Of the many open questions about the corpus of ancient
Greek poetry that is attributed to Hesiod, there are none more
intriguing than those that pertain to the wonderful shard-pile of
broken verses and narrative allusions which is all that remains of
Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women and the Ehoeaoe. Only
four of the hundreds of fragments in the heap actually have the
incipit E hoi e... (Or like her...), and of those four,
only one is of more than three lines’ length. That one is of
course the so-called Aspis (Herculis Scutum). Its subject,
the treatment of that subject, features of its language, and its
comparatively great length (480 verses) all argue against the
poem’s authenticity as a whole, and no more than some of the first
fifty-six of its hexameters are usually accepted as even possibly
of true Hesiodic origin (whomever or whatever that may mean).
The first lines of the Scutum purport to be about Alkmene,
the mother of Herakles; but in fact they more concern her
husband, Amphitryon, by whose name Herakles was known
patronymically throughout his mortal lifetime (although in reality
it was Zeus who had sired him).
Like many another displaced man of early Greek heroic legend, Amphitryon was obliged to leave his native land because he had killed someone. He thus belonged to a common type, that of the refugee homicide, like Patroklos in the Iliad (XXIII 81 ff), or in the Odyssey Theoklymenos (xv 222 ff) and even Odysseus himself as he lies to Athena in Book Thirteen. Amphitryon belongs to this same type, but he is a unique multiform of it in one respect: his wife Alkmene willingly accompanied him into his exile, despite the fact that it was her own father whom her husband had killed. Hesiod (or whoever it was who composed these lines in the Hesiodic corpus) was presumably cataloguing her among the many other mortal women whom Zeus had sometime loved when he sketched how Alkmene went with Amphitryon to his place of refuge. Thus Alkmene too, no less than her husband, belonged to a common type (i.e., a paramour of Zeus), but she too had her own unique destiny within her type:
Or such as she, who having left the house
and the land of her paternity,
went to Thebes with the warlike man Amphitryon,
namely Alkmene, the daughter of Elektryon,
inciter of the people.
She exceeded all of gentle womankind
5 in shapeliness and stature. Nor indeed did anyone
rival the quality of her mind,
not any one at all of those whom mortal men begat
in the marriage-bed upon mortal women.
From her face and from her dark eyes
a loveliness streamed forth like unto that
of golden Aphrodite.
And she held her husband in such high regard
in her own heart
10 as none of gentle womankind had ever
done before.
For verily, having overpowered him by main strength,
he had killed her goodly father,
being angry about cattle. And so he left his native country
and came among the Kadmeian shieldmen.
There he dwelt with his estimable wife
15 without the delights of love,
for it was forbidden him
to share the marriage-bed with Elektryon’s
trim-ankled daughter
until such time as he would take vengeance
for the great-hearted brothers
of his wife and with ferocious fire burn down the villages
of the lordly Taphians and Teleboans.
20 For thus it was enjoined upon him that he should do,
and the gods were witnesses of it.
Indeed he dreaded their wrath, and strove that he might
as quickly as possible
accomplish the great deed that was laid upon him
by ordinance from Zeus.
And so together with him, longing for war
and the noise of battle,
went the Boiotians who drive horses, puffing
over their hide-covered shields,
25 and also the Lokrians who fight
at close quarters, and the great-hearted Phokians.
The brave sons of Alkaeus led them,
and he rejoiced in his troops. But all the while
the father of men and of gods
was contriving in his mind yet another scheme whereby,
both for the benefit of the gods
and for men who traffic for gain, he might raise up
a protector against calamity.
30 Thus he was plotting a strategem deep in his mind
as he bestirred himself from Olympos,
craving the coital embrace of a handsomely girdled woman
in the night-time. He came swiftly to Mount Typhaon,
and from there
the wise counsellor Zeus passed onward to the
uppermost Peak of the Sphinx.
There he sat himself down and meditated godly deeds.
35a/36a Then, when it was night, verily he bedded
and mingled in a coital embrace
35b/36b With the slim-ankled daughter of Elektryon,
and so slaked his longing.
And on the same night the splendid warrior Amphitryon,
inciter of the people,
came home from the great task which he had completed.
39/40a He did not however go about rousing his retainers
and his herdsmen in the countryside
40b until he had gone in to bed his wife,
for such was the yearning in his heart which gripped
the shepherd of the people.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
46 So he lay all night long with his estimable wife
enjoying the gifts of golden Aphrodite.
But because she had been subject both to the god
and to a very fine man
she gave birth to twin children there in Thebes
of the seven gates;
50 yet they were not like-minded, albeit
they were siblings.
One of them was inferior, but the other
was a greatly better man,
he of the Herculean strength, terrible
and overpowering,
whom she conceived while in the embrace
of the cloud-wrapped son of Kronos;
but the spearman Amphitryon begot Iphikles.
55 Thus she gave birth simultaneously
to different progeny, the one sired by a mortal man,
but the other one by Kronian Zeus, begetter of all the gods.
There is not much more about Amphitryon anywhere else in the whole of the surviving classical literature. Homer does not rehearse the story about him, although he does know Amphitryon’s name as the patronymic of Herakles (V 392), and in a Catalogue of Women of his own he includes Alkmene as the mother of Herakles by Zeus (XIV 323-24). All else that has come down to us about Amphitryon is Alexandrian or later, and is full of specious rationalizations that are obviously remote from the ancient tradition. Perhaps even in the early tradition Amphitryon was never more than a subsidiary figure in the legend of his very famous foster-son. Slight and obscure as it is in its surviving form, the story of Elektryon’s and Amphitryon’s dealings with each other and with the Taphians is nonetheless certainly just such matter as should have been part of an Argive or Theban "cycle" of ancient Greek epic, if ever there were such tales sung in Greek lands about things other than the war at Troy and its contingencies.
There are only a few further tidbits of information about Alkmene in the surviving records of ancient Greek mythology:
When Alkmene died at a good old age, Zeus commanded Hermes to steal her body from the coffin in which the sons of Herakles were conveying it to the grave. Hermes executed the commission, adroitly substituting a stone for the corpse in the coffin. Feeling the coffin very heavy, the sons of Herakles set it down, and taking off the lid they discovered the fraud. They took out the stone and set it up in a sacred grove in Thebes, where was a shrine of Alkmene. Meantime Hermes had carried off the real Alkmene to the Isles of the Blessed, where she was married to Rhadamanthys.Pausanias reported that there was no tomb of Alkmene at Thebes because at her death she had been turned to stone.