Meaning
To clear away an accumulated mass of corruption, neglect, or filth - usually in an institution - in one decisive effort. The phrase is reserved for the worst cases: everything about the job is long-standing, entrenched, and foul. Strongly figurative and usually damning of whatever institution owns the stables; nearly always paired with clean out or cleanse, and worth reserving for genuine scale. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
The fifth labour of Heracles: King Augeas of Elis owned divine cattle, more than a thousand of them, and his stables had gone uncleaned for thirty years - a task designed to be both humiliating and impossible. Heracles bargained for a tenth of the cattle if he finished in a single day, then achieved it not with a shovel but by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through the yard, washing the filth away. The ending is suitably litigious: Augeas reneged, Heracles sued, was banished with Augeas's own son Phyleus as his witness, returned to kill the king, and had the labour struck off by Eurystheus anyway - because the rivers did the work and he had taken payment. The adjective has carried the image into English: Wiktionary's Augean gives both very filthy and huge, immense, Herculean, and the allegorists' reading is recorded in the previous entry's sources - the stables as the foulness disfiguring humanity. Modern usage keeps the institutional sense: cleaning out a police force, a federation, or a budget is cleaning the Augean stables.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an Augean task
- clean out the Augean stables
- the Augean stables
Usage Examples
- The new commissioner promised to clean the Augean stables of the traffic bureau, and lasted eleven months.
- Auditors described the university's finances as an Augean task: three decades of unrecorded bequests.
- Whoever takes the ministry inherits the Augean stables - procurement, pensions, and the ports.