The Universal Hero: Heracles/ Hercules

He's Zeus' baby but not Hera's! :O His momma is Alcmene. Not-dad dad was Amphitryton. Due to Zeus being a weirdo, Alcmene unkowningly got impregnated by both Amphytrion and Zeus in a worryingly short space of time, and so she gave birth to half-twins...

hera hates heracles. i don't blame her, but she should hate zeus too. she tries to kill him a lot. once she put snakes in his cot when he was a baby. he strangled them!

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Whar heracles is known best for is his labours. why did he have to do them?

when he grew up, he married megara. but then hera sent a madness down and made him kill megara and his kids. the oracle said he should serve king eurytheus for 12 years/labours (it's not super-clear). king eurytheus didn't like him and so made him do the labours, with hera telling him what to do. the ultimate goal of these labours was to embarras hercules and hopefully seriously injure then slowly kill him. 

The Nemean Lion was a terrible lion that had skin impenetrable to weapons so Heracles strangled it.

then he used its own claw to skin it (athena told him to do that, because he wasn't bright enough to figure it out on his own)and got the skin as proof that he killed the lion.

then he wore the skin as a cloak, becuase proper jackets didn't exist them.

Many headed, venemous (the blood was poison) snakey thing! if u chop a head off, 2 more grow in its place. heracles learned that the hard way...

so he chopped off a head then cauterised the wound. his nephew-assistant helped. he was also attacked by a giant crab (thx hera!! <3) 

he used the venemous blood in his arrows. it's like, did being stabbed in the heart not kill you? no? well get some poison too!

this labour didn't count bc his cousin helped him.

Hey, is the harry styles song 'golden' abt the golden hind...?

so a hind is a female deer. this particular female deer was golden and belonged to artemis.

it took heracles a whole year for heracles to find it. he put it in a net and brought it to eurytheus. except then artemis and apollo saw him and they were like 'waht'

ARTEMIS: what r u doing with my golden hind

HERACLES: MY COUSIN MADE ME DO IT!!!

APOLLO whispers hey sis, that makes sense right

ARTEMIS: if u kill it i kill u. 

HERACLES: runs off with the hind, weeping for his life

So a boar is a pig but big and hairy

this boar was huge

heracles wore it down by chasing it round for a bit then he caught it and brought it to eurytheus. eurytheus was so scared of it he hid in a pithos jar!!! (image linked) https://i.imgflip.com/7b9ig7.jpg

these were stables were full of huge horses... and these horses pooped. a lot. (lol.)

and nobody had ever cleaned it. EVER. heracles was tasked with cleaning it 

he got some rocks and diverted the nearby rivers alpeios and peneious through the stables and that cleaned them. 

heracles was promised a payment for this labour. but the king augeas didn't pay him. so after the labour heracles returned with an army and defeated the kind and made the olympic games. all that from horse poo!

stymphalian birds: pigeons from hell. they eat the crops of stymphalos and the residents too. which is pretty damn bad...

they lived in the stymphalian marsh. heracles followed them there. athena gave him a rattle. (WOW ATHENA, UR SO HELPFUL ATHENA!! CLAP CLAP

heracles shook it, this woke the birds up. he shot them, either with his slingshot or bow and arrow (like katniss in the hunger games!!, but less intelligent, indecisive and good-looking)

The cretan bull was a bull but bad and cretan. heracles strangled it but not to death. then he rode it across the sea to greece which sounds... weird.

then he let it loose in eurytheus' kingdom, which was bright. this made eurytheus hide in the pithos AGAIN

it was later PROPERLY defeated by theuseus, who, despite being evil, knew how to defeat monsters the proper way.

You know a horse is bad when it eats people...

heracles defeated the stablemen and then the king who owned the horses, diomedes, realised he was going to lose them so he went to fight heracles.

heracles consequently fed diomedes to the horses. very, very classy. 

then heracles brought the horses to eurytheus. now that they were tame, they either wandered around argos or were killed by wild animals at olympus. 

The amazons were a group of warrior women who did NOT live in the amazon rainforest, they lived near the black sea which is in between turkey and ukraine. 

their leader, hippolyte, had a belt that was magical. she gave it to heracles bc she was a huuuge fan or smn but then hera spread rumour that heracles planned to kidnap hippolyte, which he didn't.

then there was a battle. hippolyte died and heracles got the belt.

so for this one had had to go to the edge of the world.. to southern spain. yes guys, like every english person ever, heracles went to gibraltar on holiday and had a fight with the locals.

so heracles had to steal geyron's red cattle. geyron himself had 3 heads and 3 arms and 3 legs. i think geyron was in the pjo series. 

then heracles stole the cows and they chased each other around and a some point ended up in southern italy. this is why there's a roman hercules story, which i'll give in a future card.

heracles eventually defeated geyron using his bow and arrow and the cows were sacrificed to hera.

also even tho this is 10 labours, he has to do 2 more labours bc he was helped w/the hydra and offered money w/the poo stables so there's 2 more labours comin' right up!

so hercules had to get zeus and hera's wedding gift, a golden apple tree! (everything's gold... stay gold, ARMY!)

heracles gets a bit lost. he doesn't know where the apple tree WAS. on his way he frees prometheus.

when he finally gets to the tree, it's guarded by the nymph-daughters of the titan atlas who were known as the hesperides. atlas is there, holding up the sky.

heracles offers to hold up the sky for a while if atlas gets the apples for him. atlas does so, then plans on leaving heracles there with the sky on his shoulders.

then heracles asks if he can just get a cushion for his shoulders because the sky is so heavy, atlas agrees, heracles runs away. the end.

this was a tricky one! getting cerberus, 3-headed guard dog of the underworld is 'no picnic' (sorry i was reading this book written in america in the 80's...)

heracles does it anyway, he strangles cerberus not to death and is DONE WITH THESE LABOURS OH YEAHHHHHH

You thought the labours were over. the labours may be over, but this set isn't! 

- so this is a Roman story, taking place during the 10th labour when heracles is going back to greece with the red cows.

SO herc is in southern italy (where rome is, but before the founding of rome)

and he goes to sleep in pallantium (and he's thought of as a god! :O )

anyway this dude cacus steals herc's 8 red cows! he leads them backwards so it doesn't even look from the prints that they left. then one of them moos.

herc chases cacus to cacus' cave, but cacus blocks the door with a boulder that is too heavy even for herc to move. but this cave is actually a mountain, and hercules lifts the top of the mountain right off and throws stuff down it at cacus. cacus breathes smoke to hide himself. (VOLCANO VIBES ANYBODY??)
herc strangles cacus. the end.

this is set after the labours.

so hercules wanted to marry this princess Deianira of Aitolia. so then achelous dissed herc's parentage and then herc attacked achelous. achelous turned into a snake then a single horned bull.

herc rips off the horn. it grows food inside it and is called the cornucopia. (HUNGER GAME VIBES?!?!?)

then herc marries deianira. 

now happily (on herc's side at least ig) and they're going to tiryns. but they need to cross this river, evenus. not thinking of his wife, hercules swims across.

deianira can't swim tho...

so this centaur nessus helps her across then he tries to run off with her. herc shoots nessus in the chest with an arrow.

nessus gives deianira his bloodied shirt, telling her it was a gift for 'waning love'.

so this happens a couple of years after the last one.

hercules is away and celebrating a victory against smn but deianira thinks he's in love with a different woman and she gives him the shirt (idk why he didn't notice that it was soaked in blood) and then it kills him. some versions, like the textbook, says it caught on fire from an altar and stuck to his skin (i don't even-)

and so he builds a funeral pyre and dies on it.

then he becomes deified THE END  but it's not bc let's talk metopes...

METOPES! 

What was a metope? 

- A metope was a square decorative space that ran around the temple. like an ancient stone comicstrip, but rubbish!!

Metopes were...

• easily recognisable. even the dumbest timmy (no offense if a timmy is reading) could recognise the scene from a known myth.
• realistic! (so not a manga comic....)
  and....
• space filling!!! whoot!!

Right! The original cult of hercules was greekish not romanish.

• only men could take part of the ritual (which was burning incense and scrificing an animal)
• there was an annual sacrifice @ the great altar of hercules aka the forum boarium
• the cult was originally run by the potitii and pinarii families
• but then a 'select group of slaves' ran the cult
• there were a lot of slaves in rome, and slaves liked hercules
• gladiators, when (IF) freed, got a wooden sword that would be hung in the temple of hercules the victor.

WE ARE DONE!!! praise me! give me a 5-star rating!! :)