Hercules

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Hercules — the Roman name for the Greek Herakles — is the strongest and most labored of the heroes of Greek myth: son of Zeus by a mortal woman, hounded by the goddess Hera, condemned to the Twelve Labors, and at his death taken up into the company of the gods. No other Greek hero was worshipped so widely or so variously. He was a figure cults claimed at once as a man who had suffered and as a god who could be prayed to — given a hero’s bloody offerings at one altar and a god’s bloodless ones at the next, sometimes within a single sanctuary. He stands at the seam between the two orders of the Greek imagination, mortal on one side and divine on the other, and the whole shape of his story is the crossing of that seam.

The mortal outline

The myth is consistent in outline across the ancient sources, however its details wander. Zeus fathers him on Alcmene, the wife of the Theban general Amphitryon, by taking the husband’s likeness for a single lengthened night; the child is born into a quarrel he did not begin. His city is Thebes, the seven-gated town founded by Cadmus, and his blood runs back through the house of Perseus to Zeus on both his mortal mother’s and his divine father’s side — he is a great-grandson of Perseus, and so doubly the god’s descendant before he is ever the god’s son. Hera, wronged by the affair, persecutes him from the cradle — first by sending serpents into his crib, which the infant strangles, and at last by a stroke aimed not at his body but at his mind. Driven mad by the goddess, Hercules kills his own children, and in some tellings his wife Megara with them. The horror is not punished as a crime; it is expiated as a pollution. Purified, he is sent by the Delphic oracle to serve Eurystheus, the lesser king of Tiryns and Mycenae, and to perform whatever labors that king imposes. The labors are the penance for a madness that was never his to refuse. The Stoics would later seize on exactly this: that the man at the center of the story is set tasks he did not choose, by a power he cannot fight, and is measured only by how he bears them.

The labors as a sequence

The labors are the spine of the legend, and ancient art and poetry slowly hardened them into a canon of twelve. The number was not original. The lost epic Heracleia of Peisander of Rhodes, dated by later critics to the seventh century, is credited with fixing the count at twelve and re-dressing the hero in the rough lion-skin and club that displaced his older heroic armor. The earliest surviving visual canon is the cycle of twelve metopes carved for the Temple of Zeus at Olympia in the 460s — six over the east porch, six over the west — which did much to settle the list into a fixed sequence. The fullest narrative ordering comes far later, in the Bibliotheca ascribed to Apollodorus and in Diodorus Siculus.

In the standard arrangement he strangles the Nemean lion, whose hide no weapon could pierce, and wears its skin thereafter; beheads the many-headed Hydra of Lerna, which grew two heads for each one struck away, cauterizing the stumps with fire; takes the Ceryneian hind alive; brings back the Erymanthian boar; cleanses in a single day the Augean stables by turning two rivers through them; drives off the Stymphalian birds; masters the Cretan bull and the man-eating mares of Diomedes; takes the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta; rustles the cattle of the three-bodied Geryon from the edge of the western world; fetches the golden apples of the Hesperides from the garden at the world’s end; and at the last drags the hound Cerberus up from the dead. Two of the twelve, the tradition notes, almost did not count: Eurystheus disqualified the Hydra because Hercules had been helped by his nephew Iolaus, and the stables because their cleaning had been done for pay — and so two further tasks were added to make the tale come right. The number twelve, in other words, was an achievement of the tradition, not a given of it.

Read in order, the sequence opens out into a single curve. It begins among beasts and ends among the dead. The early labors clear the inhabited world of monsters; the late ones carry the hero past the inhabited world altogether — west beyond the sunset to Geryon’s island and the apple-garden, then down beneath the earth for the hound of the dead. On the way to the apples he meets the two great figures of the elder, Titan order: he frees Prometheus, chained to his Caucasus rock, by shooting the eagle that fed on his liver, and at the world’s western edge he takes the weight of the sky onto his own shoulders so that Atlas — son of Iapetos, and brother to the Prometheus he has just released — can fetch the golden apples for him. The strongest of the new heroes is thus made, for a moment, the pillar that holds heaven up, standing in for a Titan. Later writers liked to read the whole arc as a passage through and beyond death itself: the hero who can fetch a soul back from the underworld and return alive has, in a sense, already died and come up again. The labors become a rehearsal for the apotheosis that ends his life.

Around this core the tradition heaped a second, looser body of deeds — the parerga, the works done on the side. He sails with the Argonauts; he sacks Troy a generation before the Trojan War; he wrestles Death itself to win back Alcestis from the grave; he fights at the gods’ side in the Gigantomachy, the war against the Giants, which the Olympians by prophecy could not win without a mortal ally. That last role is telling. The gods need him; he is the hinge on which a cosmic battle turns. A hero who can be the deciding weight in a war of gods is already half a god, and the apotheosis that crowns his death only confirms what the deeds had been saying.

Death and apotheosis

His end is its own image, and it turns on the centaurs. Years after the labors, Hercules wins a new wife, Deianira. The centaur Nessus, ferrying her across a river, tries to carry her off; the hero shoots him with an arrow dipped in the Hydra’s venom. The dying centaur, in revenge, tells Deianira to keep his blood as a love-charm. When she later fears she is losing him and smears the blood on a robe, the Hydra’s poison still in it burns into his flesh and cannot be torn away. (The centaur of his death is Nessus; the wise centaur Chiron, his teacher in the older stories, is a different figure and not the one whose blood killed him.) In unendurable agony Hercules builds his own pyre on Mount Oeta, lies down on it, and is burned. The mortal part inherited from Alcmene is consumed; the immortal part fathered by Zeus rises to Olympus, where Hera’s anger is finally spent and the hero is reconciled to the goddess who had hunted him, married to her daughter Hebe and seated among the gods. The hero becomes a god by being destroyed. Apotheosis here is not a reward laid on top of the suffering; it runs through the fire, inseparable from it.

The double cult

In actual worship Hercules was anomalous, and the anomaly is the key to his later fortune. Most figures in Greek religion fall cleanly on one side of a line: a hero, dead and buried, receives offerings poured into the ground at a tomb; a god, deathless and on high, receives offerings burned on a raised altar. Hercules received both. At Sikyon, the sources record, the same celebrant offered him a hero’s portion and a god’s in a single rite. He had shrines from the eastern Aegean to the far west, where the Romans identified him with their own Hercules and merged his cult with older Italian and Phoenician strands — the Phoenician Melqart was read as the same power, the Tyrian Hercules, so that the hero’s name traveled the whole Mediterranean. He was the patron of gymnasia and of athletes, of soldiers, of merchants giving a tenth of their gains, of those crossing dangerous thresholds. What made him available to philosophy and then to the esotericists was precisely this in-between standing: a being the cult itself could not decide was man or god, and so a natural emblem for the human that becomes divine.

The Stoic reception

That ending made him useful to philosophy. The Stoics took Hercules as their model: not the brute of the club and lion-skin but the man who endures every ordeal without complaint, clears the world of monsters as the wise man clears the soul of passions, and is rewarded with a place among the divine. The fit was close. Stoicism held that the world is run by a rational providence — the Logos — that no one escapes, and that the whole of a human life worth living consists in accepting what that order sends and answering it with virtue. Hercules, set tasks by a king he despised, on behalf of a goddess who hated him, and bearing them without breaking, was the perfect emblem of a will aligned with fate.

Epictetus, the freed slave whose lectures were taken down by his pupil Arrian, returns to him again and again. In the Discourses he asks what would have become of Heracles “if there had not been a lion, as in the story, and a hydra and a stag and a boar and unjust and brutal men, whom he drove forth and cleansed the world of them” — answering that without such trials the hero would have slept his life away in luxury and never have become Heracles at all. The monsters, on this reading, are not the enemies of his greatness but its instruments; adversity is the only school. Elsewhere Epictetus makes the same point in a single line: had Hercules stayed home, he would have been Eurystheus, and no Heracles — the small king who held power and could not master himself, against the laborer who held nothing and ruled all land and sea, cleansing them of lawlessness and wrong. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, writing his private notes in the same school’s vocabulary, breathes the same air, even where he does not name the hero: the world sends what it sends, and a person is what they do with it.

Earlier still, a famous fable of the sophist Prodicus, preserved in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and there put in the mouth of Socrates, set the young Hercules at a crossroads. Two women approach him, one richly adorned, one plain. Vice — who calls herself Happiness — promises a road of ease and pleasure with no toil; Virtue promises a hard road, honor earned through labor and the favor of gods and men only at its end. Hercules chooses the hard road. The “Choice of Heracles” became one of the most durable moral images in the West, copied by Roman moralists and revived endlessly in Renaissance and later painting as the type of the soul electing struggle over comfort. It also reveals the logic that let the cult-hero become a philosopher’s emblem: before Hercules is the strongest man, he is the one who chooses the harder thing on purpose. The labors that the Cynics too made their patron’s badge — Diogenes’ followers carried the club and skin as signs of a life stripped to its endurance — follow from that first crossroads.

The esoteric overlay

The esoteric and occult traditions inherited this allegorized hero rather than the cult-figure. The twelve labors invited mapping onto the twelve signs of the zodiac, a correspondence already suggested in antiquity — the lion to Leo, the bull to Taurus, and so on around the wheel — and elaborated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers into a scheme of the soul’s progress through the year of the sky. On these readings the hero’s circuit is the sun’s: twelve trials, twelve stations, one turning. The myth is treated as an encoded account of initiation — the labors as graded trials of purification, the pyre as the death that must precede rebirth, the apotheosis as the goal toward which the whole sequence climbs. In Theosophical and post-Theosophical circles the scheme was worked out at length; Annie Besant and others read the labors as stages of an inner discipline, and the framework passed into a wider esoteric astrology that treats the zodiac as a ladder the soul climbs sign by sign.

The correspondence is a later interpretive overlay, not something the archaic myth states. The number twelve itself stabilized only over time — through Peisander, the Olympia metopes, and the late mythographers — and the individual labors do not map cleanly onto the signs without forcing; competing schemes assign different labors to different signs, and the order of the labors varies from source to source. What the figure carried forward, beneath every reading — cult, Stoic, astrological — was a single durable shape: that the way to the divine runs through ordeal, and that what is burned away is not the whole of a person.

Texts and scholarship

The fullest single narrative of the labors and the death is the Bibliotheca ascribed to Apollodorus (a Roman-era handbook, not the second-century-BCE scholar to whom it was wrongly attributed), available in the public-domain facing-Greek Loeb of James G. Frazer (1921), whose notes remain a standard map of the variants. Diodorus Siculus gives a rationalizing, euhemerizing account in Library of History IV; the death on Oeta is dramatized in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and the madness in Euripides’ Heracles. For the Stoic reception, the decisive texts are the Discourses of Epictetus, hosted here in P. E. Matheson’s 1916 Oxford translation, where the hero is invoked as the type who labors and does not break; the Choice of Heracles survives in Xenophon’s Memorabilia 2.1.21–34, readable in E. C. Marchant’s Loeb of 1923. Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (1985) treats the double cult of hero-and-god and the unusual rite that gives Hercules a hero’s offerings and a god’s at once; G. Karl Galinsky’s The Herakles Theme: The Adaptations of the Hero in Literature from Homer to the Twentieth Century (Blackwell, 1972) traced the figure’s afterlife from the epics through the moralists and long stood as the standard survey, now joined by Emma Stafford’s Herakles (Routledge, 2012). Together they anchor a reception history that runs from Prodicus’ crossroads to the occult astrologers’ wheel.

→ In the library: Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (1916)

→ Related: Chiron · Cadmus · Iapetos · Atlas · Zeus · Hera · Cerberus · Apotheosis · Hydra · Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius · Hellenistic Astrology · Initiation · Soul · Logos · Cynicism · Theosophy