Alcmene

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Alcmene (Greek Alkmēnē) is the mortal woman of Greek myth who bore Heracles to Zeus, and who stands in the tradition as the human parent of its greatest hero. Daughter of Electryon, king of Mycenae, she married Amphitryon and followed him into exile after he accidentally killed her father. The myth makes her wholly mortal — there is no divine blood in her — which is precisely the point: the strongest of heroes is, on his mother’s side, entirely human.

The story for which she is remembered is one of deception. While Amphitryon was away at war, Zeus took his exact likeness and came to Alcmene, who received him as her husband returning from the campaign. The god is said to have lengthened that single night to the span of three. When the true Amphitryon arrived soon after, she conceived again. From the doubled night she bore twins: Heracles, the son of Zeus, and Iphicles, the son of Amphitryon — born together yet of two different fathers, a motif the Greeks called heteropaternal superfecundation and told as a marvel. Hera, the wronged wife of Zeus, pursued the child from before his birth, delaying the delivery so that the kingship promised to Zeus’s line should fall to another; the hostility of the goddess shadows the whole of Heracles’ life.

The episode is among the oldest in the surviving Greek record. It is treated in the Shield of Heracles attributed to Hesiod and in the fragmentary Catalogue of Women; later it furnished the plot of comedies and tragedies now mostly lost, and reached Rome as the framework of Plautus’s Amphitruo, where the divine impersonation is played for farce. Across these tellings Alcmene is drawn with notable consistency as faithful and unwitting — deceived rather than complicit — a characterization that lets the tradition keep both her virtue and the scandal of her son’s conception.

What became of her after death varied by source. One strand holds that she was spirited away to the Isles of the Blessed and there married Rhadamanthus, the just judge of the dead; another, reported by Plutarch, that her body vanished from the bier and a stone was found in its place, a sign read as translation among the gods. Such endings reflect the impulse, common around the parents of heroes, to grant the mortal mother a fate raised above the ordinary human one.

She received cult as well as story. Sanctuaries and a heroön are recorded at Thebes, the city of Heracles’ birth, and elsewhere in the Greek world, where she was honoured as the mother of the hero rather than worshipped as a goddess in her own right — the religious counterpart to her place in the myth. The two roles fit together: in the narrative and at the shrine alike, Alcmene is the human point at which the divine entered the line of Heracles.

→ Related: Rhadamanthus · Thetis · Lamia