Heroes: Volume II of Mythos

A POTHEOSIS Zeus remembered his promise and drew the soul of Heracles up to Olympus.fn77 In a touching ceremony it was clothed in flesh formed from the robes of Hera – once his bitterest enemy, now his loving friend and stepmother – and reborn. Here, amongst gods and goddesses with whom he shared Zeus as a father, Heracles himself achieved immortality and divine status. As a mark of her deep affection, Hera bestowed the hand of her cupbearer, the goddess Hebe, on him as his final and eternal wife.fn78 And, at the last, Zeus raised his favourite human son into the firmament as the constellation Hercules, the fifth largest in our night sky. Back down on earth, the sons of Heracles – the HERACLIDES – eventually raised an army that defeated the tyrannical Eurystheus, who still ruled in Tiryns; Hyllus himself hunted down the fleeing king and beheaded him. They seized control of the Argolid, before installing ATREUS, son of Pelops, on the throne of Mycenae. For a while, a time of peace and prosperity descended upon the Peloponnese. For most Greeks and others across the Mediterranean world, Heracles was the greatest of the heroes, the ne plus ultra, the nonpareil, the paradigm, model and pattern of what a hero should be. The Athenians would come to prefer his kinsman Theseus, who, as we shall see, exhibited not just the strength and valour expected of a great hero, but intelligence, wit, insight and wisdom too – qualities that the Athenians (much to the contempt of their neighbours) believed uniquely exemplified their character and culture.fn79 Yet Heracles was the strongest man who ever lived. No human, and almost no immortal creature, ever subdued him physically. With uncomplaining patience he bore the trials and catastrophes that were heaped upon him in his turbulent lifetime. With his strength came, as we have seen, a clumsiness which, allied to his apocalyptic bursts of temper, could cause death or injury to anyone who got in the way. Where others were cunning and clever, he was direct and simple. Where they planned ahead he blundered in, swinging his club and roaring like a bull. Mostly these shortcomings were more endearing than alienating. He was not, as the duping of Atlas and the manipulation of Hades showed, entirely without that quality of sense, gumption and practical imagination that the Greeks called nous. He possessed saving graces that more than made up for his exasperating faults. His sympathy for others and willingness to help those in distress was bottomless, as were the sorrow and shame that overcame him when he made mistakes and people got hurt. He proved himself prepared to sacrifice his own happiness for years at a stretch in order to make amends for the (usually unintentional) harm he caused. His childishness, therefore, was offset by a childlike lack of guile or pretence as well as a quality that is often overlooked when we catalogue the virtues: fortitude – the capacity to endure without complaint. For all his life he was persecuted, plagued and tormented by a cruel, malicious and remorseless deity pursuing a vendetta which punished him for a crime for which he could be in no way held responsible – his birth. No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles. In his uncomplaining life of pain and persistence, in his compassion and desire to do the right thing, he showed, as the American classicist and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it, ‘greatness of soul’. Heracles may not have possessed the pert agility and charm of Perseus and Bellerophon, the intellect of Oedipus, the talent for leadership of Jason or the wit and imagination of Theseus, but he had a feeling heart that was stronger and warmer than any of theirs.

BELLEROPHON