Copy of The Farnese Hercules, from the Baths of Caracella in Rome, 3^rd Century A.D.
(see page 319 of our textbook)

Roman Name: Hercules
Spouse: Either Megara or Deianeira (choose whether he kills her or she kills him)
Sacred Plant: none
Totem Animals: Nemean Lion (see below)
How to Identify Him: He is almost always wearing a lion skin and carrying a club. Sometimes he also carries a bow and a quiver of arrows. In the case of the statue to the right, he is resting: he's leaning on the club, and the lion skin covers the club rather than Heracles himself.

Heracles has no sacred region: he is the ultimate "Pan-Hellenic" hero.

It might be stretching things a bit to call Heracles a major deity, but certainly no one can deny that at least he's a very important mythological character. And indeed he was the most godlike of the great classical heroes: there were shrines to Heracles, and ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes swore in his name. The closest thing to it was the Athenian reverence for Theseus, but Heracles-worship was stronger and more widespread throughout the ancient world. Unlike Theseus, Perseus, the Homeric heroes, or Jason, Heracles went through apotheosis after death: that is, he was transformed into a full-fledged deity and he was granted an afterlife on Mount Olympus rather than in the underworld or even the Elysian Fields. According to Book 10 of Homer's Odyssey, a phantom version of Heracles was sent to take his place in the underworld, but the real Heracles spends his time feasting and hanging out with the gods at home.

Heracles was descended from another hero who enjoyed divine favor, Perseus, but as you've already noticed and as our textbook tells us he had a much more spotty career than Perseus. Oddly enough, though, he seems to be more admired, and he's certainly more famous. Vandiver refers to him as "The Greatest Hero of All."

Heracles came out all right in the end--he did, after all, become a god, and after his deification he married Zeus and Hera's daughter Hebe so he became a sort of divine son-in-law--but in the meantime he experienced a number of episodes that stripped him of his dignity. There is, of course, the story of the twelve labors, where he serves as an abject slave to his wimpy cousin Eurystheus. But there are also the absurd stories, such as the one on page 315 of our textbook where he founds the Olympic Games but "doesn't always play by the rules"--kind of an understatement for the fact that he "cuts off the noses and ears of an enemy's ambassadors and sends them back with the body parts hung around their necks."

There's also the story of his death. How many heroes come to an end through the almost farcical means of a wife mistaking a deadly poison for a love potion? Okay, maybe these stories aren't exactly funny, but they certainly are ridiculous. Not to mention his bouts of temporary insanity, or his drunken exploits...

Drunken exploits were an extremely popular part of the Heracles legend, which is why his drunkenness is such a significant part of the story of Alcestis. Alcestis was the wife of King Admetus of Pherae, who bonded with Heracles when they both served as Argonauts (Admetus also bonded with Apollo when Apollo served as his hired hand to atone for murdering Zeus's thunderbolt-making Cyclopes... which, as you may recall, was retribution for the thunder strike that killed Apollo's son Asclepius). The story of Alcestis is a rather simple tale, but full of human interest and well worth purusing; I've placed a recent and very good translation of Euripides' version on reserve in the library in case you get the urge to do so, or you might read Cecelia Luschnig's equally-excellent translation on line. Also available on reserve in the library is Sophocles' tragedy, The Women of Trachis, which centers around Heracles' death.

My personal favorite of the drunken exploit stories is the one where Heracles' father Amphitryon sent his young son out of town for a while when he was getting just a little too out of hand. The teenaged Heracles wound up in Boeotia, a part of northern Greece that was usually described by the rest of the Greeks as... well, think of the way we talk about rural Arkansas and that pretty much covers it. Thespius, the king of the Boeotian town Thespiae, was having some trouble with a gigantic lion that was ravaging his flocks. Heracles came to the rescue and hunted the lion for fifty full days. In the meantime, Thespius couldn't help noticing what a fine specimen of humanity (demigodery?) the young Heracles was, and he decided that it was time to make some grandbabies. Thespius had fifty daughters, and after a night of particularly heavy drinking he sent all fifty of them, one after the other, into Heracles' bedroom. Too far gone to realize that it wasn't the same woman all along, Heracles impregnated all fifty of them and thus begot his (fifty) firstborn progeny. Some versions say he took fifty nights to manage that feat, but I prefer the "one night stand" version.

As if that weren't enough in the way of community service, he also killed the gigantic lion.

As Harris and Platzner point out, Heracles was threatened by Hera ever since she sent a couple of snakes to murder him shortly after his birth... and the story gets weird even before he's born. As we've already seen, Zeus had a habit of disguising himself in various ways to seduce mortal women, but no matter what he tried he couldn't get anywhere with Heracles' mother, Alcmene. She was so virtuous she refused to so much as look at anyone other than her husband. So Zeus did the obvious thing and, waiting until Amphitryon was away fighting pirates (there's a long story behind the pirates, but I'm not about to recount it here!), he disguised himself as her own husband.

The plan would have worked beautifully if Amphytrion himself hadn't come home, victorious, that very same night, thus interrupting Zeus's pleasure. The Roman playwright Plautus wrote a comedy, Amphitruo, which has been adapted countless times by talents as diverse as the 17^th-century English poet laureate John Dryden (whose raunchy version of the story was highly controversial), his contemporary Molière (whose version was not censored--unlike Tartuffe, which languished in the censors' office for five full years, which perhaps tells us something about the difference between English and French prejudices), a film maker in Nazi Germany and even the famous American songwriter Cole Porter in a play called, appropriately, Out of this World. For some reason, the stories surrounding Heracles often seem to invite comedies.

Later that night Amphitryon, too, seduced Alcmene, and that's why Heracles had a mortal twin brother named Iphicles. Iphicles is generally portrayed as something of a wuss and a non-entity, but one has to imagine that any normal baby would suffer in comparison with Heracles, the infant snake-strangler.

According to the story, Zeus was so proud of his son-to-be that on the day Alcmene went into labor he made an oath that a descendant of his own seed would be born that day, a child who would rule the powerful city of Mycenae. The vengeful Hera delayed the birth by sending her daughter Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to sit outside the birthing room with her legs and fingers crossed (ouch!). While Alcmene struggled in labor for seven long days, a child was born to Amphytrion's uncle (a son of Perseus, and thus a descendant of Zeus) and baby Eurystheus was destined to become king of Mycenae instead.

Thebes, by the way, is very far from Mycenae, so Heracles didn't even grow up in the region where he was originally supposed to be king. While Thebes isn't as far north as Boeotia, and not nearly as far north as Iolcus--Jason really was from the boonies, for all he boasted to Medea about how he was a native-born Greek!--it's a long way from the Peloponnese, as you can see by the map. The Peloponnese is the region to the southwest that looks like a hand, the area in which Mycenae and Sparta are situated.

Yet six of Heracles' famous labors were to take place in the Peloponnesian region: the lion of Nemea, the hydra of Lerna, the boar of Erymanthus, the hind of Ceryneia, the birds of Stymphalus, and the cleansing of the stables of Augeas at Elis.

If Zeus wanted to avoid Hera's wrath in the first place, one might ask, then why on Earth did he start boasting to her about how powerful his new son was going to be? Anybody could have predicted the results. Perhaps he felt that since the promises of the gods cannot be taken back--and he had, indeed, promised that the boy born that day would be a powerful king--Hera couldn't do a thing about it. He seemed to have forgotten that Hera has a powerful ally herself, in the form of their daughter Eileithyia. Heracles wasn't born on the day Zeus had planned. Or the next day, or the next...

Poor Alcmene! Here she is, one of the most faithful wives in mythology, and she's persecuted by the goddess who's supposed to be the protectress of faithful wives. This unfairness was just the beginning of a long string of unfair circumstances that would dog Heracles until his death. This unfairness on the part of the gods is very typical of the Mesopotamian tradition, where the gods tend to be completely callous about human beings and to see them merely as potential servants. In this way, the connection with The Epic of Gilgamesh and other Mesopotamian tales is extremely close. It's probably an indication that the Heracles stories are among the oldest in the Greek mythological tradition.

Heracles and the Argonauts

Like most of the Greek heroes who were associated with the period before the Trojan War, Heracles sailed with Jason's crew on the Argo. According to Apollonius's Argonautica, he took a break from his famous twelve labors to do so; other sources claim that he took the voyage afterwards, once he was free to take on independent assignments. Whatever the case, he never made it to Colchis: as Apollonius tells us, he took along his young "squire" (in most sources his lover or, less often, his illegitimate son), Hylas. When fetching water for the Argonauts, Hylas was abducted by a lustful nymph--or in some cases, a whole bevy of lustful nymphs--at the spring of Pegae. The famous painting to the left, the Victorian painter John Waterhouse's depiction of the event, subscribes to the multi-nymph version, while Apollonius claims there was only one (see Argonautica Book 1, pages 68-69, for the details).

Heracles deserted his shipmates to search for Hylas. What happened next varies from source to source, but the important outcome here is that Heracles was such a strong personality in every sense of the word he would have overshadowed poor Jason. Even Apollonius feels he has to explain why Jason was made captain instead of the more obvious choice of Heracles (see page 45, where the crew "with one voice called on [Heracles, not Jason] to take command"). So, for dramatic reasons, Heracles had to exit that story before its completion.

About the Twelve Labors

Nobody I know, including several people with Ph.D's in Classics, can keep the twelve labors straight. So don't worry about it. The important thing to remember is that there were twelve of them, and that the first one was the Nemean lion. The lion is particularly important because Heracles is usually depicted wearing its skin, so the lion skin and his handy club are the easiest way to identify Heracles in ancient art. This skin serves as a protective armor because it was impenetrable to weapons: to kill the creature, Heracles used his massive strength to strangle it, and since knives were rendered useless he employed one of its own claws to carry out the skinning process.

Along with the Nemean lion, the most famous labors are the Lernaean hydra, the Augean stables (which have found their way into our culture's store of metaphors as a way of referring to a seemingly impossible task, such as trying to sort all the papers in my office), the apples of the Hesperides, and the theft of Cerberus.

Apart from those four, the "side deeds"--Chiron's encounter with Heracles' poisoned arrow, Heracles' rescue of Alcestis from the underworld and Prometheus from the Caucasus, and the encounter with Atlas--are far better known than the labors themselves.

Surprise!

The famous classicist Michael Grant suggests in his Myths of the Greeks and Romans (Harcourt, Brace 1962) that the Cerberus labor was saved for last because it was the hardest of Heracles' assignments, the one from which it could be almost certain he would not come back. And indeed, after reading all that creepy material about Hades and Orpheus and such you've seen just how few people ever did visit the underworld and live to tell about it. Imagine Eurystheus's surprise!

Most accounts of this particular story describe Eurystheus as being so terrified when he heard Heracles had returned and wanted to show him what he'd caught, he hid in a large oil jar and hoped that Heracles would just go away. But Heracles was persistent.

Grant suggests that Heracles' adventures with Cerberus and Alcestis, differing from the tale of Gilgamesh in that Heracles was actually successful in his quest, might be one of the major sources of the tradition of "the harrowing of Hell," a Christian story that claims that the reason Jesus Christ took three days between his crucifixion and resurrection is he was busy retrieving all the Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs from the underworld so he could bring them to Heaven. Grant emphasizes the theme of how Heracles conquers death, grouping the Cerberus story together with the rescue of Alcestis, and quotes Richmond Lattimore's translation of lines 28-35 of Pindar's Olympian IX as proof of how this deed, along with other encounters with the gods, showed that Heracles "partook of divinity":

If men are brave, or wise, it is by the divinity
in them. How else could Heracles'
hands have shaken the club against the trident,
When by Pylos' gate Poseidon stood over against him,
and Phoebus [Apollo] strode on him with the silver bow in his hands poised?
neither the death-god Hades rested the staff
wherewith he marshals mortal bodies, of men perished, down the hollow street.

And on the subject of apotheosis...

In the end, Heracles' divine nature kicks in and he becomes a god, ascending to Olympus while still in his body. His reward for all his suffering is... to become Hera's son-in-law. For all eternity. Surely there's a certain irony in that?

As a god, Heracles was worshipped and had his own cults, sometimes with rather bizarre results. If you saw the movie Gladiator, you'll remember the slimy Caesar Commodus, who persecutes the hero as mercilessly as Hera ever persecuted Heracles. The movie isn't based on actual history (sorry!), but Commodus was a real emperor and was every bit as bad as the movie made out. Maybe worse.

Toward the end of his life, shortly before he was murdered by his own guards, Commodus began calling himself "the reincarnation of Hercules" (Hercules being the Roman version of the name Heracles). It was traditional for a Caesar to go through apotheosis and become a god after death--the last words of Caesar Vespasian, who died in 79 A.D., are said to have been "I think I'm becoming a god"--but not while one was still alive. It was in bad taste. Yet Commodus had himself portrayed as Hercules, with his own wimpy face peeking out from under the Nemean lion's skin, in a famous portrait bust and on the Roman coins (okay, so the page I linked to disagrees with me about the wimpy little face; personally, I'm on the side of those art historians he criticizes--and although he's correct about how the Roman emperors sometimes had themselves depicted as gods in their statues, that's not quite the same thing as going around claiming to be that god... only Commodus and his notoriously loopy predecessor Caligula actually went that far). In the example below, a Denarius struck in 191 or 192 A.D., Commodus has put himself on the front and various objects associated with Hercules--the ever-present club, plus a bow and a quiver of arrows--on the back. If you squint just right you can read the name "Hercules" along the rim on the left-hand side.

Speaking of movies, if you've seen Disney's Hercules you'll probably have noticed how oddly the stories have been changed, and not just in the fundamental way that Vandiver complains about--his being transmogrified into the legitimate son of Zeus and Hera. For instance, he saves his first wife, Megara (not Deianeira), from the lustful centaur. The Disney film also includes the Alcestis/Cerberus descent-to-the-underworld theme. And, of course, Philoctetes' role, not to mention his species, is completely different. For a detailed comparison, see the Disney's Hercules page at Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link.

You might also want to check out this excellent on-line cartoon version of the labors of Hercules. It even includes the serpent-strangling episode.

And if you really have time on your hands... As I was surfing through various web sites on the subject of Heracles, looking for good stuff, I came across a number of pages devoted to the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Some of them were quite thought-provoking, especially the ones devoted to fan fiction. The one I enjoyed most was a short story that imagined a meeting between Heracles' mortal twin brother and our good ol' buddy Jason. The eternal exile Jason is depicted here as a young King of Corinth... well, I said it was thought-provoking, but I didn't say it was 100% accurate. As we know, it was Jason's attempt to marry the daughter of the King of Corinth that provoked Medea's famous murder of her children by Jason (not to mention her murder of that King's daughter, and the King himself). After that, nobody was in the mood to promote Jason to King; in fact, he got exiled as a result of Medea's murderous actions. Again. And Medea got off without any punishment at all. Again.

Nitpicking aside, the thing that intrigued me was that this and so many other of the fan fiction stories concentrate entirely on the mortal brother--a completely colorless figure in the mythological record--and leave Heracles/Hercules strictly alone. The authors seem very interested in pursuing the question of what it would have been like to be a mere mortal who is destined to live in the shadow of a larger-than-life demigod.

One thing that really bothers modern readers is the fact that according to the classical tradition, a happy afterlife in the Elysian Fields was not a reward for virtue but rather something determined by one's family connections. Personally, I've often wondered how King Agamemnon must have felt about his brother Menelaus, who was inferior to Agamemnon in every way but got to spend eternity in paradise simply because he married the right twin and Agamemnon married the wrong one (Menelaus was the husband of Helen of Troy, who was a daughter of Zeus, but Agamemnon married her mortal twin sister Clytemnestra--yes, just like Heracles, Helen had a mortal twin who was the progeny of her mother's husband). It must have seemed terribly unfair. Agamemnon did all the work--he even got murdered by that same mortal-twin wife as a direct result of his aid to Menelaus--and Menelaus reaped all the rewards, both in this world and the next.

No doubt poor Iphicles felt the same way every time Heracles made him look like a wimp.

To read more about Heracles, click here for his entry from the Encyclopedia Mythica (with yet another version of the Farnese Hercules) and here for Carlos Parada's overview of myths about Heracles (the non-Disney version) in capsule form.