Biography of Hercules

This study will present a biography of Herakles (Hercules) based on the two volumes of Pausanias's Guide to Greece. The approach of the study will be to show how Herakles is a complex and even contradictory character whose great accomplishments are in part the result of that complexity and those contradictions.

Herakles is the most popular hero in both Greek and Roman legends, famous for the incredible feats of courage and strength which are covered in Pausanias's books. Herakles is the son of the god Zeus and a mortal mother, Alkmene (Pausanias 1, 54), and as such he is hated by Zeus's wife Hera, who tries several times to kill him. Herakles avoids those murderous efforts through his own heroism and through the protection of other gods. Much of the conflict and contradiction of the character of Herakles---and perhaps also the rage which marks so many of his experiences---is certainly in part the result of his mixed godly and mortal origins.

In terms of his courage and strength, Herakles certainly behaves heroically in every encounter of his life, but at the same time, as Pausanias points out in a number of instances, Herakles is not in every case a good and moral hero. He can be compared to modern heroes in that he is a very complicated character who is prone to fits of temper and even madness which drive him to bizarre behavior. In fact, it is an act of madness forced upon him by Hera which leads him to kill his wife and children and to seek purification through following

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mes were established and thrived (Pausanias 2, 215-217). By far the most monumental accomplishments of Herakles, however, are the twelve tasks he carries out as means of his own purification for the killing of his wife and children as a result of his being driven mad by the wife of Zeus, who was angry and jealous for Herakles's having been the offspring of Zeus and a mortal woman: Most of the labours of Herakles are represented at Olympia: above the temple doors you see the hunting of the Arkadian boar, the labour with Diomedes the Thracian, the labour with Geryon at Erytheia, and Herakles on the point of taking over Atlas's burden, and clearing the ground of dung for the Eleans; over the rear doors he is taking the Amazon's belt, and you see the story of the hind and the bull of Knosos and the Stymphalian birds and the many-headed dragon and the lion of the Argolid (Pausanias 2, 226). One feat not portrayed in that monument was the capturing of the three-headed Hound of Hades, Kerberos. Pausanias writes that there is some suggestion that the hound was perhaps actually a serpent, but he discounts that suggestion by referring to the writing of Homer, who, the author says, would never have called the creature a dog if it had been a

Category: Literature - B