It’s impossible to know exactly when stories of Herakles (Greek)/Hercules (Latin) began to be told. If we are to believe the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and we probably shouldn’t, Herakles lived more or less around 1300 B.C.E., founding various city states and royal lines in between fighting monsters, killing his children, taking away a tasty food source of divine liver from kindhearted, hungry eagles under the guise of “freeing” minor gods from unjust punishments, cross-dressing, and wrestling Death. This was the sort of thing that made for great stories, and by Herodotus’ time (5^th century B.C.E.) the stories were widely told, not just in words, but in pottery, paint, mosaic, sculpture and stone—including the great temples raised in his honor, since by that time, Herakles was regarded as a god.

It’s possible that, as at least some 5^th century Greeks believed, Herakles was based on some remote historical figure—possibly a man whose life was so filled with misfortune and bad luck that his contemporaries just assumed a goddess had to be after him—and that, like King Arthur years later, stories about him later grew in the telling, continually reshaped to suit the needs of each teller. It seems more likely, however, that Herakles was never more than a myth—quite possibly a myth with roots stretching back to hunter/gatherer days, later assumed to have a historical existence simply because so many ancient royal families found that convenient. (It always helps to have a hero and a god on the family tree.) His name, after all, suggests this: “Herakles”, or a hero originally connected to the great goddess Hera. Though by the time the tales were recorded, that connection was a relationship of pure hatred and spite.

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