Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, had found Iole, Hercules’ lover, a good confidante. Since Hercules’ apotheosis, and at the hero’s instruction, Hyllus had married Iole, and she was now pregnant with his child.

This reminds Alcmena of her own pregnancy with Hercules, that had been cursed by Juno to be a difficult one. She was in labour for seven days and nights, in agony, and called on Lucina and the multiple Roman deities of childbirth to deliver her child. But Lucina had received instructions from Juno, and would not let the labour progress.

Lucina sat on an altar by the door, her legs crossed and her hands linked, preventing delivery. One of Alcmena’s most loyal maids, Galanthis, took matters into her own hands, and announced to Lucina that Hercules had been born. The goddess was so shocked that she jumped up, parting her hands, so allowing Alcmena’s labour to conclude at last. But Galanthis ridiculed Lucina for this. The goddess seized Galanthis by her hair and dragged her along the ground. As the maid struggled to rise she was transformed into a weasel, and Hercules entered the world.

I’ve been unable to find any paintings of this story, but there are several engravings.

Virgil Solis engraved Alcmena’s Labour at some time around 1550. Alcmena is in the left foreground, in the throes of her protracted labour, with four women attending to her. In the background, two women are talking, and at the far right, Lucina is dragging Galanthis to the ground by her hair. There’s also a weasel walking past.

Subsequent engravings have drawn on this. Some show Lucina and Galanthis fighting in the background, but most omit the weasel. One other comes close to showing the story as told by Ovid.

The unknown engraver who made Alcmena Giving Birth to Hercules: Juno, Jealous of the Child, Attempts to Delay the Childbirth, in about 1606, has an almost identical group around Alcmena. The same two women are talking in the background, but the weasel is prominent.

Other stories about Hercules as a baby and young child, which Ovid doesn’t tell here, have been much better represented in paintings. According to older Greek myths, the sons of Jupiter could only become divine if they were suckled at Juno’s breast. Shortly after the birth of Hercules, Mercury took the infant to Juno, who put him to her breast. When she realised who the baby was, she pulled him away, and the excess milk released as a result sprayed over the heavens, forming the Milky Way.

There are two outstanding paintings showing this unusual scene.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way from about 1575 shows the infant Hercules being pulled away by an anonymous assistant, with fine streams of milk gushing upwards to generate individual stars. In the background, Jupiter’s eagle appears to have a crablike object in its talons, perhaps representing the constellation of the Crab (Cancer), and Juno’s peacocks are at the right.

Just a few years before his death, Rubens painted an even more wonderful version, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-37). Jupiter sits in the background on the left, seemingly bored. Juno’s milk arcs out from her left breast over the heavens, and her peacocks look distressed.

Other myths tell that Juno was still furious that Hercules had been born, so she placed two serpents in his cradle, in an attempt to kill the child. Hercules’ mortal twin Iphicles (not mentioned by Ovid) screamed at the snakes, bringing their father Amphitryon running. He found Hercules strangling the serpents with his bare hands: proof that he was indeed the son of Jupiter.

Several fine paintings seize this unique opportunity to show an infant strangling serpents.

This painting from the mid seventeenth century, attributed to Bernardino Mei, has been neutrally titled Scene from the Infancy of Hercules. Rather than let his father discover the baby’s strange abilities, it’s Alcmena who has come running into his nursery.

Pompeo Batoni’s account, The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle from 1743, succeeds because it shows so well Hercules’ parents, disturbed from their bed, discovering their baby despatching the snakes, all by the light of an oil lamp.

The third version of this story comes from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1785 to paint her a history subject of his choice. Reynolds thought that he could flatter the Empress of Russia, perhaps, and produced this preparatory study for the heart of his final work.

The Infant Hercules was painted between about 1785-88, then exhibited at the Royal Academy before being sent to Russia. Reynolds is reputed to have used a real baby as his model, and later reused this for a painting of Puck as a baby.

Reynolds’ finished painting of The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) loses the baby among its elaborate supporting cast. It has also suffered problems with deterioration in its paint layer, a common issue with many of Reynold’s paintings.

There are signs that society is moving away from the progressive left’s often strict expectations about how to discuss culture and politics.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

With Medea finally consigned to oblivion and Theseus united with his father, King Aegeus of Athens, Ovid’s Metamorphoses rushes on to a little-known group of myths explaining the origins of Minos and the fearsome Myrmidons who were later to fight for Achilles in the war against Troy.

The delight of King Aegeus in meeting his son at last proved short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there. When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, Aeacus its king refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.

King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague that had almost destroyed the people of Aegina. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably also named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague sent against the people of the island. Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like one of the many outbreaks of the plague that have struck Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.

Aeacus saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being transformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh. They hailed Aeacus as king, and immediately went on to labour hard on the land and to become the fearsome band of warriors known as Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex).

Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, from where Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them with him to the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.

The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.

That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, showing Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.

If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he, together with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.

Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.

Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.

Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a thoroughly radical vision.

Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.