page_title: Omphale
section_title: Heracles and Omphale
hierarchical_section_title: Omphale / Mythology / Heracles and Omphale
caption_attribution_description: English: Hercules and Omphale. Detail of The Twelve Labours Roman mosaic from Llíria (Valencia, Spain). It shows Hercules wearing women's clothing and holding a ball of wool (left), and Omphale wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion and carrying Hercules' olive-wood club (right). Español: Hércules y Onfalia. Detalle del mosaico romano de Los Doce Trabajos de Liria (Valencia, España). Muestra a Hércules vestido con ropaje femenino y sujetando un ovillo de lana (izquierda), y a Onfalia con la piel del León de Nemea y la maza de madera de olivo de Hércules (derecha).
context_page_description: In Greek mythology, Omphale was queen of the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor. Diodorus Siculus provides the first appearance of the Omphale theme in literature, though Aeschylus was aware of the episode. The Greeks did not recognize her as a goddess: the undisputed etymological connection with omphalos, the world-navel, has never been made clear. In her best-known myth, she is the mistress of the hero Heracles during a year of required servitude, a scenario that offered writers and artists opportunities to explore sexual roles and erotic themes.
context_section_description: In one of many Greek variations on the theme of penalty for "inadvertent" murder, for his murder of Iphitus, the great hero Heracles, whom the Romans identified as Hercules, was, by the command of the Delphic Oracle Xenoclea, remanded as a slave to Omphale for the period of a year, the compensation to be paid to Eurytus, who refused it. (According to Diodorus, Iphitus' sons accepted it.)
  The theme, inherently a comic inversion of sexual roles, is not fully illustrated in any surviving text from Classical Greece. Plutarch, in his vita of Pericles, 24, mentions lost comedies of Kratinos and Eupolis, which alluded to the contemporary capacity of Aspasia in the household of Pericles, and to Sophocles in The Trachiniae 
  
  it was shameful for Heracles to serve an Oriental woman in this fashion, but there are many late Hellenistic and Roman references in texts and art to Heracles being forced to do women's work and even wear women's clothing and hold a basket of wool while Omphale and her maidens did their spinning. Omphale even wore the skin of the Nemean Lion and carried Heracles' olive-wood club. No full early account survives to supplement the later vase-paintings.
  But it was also during his stay in Lydia that Heracles captured the city of the Itones and enslaved them, killed Syleus who forced passersby to hoe his vineyard, and captured the Cercopes. He buried the body of Icarus and took part in the Calydonian Boar Hunt and the Argonautica.
  After some time, Omphale freed Heracles and took him as her husband. They travelled to the grove of Dionysus and planned to celebrate the rites of Bacchus at dawn. Heracles slept alone in a bed covered with the clothes of Omphale. The Greek god Pan hoped to have his way with Omphale and crept naked into the bed of Heracles who threw Pan to the floor and laughed.
caption: Hercules and Omphale, detail of a Roman mosaic from Llíria (Spain), third century.
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