This is the truth behind the myth of Hercules. In a strange and unfamiliar world something stirs just below the water line. It breaks de surface...a giant serpent with not one, but nine dragon-like heads. It spews poisonous vapours and then eats its victims alive. But today the monster has met his match. The strongest hero who ever lived. Mythology's ideal man. Hercules.
He is the most popular hero in history. A half-god, half-mortal with superhuman strength who is destined to rid the Greek world of evil. But that's only the beginning of his story. Hercules was something special and at the same time extremely ordinary. He was a man of the people. He was a little bit like Babe Ruth in American mythology. He was a womanizer, he was a heavy drinker, and he was an extraordinary athlete.
He was a little bit like a god but he was very definitely a human being. Today a lot of people think heroes have superhuman strength, they get the girl, they have superhuman powers, can fly through the air. It's a different conception in the Greek world. A hero is someone who has superhuman strength but someone who has to suffer.
And Hercules is the consummate hero in Greek society. He's destined to suffer more than anyone else. In his myth, Hercules confronts a legion of terrifying enemies, and endures suffering on a scale no human has ever known. His story begins with Zeus, the sex-crazed king of the gods having an illicit affair. Hercules is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Alcmene.
Classical mythology is loaded with stories of gods who impregnate mortal women and give birth to gods or demi-gods. So this demi-god idea means that this person has some features that are very godly, some divine powers but, at the same time, he is mortal, he can die. I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible, to create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods.
Hercules would grow up to be Greece's model hero. But he has one powerful enemy who wants to see him destroyed. Zeus' wife, the goddess Hera. She's the queen of the goddesses and she has wonderful beauty, she's supremely intelligent, she's mighty, but she's also exceedingly jealous because Zeus is always running after other women.
Zeus fathers countless children with a variety of mortal women. And Hera hates them all. But she decides it is Hercules who must pay the ultimate price for the sins committed by Zeus. Hera's hatred of Hercules is actually very, very irrational. It's almost as if she knew that he was going to challenge her favour in heaven in some way. She knew there was something about Hercules that was different than the other children and maybe she felt threatened by this, but every day of his life he seemed to have been paying for this hatred of hers.
One night, while Hercules is still a baby, Hera sends two poisonous snakes into his nursery. He's got one snake in each hand and he's squeezing them to death. A little tiny infant squeezing to death these two giant serpents. Everyone knew at that point that there was something a little bit different about Hercules. This is one of the reasons why Hera will hate him, because she cannot kill him.
She can make his life wretched but she cannot kill him because destiny says he will become immortal. And even a god has to obey destiny. But Hera is just getting started. Her vendetta against Hercules will determine the course of his life, from the cradle to the grave. So goes the myth. But what is the link to reality? February 2004, in a Greek town called Thebes archaeologists discover stunning evidence that sheds new light on the story of Hercules' birth.
They uncover a buried temple beneath an ordinary residential loft. In its centre are the remains of an altar. Around the altar are hundreds of ceramic vases and small statues. They all portray one thing...Hercules. After the discovery, researchers linked the findings to a 2500 year-old text that describes a mysterious house of Hercules at Thebes just outside the gates of the ancient city. The description and the site match perfectly, but there's more.
The ancient text says that this shrine was erected on the precise spot of Hercules' birth. Could the hero have been real? The hunt for clues leads back to the myth. As the story continues, Hercules comes of age. A man-god straddling two worlds, the human and the supernatural. He is too strong to be a human. He's sort of like a god trapped in a human's body. Often, he accidentally does bad things to people around him, like he accidentally kills people.
He accidentally damages property. He can't really control himself. This superhuman strength makes it impossible for Hercules to blend into Greek society. He was unable to form emotional contacts with anyone. In fact, there seems to have been a kind of schizophrenic quality to his make-up. He was half-human, and half divine, and yet he had a father who would not protect him from the terrible trials and tribulations that Hera inflicted upon him.
He was left alone, suspended between heaven and earth, and having nowhere to go.
Desperate for some semblance of normalcy Hercules marries a beautiful princess who bears him two sons. But his domestic bliss is short-lived. His nemesis Hera soon returns determined to make sure he never knows happiness. This time he'll transform him from family man to murderer by driving him mad.
She sends madness to him as he sleeps. And he, in his madness, believes that his wife and his children are his enemies. In the dead of night, Hercules commits an unspeakable horror. When Hercules wakes up from this madness, from this ravenous madness, he finds himself covered in the blood of his own family. He doesn't really even know that he's the one that did it. But nevertheless he has the blood stains on him, it is the physical mark of guilt. And this is the guilt he must bear.
And is from this horrible incident that the rest of Hercules' story unfolds. The strongest man on earth has slaughtered his entire family. When his blind rage subsides it is replaced with intense remorse, a horrible anguish that will plague him forever. The ancient Greeks called this a "blood guilt". In antiquity a "blood-guilt" was understood to be a kind of curse that clung to you from the blood of the person whose murder you were involved in.
This is a little bit like a Christian penance where you do certain good acts on the earth in other to make up for bad things that you might have done. From here on, he's going to have to try to get rid of the stain of blood guilt from this horrible act. And this is the very pivot of Hercules' whole life. To purify his soul, Hercules will have to survive the most excruciating series of challenges ever confronted by man or the gods.
It is a journey that will take him across the Greek world and beyond and leave a trail of real evidence that sheds new light on the truth behind the myth. Mythology's superhero, Hercules, has just butchered his wife and children under a spell cast by his stepmother, Hera. Now, the strongest man on earth must atone for his crime. But he is lost.
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