Heracles

Heracles, known in Latin as Hercules, is the preeminent hero of ancient Greek mythology rather than a historically documented person. Ancient poets and mythographers, including Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Apollodorus, and Diodorus Siculus, present him as the son of Zeus and Alcmene, a granddaughter of Perseus and the wife of Amphitryon of Thebes. Zeus is said to have assumed Amphitryon's appearance in order to lie with Alcmene; on the same night Amphitryon returned from war, so that Alcmene bore twins: Heracles, the son of Zeus, and Iphicles, the son of Amphitryon. The birth is placed at Thebes in Boeotia. Hera, Zeus's wife, delayed the birth so that Eurystheus of Mycenae or Tiryns would be born first and thus have precedence, and she thereafter persecuted Heracles. In infancy he strangled two serpents she sent against him. He was trained in the arts of war and in music; in a fit of anger he killed his music teacher Linus. After slaying the lion of Cithaeron he married Megara, daughter of Creon of Thebes.

Hera later struck Heracles with madness, in which he killed Megara's children and, in some versions, Megara herself. Seeking purification, he consulted the Delphic oracle, which commanded him to serve Eurystheus and to accomplish the tasks Eurystheus would set. These became the famous Twelve Labors: he strangled the invulnerable Nemean Lion and thereafter wore its skin; he killed the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra, whose necks regenerated, with the help of Iolaus, and dipped his arrows in its venom; he captured the Ceryneian Hind sacred to Artemis; he brought back the Erymanthian Boar; he cleaned the stables of Augeas in a single day by diverting rivers; he drove away or shot the man-eating Stymphalian birds; he captured the Cretan Bull; he seized the man-eating mares of Diomedes of Thrace; he obtained the girdle of the Amazon queen Hippolyta; he stole the cattle of the three-bodied Geryon in the far west; he fetched the golden apples of the Hesperides, having held up the sky for Atlas; and he descended to the underworld to capture the hound Cerberus. Ancient authors vary in the order and in some details of the labors.

The wider saga includes many additional deeds. Heracles joined, or was associated with, the voyage of the Argonauts; he sacked Troy in the time of King Laomedon, a generation before the Trojan War of Homer; he freed Prometheus from his Caucasian rock; he wrestled the river-god Achelous for the hand of Deianira; and he fought the centaurs and the giant Antaeus. After Megara he married Deianira of Calydon. When the centaur Nessus attempted to violate Deianira at a river crossing, Heracles shot him with a hydra-poisoned arrow. The dying Nessus told Deianira that his blood would be a charm to keep Heracles' love. Years later, fearing a rival in the captive Iole, Deianira sent Heracles a robe smeared with that blood. The poison burned his flesh. In torment he had a pyre built on Mount Oeta in the land of Trachis. Philoctetes or Poeas kindled it. The mortal part of Heracles was consumed; the immortal part was taken to Olympus, where he was reconciled with Hera and given Hebe, goddess of youth, as wife. He thus became both a suffering hero and a god.

No year of birth or death can be verified, because Heracles belongs to legend, not to the documentary historical record. Greek chronographers sometimes situated him in a Heroic Age a generation or two before the Trojan War, but such schemes are literary, not historical. What is historically attested is his cult: from the Archaic period onward he received worship as a hero and as a god throughout the Greek world, notably at Thebes, at the sanctuary on Mount Oeta, at Marathon, and in countless gymnasia, where he was patron of athletes. The Romans adopted him as Hercules, with major cult sites at the Ara Maxima in the Forum Boarium at Rome and elsewhere in Italy. His myths were a central subject of Greek tragedy, vase-painting, and later Roman and Renaissance art. He is not a Christian saint, was never bishop of Rome or patriarch of an Eastern see, and has no place in the calendars of canonization or beatification.