Nessus - Blog Posts
Nessus from Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
Where is the second head?
how come each one of these looks more sinister than the last
Fun Fact:
History's greatest hero deserved better...
The ending to Hercules' story is quite a downer. When Hercules was traveling with his new bride Deianeira, they came across a flooded river and the centaur Nessus offered to carry Deianeira across while Hercules swam in front of them. Only when Hercules got to the shore, he saw that Nessus had turned around and tried running off with his wife. So the hero took out one of his poisoned arrows and sent it ripping through Nessus' chest. Refusing to die unavenged, Nessus told Deianeira that she could use his bloody shirt to cast a love spell on Hercules if he ever got bored with her. And years later, she gave it a try, without realizing the shirt had also absorbed the poison from her husband's arrows and so the moment Hercules was tricked into putting the shirt on, his body cried out in pain. The poison entered his bloodstream, causing it to boil and hiss and the tunic grafted itself to his skin. So the only way to get it off was by ripping off his own flesh. Left with no other option, the immortal Heracles made a funeral pyre to burn away his physical form and soon after, his spirit was welcomed to Mt. Olympus.