Hercules (Greek: ‘Heracles’) was the greatest hero of the Greek world, known for his feats of strength. His mother Alcmene was mortal, his father was the god Zeus. Even as a child, Heracles strangled serpents in his cradle. As an adult, after murdering his own children in a fit of madness caused by the goddess Hera, he was punished by having to carry out twelve labours, which included cleaning the stables of Augeas, capturing the man-eating mares of Diomedes, taking the belt of the queen of the Amazons, stealing the golden apples of the Hesperides, and chaining up Cerberus, the many-headed hound of Hades, who wags his tail when the newly deceased arrive but attacks and eats those who try to leave. These labours took him to the limits of the known world and, in the case of Cerberus, to the world of the dead. In art, he is represented with a lion-skin cape and hood (courtesy of the object of another labour, the Nemean lion), and carries a club and a bow and arrows.
He was finally defeated only by trickery. In the version given in Sophocles' play,
The Women of Trachis, his wife Deianira gave him what she thought was a love potion, but was in fact poison given to her by the centaur who had previously tried to rape her. The poison was used to impregnate Hercules' robe, but it ate away his flesh, causing him unbearable pain.
A number of Greek rulers claimed descent from Heracles as a symbol of their power; these included the Macedonian royal family, whose most notable member was Alexander the Great. The cult of Heracles may have been the first foreign cult to be introduced to Rome; he was particularly popular with merchants, because of the amount of travel involved in his labours. Dogs were excluded from his sanctuary at Rome; maybe he had seen enough of them with Cerberus. In the later Roman Empire a number of emperors identified with Hercules and had themselves represented in statuary with his attributes — most notably Commodus, who issued a commemorative medal showing himself wearing Hercules' lion-skin, with the inscription ‘To the Roman Hercules’.
Hercules' reputation as a strong-man derives in particular from his wrestling bout with the supposedly invincible Libyan giant, Antaeus. Knowing that Antaeus renewed his strength by physical contact with his mother, the earth goddess, Hercules held up his opponent so that his feet could not reach the ground, then crushed him to death. Another feat demonstrating his strength was the establishment of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ at the limits of the known world — the Strait of Gibraltar.
Helen King
See also
Greeks.
