20 questions on the twelve labours of Hercules — the Nemean Lion, the Hydra, the Augean stables, the Hesperides and Cerberus.
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Heracles — Hercules to the Romans — is the most famous strongman in Western myth, and his twelve labours are a punishment, not an adventure. Driven mad by Hera, he killed his own wife and children. The penance the oracle at Delphi imposed was to serve Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for twelve years and do whatever he was told.
What he was told was mostly impossible. Strangle a lion whose hide no blade can pierce. Kill a swamp serpent that grows two heads for every one you cut off. Catch a hind sacred to Artemis without harming it, which took a year of walking. Clean a cattle yard fouled by a thousand beasts in a single day — solved by tearing down a wall and rerouting two rivers through it. Steal the man-eating mares of a Thracian king, fetch the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, drive home the cattle of the three-bodied giant Geryon from the far edge of the world.
The last two are the strangest. Atlas holds up the sky, so Heracles takes the weight on his own shoulders to send him after the golden apples — then has to trick him into taking it back. And Hades permits the theft of Cerberus on one condition: no weapons, bare hands only. There were meant to be ten labours. Eurystheus disqualified two on technicalities, and that is the only reason anyone says twelve.