The later labors send Heracles far beyond Greece, on tasks that read less like local monster-hunts and more like journeys to the limits of the known world. He drives off the man-eating Stymphalian Birds, captures the savage Cretan Bull, and rounds up the flesh-eating Mares of Diomedes, before setting out to obtain the war belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, then the cattle of the three-bodied giant Geryon from an island at the western edge of the world, marking the boundary with the Pillars of Heracles, later identified with the Strait of Gibraltar.
The final tasks push further still: fetching the golden apples of the Hesperides from a garden at the world's far edge, a feat he accomplishes by briefly taking on Atlas's burden of holding up the sky while Atlas fetches the apples himself, and finally capturing Cerberus, the multi-headed hound guarding the underworld, and bringing him up to the world of the living and back again. Completing the labors purifies Heracles of his crime and stands, in most versions, as the qualifying ordeal that eventually earns him a place among the immortal gods on Olympus after his death. Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca, compiled from earlier sources probably in the first or second century CE, is the fullest connected ancient account of the labor sequence to survive.