[2] In her best-known myth, she is the mistress of the hero Heracles during a year of required servitude, a scenario that, according to some,[3] offered writers and artists opportunities to explore sexual roles and erotic themes.

According to Diodorus Siculus, Omphale was the daughter of Iardanus[4] while according to the mythographer Apollodorus, the name of her father was Iardanes, and she was the wife of Tmolus, a king of Lydia from whom she inherited his throne.

[5] |Heracles and Omphale, Roman fresco, Pompeian Fourth Style (45-79 AD), Naples National Archaeological Museum, Italy In one of many Greek variations on the theme of penalty for "inadvertent" murder, for his murder of Iphitus, the great hero Heracles, whom the Romans identified as Hercules, was, by the command of the Delphic Oracle Xenoclea, remanded as a slave to Omphale for the period of a year,[6] the compensation to be paid to Eurytus, who refused it.

[7]) The theme, inherently a comic inversion of sexual roles,[8] is not fully illustrated in any surviving text from Classical Greece.

Plutarch, in his life of Pericles, 24, mentions lost comedies of Kratinos and Eupolis, which alluded to the contemporary capacity of Aspasia in the household of Pericles,[9] and to Sophocles in The Trachiniae [10] it was shameful for Heracles to serve an Oriental woman in this fashion,[11] but there are many late Hellenistic and Roman references in texts and art to Heracles being forced to do women's work and even wear women's clothing and hold a basket of wool while Omphale and her maidens did their spinning.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.28.1) cites a tradition that the supposed founder of the Etruscan settlements was Tyrrhenus, the son of Heracles by Omphale the Lydian, who drove the Pelasgians out of Italy from the cities north of the Tiber river.

In Hercules's quest to mediate the power struggle between Polynices and Eteocles, he drinks from the fountain and becomes captive to Omphale.

His comrade, Ulysses (Odysseus), pretends to be deaf and mute in order to remain imprisoned on the island and stay in contact with Hercules, as opposed to being killed.

He sneaks out of his cell one night to find a cave filled with preserved statues of Omphale's previous love slaves.