This feud of Heracles was a famous theme; the legend included the fairy story of Periclymenus, brother of Nestor. Poseidon had given him the gift of taking all sorts of shapes, but when he settled on the chariot of Heracles in the shape of a bee, Athene pointed out the bee to Heracles, who shot it. In _Iliad_, v. 393, we learn that Heracles once wounded Hades and Hera. The later Pylians conceived Nestor's wounding of Hades to have occurred at their town, when the hero attacked the household of Neleus. Nestor, in the passage quoted, says nothing about the help of Hades on this occasion, but Dione (v. 397) says that Heracles wounded Hades ἐν πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι, "in Pylos among the dead." Aristarchus took this to mean _in the gate, in the country of the dead._ The incident would be part of the journey of Heracles to hell, to bring back "the dog" Cerberus. On this showing Homer is not saying that Hades fought vainly against Heracles in his raid on Nestor's town. But Homer never elsewhere uses pylos for "a gate." The affair is confusing, but later legend associated Heracles's feud against Neleus with the rites of purification. Nestor does not tell us, but the Venetian scholiast on his speech does tell us that Neleus had refused to purify Heracles for the murder of Iphitus, his guest, under trust.[28] Was the Homeric poet of Nestor's speech (xi. 693) ignorant of this "cause of wrath," and is it a later invention after the custom of purification came in; or did Homer "expurgate" a rite which he found in pre-Achaean tradition? The certain fact is that the society for which the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ was composed did not practise the sanguinary rite, and took no interest in it. In Mr. Ridgeway's theory, Heracles is not Achaean, he is Pelasgic. If, then, the poet, whether Achaean or, in Mr. Ridgeway's view, a Pelasgian minstrel of an Achaean lord, adopted Heracles from Pelasgian legend, and if that legend spoke of purification, the poet ignored it, as a thing not in the manners of his Achaean audience. [1] Mr. Murray takes this view, _R. G. E_. p. 64; but there is no trace of such ideas in Homer. [2] _Odyssey_, xxii. 407-416. [3] Monro, Note to _Odyssey_, xxii. 408. [4] _Odyssey_, iii. 420-472. [5] _Iliad_, i. 447-468. [6] _Iliad_, x. 291-294. Mr. Murray compares Nestor's "timid, religious, almost tender sacrifice of the ox" with "the habitual sacrifices of the Iliad," which "seem like the massacres of a slaughter-house, followed by the gorging of pirates." In his opinion Nestor's cow was a kind of member of the family, "the common blood running in the veins of all," while the alien cattle at Troy are not the most distant relations of the invaders (_R. G. E._ pp. 59-65). Homer knows nothing of these ideas, as we see; all depends on the degree of solemnity and on the occasion of the sacrifice. If it be solemn, the same rites are used in Troyland during war as in Pylos during peace. [7] _Iliad_, vi. 308-310. [8] xxii. 170-172.