the labors of Hercules

When Hercules sought to cleanse himself of a terrible crime, the oracle bound him to the service of King Eurystheus, a small and fearful man who envied the hero's strength. To be rid of him — and perhaps to see him die trying — the king set him not one impossible task but a whole chain of them, twelve in all, each meant to be the last.

He was sent first against the Nemean lion, then against the many-headed Hydra, whose necks grew back two for every one he cut. He chased a golden-horned deer for a full year, captured a monstrous boar alive, and shot down the man-eating birds of a poisoned lake. No sooner had he returned from one ordeal than the king was waiting with the next.

They grew stranger and further-flung as they went. He fetched the belt of the queen of the Amazons, and the cattle of a three-bodied giant from an island at the edge of the world. He gathered the golden apples of a garden guarded by a sleepless dragon. And for the last and worst, he went down into the land of the dead itself to bring back its three-headed hound.

Twelve times he set out believing the end was near, and twelve times the finish line moved. It was not the strength of any single labour that made his name, but the sheer, unrelenting succession of them — one impossible thing after another, with no rest between.

So the labors of Hercules names exactly that: not a single hard job, but a long series of them, each punishing in its own way, that a person must grind through one after another before the work is finally done.