The Nemean Lion belonged to the family of monsters born from Typhon and Echidna. Hesiod's account is compressed but powerful. Echidna, the half-nymph and half-serpent mate of Typhon, bore the two-headed dog Orthrus. Orthrus in turn fathered the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion upon the Chimera, the fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. Later mythographers simplified the genealogy and called the lion the direct son of Typhon and Echidna. Other traditions gave it an even more remote origin: Selene, goddess of the Moon, shook the lion from her body at Hera's command and brought it forth in Nemea.

Hera's role links the beast to her hatred of Heracles. The lion was her instrument. She raised it, nursed it or sent it into Nemea to ruin the land that Zeus had given her. Its territory spread around the valley between Mycenae, Nemea and Cleonae. Ancient tradition named the mountains around its lair Tretos, the Pierced Mountain, because a cleft ran through its base and formed the lion's cave, and Apesas, another summit sacred to Zeus. The animal ruled the roads and fields as though it were king over Tretos, Apesas and Nemea. Herds vanished, farmers abandoned the land and no hunter returned.

The lion's skin made it unkillable by ordinary means. Heracles' arrows bounced from it. Spears failed. Stones left no wound. Its claws were sharper than bronze and could tear through shields and armour. The creature appeared to have no vulnerable point. Its size and ferocity completed the illusion of invulnerability. The Nemean Lion was not merely difficult to wound. It seemed to stand outside the ordinary laws by which a mortal enemy could be defeated.

Heracles was sent against it by Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, whose cowardice and hostility governed the entire labour cycle. On the way to Nemea the hero stopped at Cleonae and was received by the poor but generous Molorchus. The man was preparing a sacrifice, but Heracles asked him to wait thirty days. If Heracles returned alive from the lion, they would sacrifice together to Zeus Soter, Zeus the Saviour. If he did not return, Molorchus was to offer the sacrifice to Heracles himself as a hero. The agreement turned hospitality into a memorial and marked the labour as a journey into possible death. Heracles returned after the thirty days had just passed, and the two men sacrificed to Zeus.

The cave had two entrances. Heracles blocked one with stones or earth, sealing half the labyrinth before he entered the other. He found the lion asleep or returning from its feeding. In the common account, he first shot arrows, but the shafts sprang back from the hide. He attacked with his club, but the weapon shattered or failed. He then closed with the monster and caught it around the neck. The fight became a contest of strength. Heracles pressed the lion's throat until the breath stopped within it.

Theocritus gives the battle in a longer, more dramatic form. Heracles finds the lion at midday, its mane and chest spattered with blood from its latest kill. He looses three arrows, and each falls harmless to the ground. The lion rages, arches like a bow and springs. Heracles strikes its skull with his club, but the wild olive staff splits upon the invulnerable head. Before the beast can recover, Heracles throws away his useless bow, seizes the lion by the scruff of the neck, locks his knees against its body and strangles it. Even then, the hide cannot be removed by knife or stone. A god inspires him to use the lion's own claw to cut through the pelt.

A stranger tradition says the lion bit off one of Heracles' fingers during the struggle. The loss would not diminish his strength, but later Greeks remembered the finger through a stone lion raised as its tomb. Such a memorial gave the hero's first labour a physical wound and a local landmark. The lion may have been invulnerable, but the hero who defeated it was still mortal.

After the death came the second labour of the first labour: removing the skin. Heracles tried an iron blade, stone and every sharp tool, but nothing could cut the hide. Athena finally showed him the solution. The only thing sharp enough to pierce the lion's pelt was the lion's own claw. Heracles cut the body free, pulled off the golden skin and draped it over himself as armour and cloak. The head became a cap whose jaws rested above his forehead. The pelt was large enough to cover his whole body and light enough to carry in battle. What had once resisted every weapon now protected the man who killed it.

Heracles returned to Eurystheus carrying or wearing the dead lion. The king was terrified by the sight. If a man could defeat an animal that no weapon could harm, what defence could a palace offer? Eurystheus ordered that Heracles should henceforth leave his trophies outside the city and speak to him only from beyond the walls. He concealed himself in a bronze jar whenever the hero approached. The fear of Eurystheus made Heracles' victory complete: the lion had made him not only stronger but publicly dangerous.

The lion skin became the central symbol of Heracles' identity. In art, the hero appears with club in one hand and the jaws of the Nemean Lion framing his face. On the metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Heracles wrestles the lion with Athena at his side, the divine helper who watches the first labour begin. The flayed pelt gives the hero a second skin. He enters battle wearing the monster he defeated, turning the beast's invulnerability into his own.

The skin also marks the beginning of Heracles' passage from brute strength to heroism. He does not overcome the lion by piercing its hide but by finding a place where strength still works. The throat can be crushed even when the body cannot be cut. Intelligence discovers the loophole in invulnerability. After Nemea, Heracles approaches every labour with a different question: not How do I wound it? but Where is it vulnerable? What tool does it provide? What trick will the monster itself make possible?

Hera's lion could not remain only a corpse. In the heavens, the constellation Leo preserved its shape. Ancient mythographers said that Zeus placed the lion among the stars because of its strength and nobility, or that Hera gave it immortality after its death. The lion's brightest star, later called Regulus, became the heart of the beast. The constellation rises with the summer heat, when Sirius burns the sky and the lion's fiery nature seems appropriate. Seneca calls it Heracles' first toil, glowing with rage in heaven. The Nemean Lion thus gained the immortality Hera had tried to use against the hero.

The sanctuary of Nemea preserved a different memory. The Nemean Games, held in honour of Zeus, were connected in ancient tradition both to the funeral of Opheltes, the infant whose death caused the games to be founded, and to Heracles' victory over the lion. The games included footraces, wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon, chariot racing and musical contests. Victorious athletes wore wreaths of wild celery, a plant also connected with death and mourning. The same valley that had feared the lion became a gathering place for Greek competition.

Pausanias still saw the place where the lion's cave was said to lie, fifteen stades from the sanctuary of Nemean Zeus. He also describes paintings and dedications at Olympia showing Heracles' exploit against the lion. The landscape retained the story. The cleft in Mount Tretos, the cave, the mountain names and the Nemean sanctuary joined myth to geography. Travellers could walk through a valley whose rocks were said to remember the beast.

Ancient artists returned to the scene constantly. On sixth-century BCE black-figure vases, Heracles faces the lion frontally, grasping its throat or tearing its jaws. In the fifth century, red-figure artists render the struggle with tighter anatomy and more violence. Roman mosaics show the lion as a massive cat locked against the hero's body. Renaissance and Baroque painters fill the scene with golden light, open mouths, muscular backs and flying sand. Francisco de Zurbarán, Rubens and countless later painters turn the first labour into an image of mankind conquering the king of beasts.

The lion itself remains unusual among Greek monsters. It has no extra heads, serpent limbs, wings or magical transformations. Its power lies in a single impossible property: invulnerability. The story therefore turns upon a problem of method. A normal beast can be pierced. A normal giant can be clubbed. The Nemean Lion resists every known weapon, and Heracles must defeat it without the technologies that define heroic combat. His hands become the weapon that the gods cannot defeat.

The pelt gives the victory a second meaning. By wearing the lion, Heracles absorbs its power. The cloak protects him, identifies him and announces that he has crossed the threshold into heroic status. Every later scene that shows him in the lion skin carries Nemea forward with him. When he fights the Hydra, captures the Erymanthian Boar, descends to Hades or wrestles Antaeus, the first labour is already present on his shoulders.

The Nemean Lion also opens the cycle with a test of mortality. The monster is nearly perfect in defence but has one flaw: it must breathe. The throat, not the skin, becomes its weakness. Heracles' labour is to find the living point inside an apparently unbreakable exterior. His success anticipates the pattern of the entire cycle, in which each seemingly impossible monster possesses a secret passage that intelligence can discover.

The lion survives in the sky, in art, in athletic memory and in language. Its name gives Leo the mythical weight of the king of beasts. Its skin gives Heracles the emblem that has identified him for more than two thousand years. Its defeat gives Greek mythology one of its cleanest statements of heroism: where weapons fail, strength must become thought, and where strength alone fails, thought must find the body beneath the armour.