While walking through the wilderness, Heracles was set upon by the Dryopians. He punished them by tying them to a stick with their faces pointing downward.

It was at that time that the cercopes, mischievous wood spirits, stole Heracles' weapons. Some sources mention a son fathered on Omphale who is variously named. After some time, Omphale freed Heracles and married him. He was forced to do women's work and wear women's clothes, while she wore the skin of the Nemean Lion and carried his olive-wood club. As penalty for a murder, Heracles was her slave. Omphale was a queen or princess of Lydia. One account of the origin of the Milky Way is that Zeus had tricked Hera into nursing the infant Heracles: discovering who he was, she had pulled him from her breast, and a spurt of her milk formed the smear across the sky that can be seen to this day. Heracles throttled a single snake in each hand and was found by his nurse playing with their limp bodies as if they were child's toys. A few months after he was born, Hera sent two serpents to kill him as a he lay in his cot. Heracles was named in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. Hera turned her into a weasel and forced her to give birth by laying eggs through her mouth. She would have permanently delayed the birth had she not been foiled by Galanthis, her servant, who told Hera that she had already delivered the baby. Once the oath was sworn, Hera hurried to Alcmene's dwelling and slowed the birth by sitting crosslegged with her clothing tied in knots. While Alcmene was pregnant with Heracles, Hera, who was already informed of Zeus' adultery, persuaded Zeus to swear an oath on the night Heracles was to be born that the child born that night to a member of the House of Perseus would be High King.

A major factor in the tragedies surrounding Heracles stem from Hera's hatred of him as the wife of Zeus she often hated his mortal offspring because they were living proof of Zeus' constant affairs, and she especially hated Heracles.

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