The Strength of a Thousand Men Had a Price

[Fair warning: I talk about fictional characters like they're real a lot in this post. I promise I'm not insane.]

I've been thinking a lot about Heracles lately, or, as most people know him, Hercules.

Well, to be honest, I've been thinking a lot about greek mythology in general, because since it concerns both the books I'm reading and the book I'm writing, it's taking up a lot of my brainspace. But my point is I've been thinking about Hercules in particular.

What spurred this train of thought is that I've been seeing the trailers for the new Hercules movie EVERYWHERE. You know the one, starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? And I watch this trailer, and I see him wearing the lion skin, and I think, wow, maybe we'll actually get an accurate movie about this hero for once. And I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on it, but that's okay, because I'm just going to comment on the strongest aspect of the trailer.

The strongest aspect of the trailer, of course, is that there is so much testosterone I can barely stand it.

And this irritates me.

Because the thing is, yes, Hercules was a hero, and he killed a lot of monsters with his bare hands and had the strength of a thousand men, blah blah blah. But if you actually pay attention the story of Hercules, it's actually very very sad. And I feel like the overall tragedy of Hercules, which is extremely important to the character, always gets overlooked and, more often than not, completely cut out of everything in order for him to become this ridiculous male power fantasy.

Hercules accomplished a lot, but more importantly, he endured a lot. But everytime I see him in pop culture he gets reduced to this chest-beating testosterone junkie who every woman is attracted to. And yeah, that irritates me. There's so much more to his story than that.

Okay, Hercules fought a ridiculous amount of monsters and did a ridiculous amount of stuff in mythology, so I doubt I'll cover everything. (There was a line in a book I was reading that I thought was funny and accurate: "Man, Hercules was like, the Starbucks of Ancient Greece. Everywhere you turn - there he is.") But in any case, here's a crash course of Hercules so that y'all understand what I'm talking about.

So, Zeus had a kid with a mortal woman. What a surprise that is, considering it's basically all he does. This demigod child was Hercules. Now, the problem is that Zeus has a wife, Hera. She causes about ninety-five percent of the conflicts in greek mythology because she's always jealous of the affairs Zeus has, and takes revenge on the mortals involved rather than, I dunno, Zeus. So before Hercules was even born, she was already taking revenge. Basically, she made Zeus swear an oath that whoever be born that night to the party of Perseus (a different greek hero, son of Zeus - Hercules was his great-grandson) would become a king. Then she delayed Hercules's birth in a way that was extremely painful for his mother while causing the premature birth of Hercule's cousin, Eurystheus, and making him king. (This becomes important later). Actually, she would have kept Hercules from being born at all, except she screwed up, basically, allowing him to be born. (By the way, his original name was something entirely different from Hercules - something starting with an A, don't remember, but Zeus convinced his mother to name him Heracles, which means "for the glory of Hera", in order to maybe make it up to her. Spoiler alert: it didn't work. Then, of course, the romans changed his name from Heracles to Hercules, so that part gets lost entirely).

Hercules had a relatively normal childhood, aside from occasionally strangling evil Hera snakes to death and things like that. He grew up and married the daughter of a king, had a few kids, all is happy. And then Hera swoops in, unable to allow an illegitimate child of Zeus to be happy. She makes him go insane, and so, in a rage, he murders his wife and children. When he eventually snaps out if it, he sees what he's done, and is, of course, horrified. And Hera basically goes, "Oh my gods, what have you done? That is a terrible crime, you horrible person! You will have to do ten labours for your cousin Eurystheus in order to atone." Which is pretty bitchy, considering she's the one who made him do it in the first place.

Remember Eurystheus, the one Hera made king instead of Hercules? Well, he's the cousin of Hercules. And he is jealous of Hercules. So, of course, Hera puts Hercules at the mercy of Eurystheus, knowing full well that he will probably try to kill him with the labours. And guess what? Eurystheus tries to kill Hercules with the labours he has him do. Go figure.

I'm not going to go into all ten of them, but they were all designed to be impossible for Hercules to do and hopefully kill him. The most important ones are these: Hercules killed the Nemean lion, whose fur couldn't be penetrated by any weapon, by strangling the monster to death. When that was done he wore the lion's fur, because it handily was weapon-proof and also a great fashion statement. The other two that matter is that Hercules killed the Hydra, which, as you may know, if you cut off one of its head, two more will grow back in its place. At first he didn't know how to kill it, until his nephew advised him to set the stumps of the heads on fire before they could regenerate, which he did. The other one is the cleaning of the Augean stables.

Stable cleaning? Big deal, right?.

Well, yeah, except there were a thousand cattle in the stables. And they were all immortal. And the stables had never been cleaned. And Hercules had to do it all in a day. That is an extremely large pile of cow dung. Anyways, he did it by rerouting the rivers to wash out the icky stuff. He'd been offered a third of the cattle if he did it, but of course, since it was supposed to be an impossible task, that point was moot. Except then it wasn't, and Augeas was all, "lol jk you can't have my cattle" and so Hercules killed him.

Anyways, these labours matter because Eurystheus decided that since A) Hercules hadn't accomplished the Hydra slaying by himself, and B) Hercules had been offered payment for the cleaning of the Augean stables, his accomplishing them didn't really count, and so he had to do two more.

After he finished his twelve labours, Hercules did a lot of other stuff - slayed a lot of monsters and a lot of bad people, became an Argonaut (along with his friend and, according to some myths, lover) with Jason to search for the Golden Fleece. Except they stopped at an island and Hercules's friend/possibly-lover drowned, and all the other Argonauts basically went, "Oh crap, what if Hercules finds out about his boyfriend dying and goes nuts like he did before and kills us all?" and, basically, they left Hercules on the island. What great friends.

Long story short, Hercules finds this other girl, also a daughter of a king, as well as makes friends with her brother, and he takes her and is besties with her brother and things are starting to look up. But then Hera's all, "No, no, happiness is not allowed," and makes him go insane again. This time, Hercules throws his new BFF over the city wall and kills him. Then he snaps out of it and Hera's like, "Well, there you go again killing innocent people, you terrible person. You'll have to be a slave to Queen Omphale for a year to atone for that."

So he does that. It's humiliating for him. After his year of slavery was up, Omphale decided to marry him. I'm not sure how that ended, exactly - some myths delight in being vague - all I know is that after a while there's this other open space for a wife that Hercules decides to fill with Deianira, who he fought the river god Achelous for. (Also breaks off the horn of Achelous, which incidentally becomes the first cornucopia).

At one point, Deianira gets attacked by a centaur (who were essentially the douchey frat boys of greek mythology). Hercules protects her by shooting the centaur with an arrow poisoned by Hydra venom. But the centaur gets its revenge, because as he lays dying, he basically tells Deianira, "Look, Hercules is a womanizer, okay? He's not going to stay with you. So here, take my Hydra-poisoned blood, and put it on the inside of his clothes. It'll burn people like acid. It'll kill him, but he sure won't be cheating on you anytime soon!" (How does this logic even resemble logic, by the way?)

So, when Deianira begins to suspect that Hercules is interested in someone else, she does that. When Hercules puts on the poisoned clothing he is immediately in agony and dying. When he takes it off, his flesh goes with it. There's no winning. So he chooses to die voluntarily, (sort of,) and dies on a pyre. As he dies, the gods decide that he was worthy to become a god, so they turn him into a god. That's Hercules's version of a happy ever after.

And of course, between those stories, he helped the gods kill giants, and slew a lot of monsters, and killed a lot of bad people, etcetera etcetera. Like I said, this was just a crash course. He did about a billion other things besides.

But my point is that Hercules's story is actually pretty tragic. Every time he gets a friend, the friend either dies or Hera makes him go insane and kill him. Every time he finds a woman (or man - apparently he wasn't picky) he can love, they either die or try to kill him. Every time he kills a monster there's three others, a jealous human and a goddess still trying to kill him. It wasn't a happy life.

And yet, here's the thing. Here's the thing that makes Hercules such an interesting story for me, and also what makes it that much more sad. He keeps trying.

He continued to kill the monsters. He continued to kill the bad guys. He even helped the gods, who by the way, had done nothing but screw him over, he even helped them kill the giants. All things considered, Hercules is a good guy. If he got bitter, if he got angry, it didn't stop him from constantly doing good deeds. I mean, some of the stuff he went through, I feel like it would be enough to make him crazy without Hera's help, you know? But that didn't happen. He kept being good.

Which makes it sadder. Because he deserved a better ending than he got.

I've clearly been thinking about Hercules too hard, but I have a lot of sympathy for the character. He really couldn't catch a break.

But none of the tragedy of Hercules ever gets captured, does it? Nope. People don't want the actual story, the actual sadness. They want a chest-beating, testosterone-driven he-man. Yeah, let's see him strangle the Nemean lion, but gee, ever wonder why they don't show some of the other labours, the more emasculating bits of his story, like stable cleaning, and slavery to a woman? Or the fact that he had male lovers?

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I am tired of seeing a tragedy like Hercules's get reduced to a male power fantasy. But it's all that ever happens. And to be honest? It pisses me off. Because there was way more to it than that. And the representation that pop culture gives Hercules is just not fair to the character that the myths actually described.

I just have a lot of frustration over this. Because for the longest time, I thought Hercules was a lame overrated hero who just killed a lot of things. Now, after I got my mythology straight, I realize that he really was a hero, because of the things he endured, and how in spite of the things he endured he kept being good. That, not the strength he was born with, is what makes him heroic.

And the fact that that's not represented... I think it says something about the things that we value.

And what I read in that, well, I think that's tragic as well.