lake Stymphalia.
- The birds were too numerous to fight directly and hidden deep within the marsh's thick reeds, so Heracles needed another way to flush them out.
- Athena gave him bronze rattles forged by Hephaestus; their deafening noise startled the birds into flight, letting Heracles shoot them down as they scattered.
At Lake Stymphalia in Arcadia, a flock of monstrous birds had gathered in such numbers that they blotted out the sun when they took flight. Their feathers were said to be sharp as arrows and could be launched at will, and their beaks and claws were forged of solid bronze, strong enough to tear through flesh and armor alike. Worse, they were rumored to feed on human flesh.
For his sixth labor, Heracles was sent to drive the birds from the lake for good. But the marsh surrounding Stymphalia was so dense with reeds and mud that no one could wade in far enough to reach the birds' nests, and the flock was far too vast to fight one at a time even if he could.
The goddess Athena, watching his struggle, brought him a pair of bronze rattles crafted by Hephaestus, the god of the forge. Heracles climbed a nearby mountain overlooking the lake and shook the rattles with all his strength, filling the valley with a deafening, unbearable noise.
Panicked by the sound, the birds burst from the reeds in a single terrified mass and took to the sky. As they wheeled overhead in the open air, Heracles shot down as many as he could with his poisoned arrows, and the rest fled Stymphalia entirely, never to return.
