Sent out by King Eurystheus, Heracles must kill a lion that no arrow can pierce, a many-headed Hydra, and man-eating birds with bronze beaks, and also catch a hind that outruns arrows and a boar on a snowy mountain, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung without help.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
Jesse and Céline are now a couple with twin daughters, on a summer holiday in southern Greece. Before Midnight, the third and final film of Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, was shot in 15 days on the Peloponnese coast and turns one last night into a long, honest argument about love.
The route follows the film from an airport farewell to a writer's house, a castle, a harbour town and a resort hotel. The filmmakers have named few exact addresses, so the Pylos and hotel stops are approximate.
Before the Minotaur, there was the road. Theseus grew up in Troezen, never knowing his father; when he was old enough to lift a great stone and take the sword and sandals hidden beneath it, he set out to find him in Athens. The safe way was by sea. He chose the coast road round the Saronic Gulf instead, which was infested with bandits, and dealt with each one in the way they had treated travellers.
The route follows the six labours of that journey as Plutarch tells them in his Life of Theseus, written around AD 100 from much older tales. The places are real; the giants and robbers belong to myth, and several sites are traditional guesses.
