text: why did heracles preform the twelve tasks?   heracles married king creon's daughter, megara. however, hera drove heracles into a fit of madness during which he killed his wife and children. upon realizing what he had done, he fled to the oracle of delphi. unbeknownst to him, the oracle was guided by hera. he was directed to serve king eurystheus for 12 years and perform any task which he required, resulting in the twelve labours of hercules.  the twelve labours (greek: dodekathlos) of heracles (latin: hercules) are a series of archaic episodes connected by a later continuous narrative, concerning a penance carried out by herakles, the greatest of the greek heroes. the establishment of a fixed cycle of twelve labours was attributed by the greeks to an epic poem (now lost) written by a certain peisandros of rhodes, perhaps to be dated about 600 bce (burkert).  as they survive, the labours of herakles are not told in any single place, but must be reassembled from many sources. ruck and staples (pp 169–170) assert that there is no one way to interpret the labours, but that six were sited in the peleponnesos, culminating with the rededication of olympia and six others, part of the same sequence, took the hero farther afield. in each case, the pattern was the same: herakles was sent to kill or subdue, or to fetch back for hera's representative eurystheus a magical animal or plant. "the sites selected were all previously strongholds of hera or the 'goddess' and were entrances to the netherworld" (p 169).