Given the fact that Moore’s allusions are famously crucial to an understanding of her poems, and that she very pointedly references Hercules and his second labor in “The Paper Nautilus,” it behooves us to look at this famous Greek tale.
The goddess Hera hated Hercules because he was the son of her husband Zeus and another woman, Alkmene. Zeus boasted that his son would rule over all of Greece, so Hera not only tried to kill the baby Hercules but, once this failed, forced the adult Hercules to lose his mind and kill his own wife and children. When Hercules realized what he had done he asked Apollo what he could do to rectify this, and the god’s oracle said he would serve Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns and Mycenae, for twelve years.
During this time Hercules had to perform twelve labors (initially ten), but he had the favor of Athena and Hermes who helped him when he needed it. At the conclusion of these labors Hercules was enshrined a Greek hero and an embodiment of pathos.
The twelve labors included bringing back the skin of the Nemean lion; bringing the King the hind of Ceryneia; bringing the Erymanthian boar; cleaning the Augean stables; driving away the Stymphalian birds; getting rid of the Cretan bull; bringing back the man-eating horses of Diomedes; bringing back the belt of Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons; bringing back Geryon’s cattle; bringing Zeus’s golden apples; and kidnapping Cerberus, the dog who guarded Hades.
The second one of these labors was to kill the Lernean Hydra, a massive and malevolent serpent with nine heads and poisonous venom that terrorized the people who lived near it. One of the heads was immortal and thus even more difficult to vanquish. Hercules brought his nephew Iolaus with him. At Lerna and near the spring of Amymone they found the hydra, which Hercules lured out by shooting flaming arrows at it. When it emerged Hercules grabbed it, but it coiled around his foot. Hercules tried to club the Hydra's heads, but those he smashed were replaced; some renderings of the story say three heads grew back in place. The hydra’s crab came forth and bit Hercules’s foot. Hercules clubbed the crab and called for Iolaus, and the young man torched the necks of the hydra as he cut them off, so that they could not grow back. Hercules destroyed the mortal heads and then chopped off the ninth and immortal head, burying it on the side of the road and covering it with a rock. He slit open the corpse and dipped his own arrows in its poisonous blood to use later on his enemies.
Unfortunately, Eurystheus claimed that since Iolaus had helped, this task was not technically completed; this added one of the two extra labors on to Hercules' list of tasks.
