The strongest, most beloved demagogue in all of Greek history murdered his own wife and children with his bare hands. And then the mightiest hero in history dropped to his knees and begged to die. Yeah, that's the real story of Hercules. Far more complicated, dark, and devastating than you probably remember of a Disney cartoon. The actual figure from Greek legend was one of the darkest heroes ever imagined, a man whose own name honored the goddess trying to destroy him. A man forced to serve a weaker king for years. A man who strangled lions with his arms and rerouted rivers with his bare hands. And he walked into the land of the dead and back out again. And yet somehow, this man who probably never lived became the most powerful name in the entire ancient world. The hero that Spartan kings, Alexander the Great, and a mad Roman emperor and a lion skin would all go to war to claim. 3,000 years later, you still know his name. No emperor could tame him. No other religion could eliminate him. And even death did not stop him. Considering he died as a mortal and came back as a god. This is a fascinating look at Greek mythology and the figure of Hercules. If you are interested in these topics, well, great news you're in the right place. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up people, and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we explored the most interesting, fascinating and controversial stories from all history for all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here on this very show every single week. I try to figure out everything that has ever happened. And there's a lot of stuff happening all the time, as a matter of fact. History's made every day, as they say. And as a result, I thought I'd get through basically all of history in like a couple episodes, but there's just more stuff happening all the time. And this is no exception. And before I jump in to the great story of Hercules, I want to say a few words. Thank you to you. Yeah, dude, or girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in to this show. Every time you comment, you like, or you subscribe, you help the show grow, you keep the lights on of the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, of course, my sort of, I should say, my obsession with Greek history is not possible without my good friend, my pal, the Greek freak himself, my pronunciation guide, and my friend. How are you? How dare you say, Hercules might not have existed. What do you, okay, he obviously didn't, I mean, he existed in the cartoon. That's for sure. And in real life, the son of Zeus. That's what they taught me. That's your religion, you believe this? Yes. Well, we're going to find out once and for all today. And more importantly, Crestos, your day has come, as it has come a few days already now, where I'm going to need your help pronouncing some words, especially lately. Yes, especially lately. We've absolutely been on a Greek history tear, and it wouldn't be possible without you correcting me on how I say these words. Burning the midnight oil, as I said. As they say, that's an old Greek phrase, right? I hope so. You probably will claim it. Now, look, Hercules is one of the most famous figures in world history. Like the legend has transpired for thousands of years. I'm not just talking Greek. Obviously, I'm talking Greek to an extent, but I'm not just talking Western history. His name is known all over the world, and has survived for thousands of years. So before we can even go anywhere, we actually got to talk about literally his name, because that alone has an entire back story behind it and gives us so much context on who Hercules is and where he came from. So I'm saying Hercules. We know him as Hercules. We've all seen the Disney cartoon, which is my favorite Disney movie for the record. I love Hercules. Or as they call him in the film, "Huncules." Favorite character? I'd love the muses. How was it just about to say that? It is a gospel film. You know what I mean? Hot Take, Hercules is kind of like a black movie. It is a black TV. It is a black film. Easy, Mark. It is. I mean, think about the muses. It's all gospel music. It is, in my opinion. It is, I think, goes in the pantheon. It's like dolomite and like centers and black panther and Hercules. Great black movies. That's all I'll say. Now, it's actually not his name, fun fact. Hercules is the Roman version. It's like the Latin remix that came centuries after the original. And then somehow that's the version that the entire Greeks speaking world defaulted to. The Greeks who actually invented Hercules, they called him Hercules. Yeah, it's the same character told by different cultures. And, you know, about 2,000 years of remodeling kind of between them. You can think of like the Iliad is the Greek version and then the Iniad is the Roman remix of the same story. So just to keep it straight for the rest of, you know, what we're talking about, when we're in the Greek world, he's Hercules. And when we move to Rome, he becomes Hercules for the sake of this episode. I'm going to keep calling him Hercules. Sorry, Christus. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Now let's get back to it. So where does he actually come from? Well, the story starts the way that a lot of these Greek stories start. It has to do with Zeus being a bad guy. Yeah, I'm sorry. If you watch our episode on Zeus, you know that Zeus was not a model citizen or a model god for that matter. So, you know, Zeus was the king of the gods. And he had a problem with faithfulness. And one day he comes down to earth and he sleeps with a mortal woman. Her name is Alchmini. Her husband is a guy named Amphitrion. And he ends up as the father on paper. And he's the one who actually raises the kid. But as we know, the kid isn't really his. The kid is half god. It's really half Zeus's kid. Now, we'd look at that and go like, oh, a demigod. Meaning like a half god. Well, you know, one divine parent, one mortal parent, easy case close. And that works. But we should flag something because it's going to be important later. The ancient Greeks didn't actually sort their characters into tidy little categories like that. Hercules wasn't a clean 50/50 split. 50% god, 50% human. He was more complicated. So his story starts with him as a mortal human. And then he dies and becomes a dead hero. Like the kind of hero that people would like go to his tomb. They would visit, you know, where he'd laid to rest. And they would give offerings. And then after all that, he becomes a full god, a true Olympian, as the Greeks would say. And he was worshipped in temples, right up there with, you know, all the immortals. So he crosses the line between human and divine. But not just ones. He does it twice. There's actually almost nobody in all of Greek mythology that does that. Like kings don't do it. Other heroes don't do it. But Hercules or Heracles makes it work. Now his name, Heracles, most scholars translate it into something to be like the glory of Hera, like Heracles. You can see where it comes from. Hera is the queen of the gods, the most powerful goddess on all of Mount Olympus, which sounds like an honor. But it's not. You see, Hera, the goddess, his name literally celebrates, spends the entire rest of his life trying to destroy him and to understand why the guy, you know, the glory of Hera becomes the personal nemesis of Hera herself. Well, we have to go all the way back to the day that she birthed him. Now, real quick, before we get into the whole story of Hercules, Heracles, I need to explain to you why there's not just one cohesive story about his life. And in order to understand this, we have to break down his legacy layer by layer. So let's start. When did Hercules actually live? Well, the Greeks would have had a pretty confident answer for you. They would tell you that he belonged to the heroic age. This is like a legendary golden stretch of time when demigods walked around, like killing monsters, and, you know, produced the same generation that fought the Trojan War. So the poet, Hesiod, literally described him as like, they described like a separate race of humans that were bigger and stronger and like better than all of us regular humans. And it's dropped into history right before our own sad kind of water down age came along. And the later Greek scholars would even do the math for you. So like they would tell you that history lands somewhere around what we now know is the late Bronze Age. So they'd be like, oh, Hercules existed around like 13th century BC. Now, Bronze Age just means the stretch of history when people were making their tools out of Bronze. And the late Bronze Age is like the end of that period. It's pretty self-explanatory. So in Greece, that final stretch has a more specific name because a very specific civilization was living there at the time. And we now know them as the Mycenaeans. It's technically the same era with like two overlapping labels. So late Bronze Age is when and the Mycenaean people is the who. The Mycenaeans were a real civilization of like, you know, massive stone fortresses and warrior kings and palaces that were super organized, so organized that they kept ridden inventory of their like raw supplies on clay tablets. And they rose around like 1600 BC and they ran for centuries until they collapsed kind of dramatically and mysteriously, right around like 1200 or 1100 BC. And Hercules is supposed to have been alive near like the end of that empire. So now we have a time and a place and a people. So let's go check the records for any other signs of this great guy. A lot from the world actually survived from that specific time period. Those fortresses are still standing and we've dug up tombs and we can even read the clay tablets. I mean, I say we, I don't know how to read the clay tablets.
or I didn't dig up any tombs, but someone did. And you know, we have the names of their kings and officials and like records of who owned what. Archaeologists have spent literal lifetimes pulling the Mycenaean world up out of the ground, like piece by piece, but in all of it, every clay tablet, every tomb, every inscription, every scrap that those palaces have left behind, there's not a single mention of a man named Heracles. Sorry. No monument, no grave, no seal, nothing. And it actually gets a little bit worse for the people who believe that Hercules or Heracles was real, because the earliest time he shows up anywhere in Greek writing, the first surviving mentions of him at all, is in the poems of Homer and of Heziat, and those are dated around like the eighth century BC. So that's like a 500 year gap after the Bronze Age heroes supposedly died. So five centuries of total silence, and then all of a sudden he's everywhere. He's in poems, he's in pottery, temples, like he just kind of materialized out of nowhere, fully formed 500 years after he was supposed to have lived. So if you time travel to Ancient Greece, and they tell you that he's from the late Bronze Age, you're gonna have to unfortunately correct him, be like actually we looked into it and we don't think he is. So historians do the only thing that they really can. They treat Heracles as a complete myth, not like an actual human being. Now, could there be something real buried at the very bottom of all this? Well, some actual Bronze Age strongmen, some like local king or maybe a warrior who got forgotten whose story was exaggerated and immortalized like centuries until it became this. Well, yeah, it's possible, right? You can't rule it out, but you also can't prove it. And the evidence to nail it down simply just isn't there. So it kind of leaves us with a strange situation. The single most famous hero of the ancient world, like the strongest man, like this hunk, whose name got stamped into coins and temples, and empires probably never existed. And at best, it's based off of like the loose stories of maybe a warrior from, you know, the late Bronze Age. But even in spite of all that, three of the most powerful men in history were about to go to war over who ultimately got to claim him. So here's a thing that most tend to believe about these kinds of ancient myths. Like we assume that there's an original story. Like somewhere way back in the beginning, there's a real version of Hercules and everything that came after is just a copy of a copy of a copy getting kind of blurrier and changed and exaggerated every time someone retells it. Well, sometimes that's true. But for Hercules, that's not really what happened at all. There was never one Hercules. The myth of Hercules is actually this giant sprawling thousand year long pile of stories written by a bunch of different people in different centuries and different cities who kind of all contradict each other. So let's just kind of go through some of them and see how it all stacks up. If you're gonna start with Hercules, you gotta go to Homer around eighth century BC and Homer barely engages with it. I mean, he name drops Hercules. He's like, oh yeah, you know, the famous hero from the old days, but he never actually like sits down and tells you the story. He just assumes that the people that are hearing this already know about it. And then of course you have the playwrights and this is where we get a lot of the Hercules story that we know. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because it's summertime and I gotta tell you something. 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The frother alone is absolutely worth it. That's right, up to 43% off with the code camp at mudwtr.com, go to mudwater.com/camp. And after you check out, make sure you tell 'em that the good folks here at camp sentia, it really helps out the show. So for example, Euripides writes an entire tragedy built around the single most horrifying thing that Heracles ever did. We'll get to that in a second. You know Euripides, right? Yeah, he's the. Yeah, Euripides nuts in your mouth. All right. And then you have, I shouldn't be making these jokes. This is a good historical program. I'm sorry, I'm not sorry. That's a good one. And then of course, you have Sophocles. And Sophocles writes a completely different story about how Hercules died. And neither of these guys is trying to be a historian. Like this is not a historical ledger of what happened. They're, they're drama guys, right? They're chasing the version that is gonna like, you know, slap in the theater that's gonna make people get up and give the standing ovation, right? So they're gonna bend the story in order to achieve that end. And then centuries later, there's a compiler that people call pseudo-apolodoras. And he finally comes along and does a thing that you'd think somebody would have done like literally years ago. He strings all the adventures into one clean connected account from start to finish. And it is because his version is the neat and tidy one, like technically the complete one that people have since treated it as the story, like the true Hercules canon. But it's not. It's just the most organized and consolidated version of his life or the myth around him. And so it shows up actually really late in the game. And then after him, you get Diodorus Siculus writing his own big sweeping take in the first century BC. And then you're gonna get Pausanias who travels around Greece in the second century AD, actually writing down the local versions of Hercules, like literally going town by town, being like, what do you think about this guy? And discovers that every region had its own hometown spin, like its own weird little details, its own version of Hercules, like how some people have soda, some people have pop, like they just had their own little version of it. And then of course you're gonna get Ovid in Rome, taking the entire thing and reshaping it into this gorgeous Latin poem for an imperial crowd that wanted something a little more elegant, you could say. Now it's easy to look at all of this and just be like, this is a mess. This is a broken game of telephone, this whole story is absurd. But it's not, that is the myth. Every one of these writers inherited Hercules from the people before them, the people before them and then remade them and re-contextualize them for their own century, for their own people, for their own theater, and ordered to fit what they needed at that time. And some of the versions that they were working from, like the local versions, we can't even read them anymore. There was actually an early epic about Hercules, called Heroclia, an entire poem about this person and it's just gone. It's vanished, like we only know it existed because other people mention it in their writings. Someone, someone, it comes to you and they're like, what's the real story of Hercules? There isn't really one. There's so many different cities and civilizations and cultures throughout history that claim him as their guy. And in a second, we're gonna see just how far some men were willing to go to prove that he's theirs. So we're just gonna put a pen in the history really quick and jump back into the Herocles story, like the actual story as best we can. We left off with him being fully human and having this goddess stepmother who hated him. Well, let's go back to that. So Hera, right? You remember Hera, the goddess of all the goddess, right? Herocles is an insult. Herocles is living proof that her husband Zeus cheated on her.
And she's not a subtle about it. She wants to mess with Heracles' life. So when he's still just a baby in the cradle she sends two serpents to kill him. But what does Heracles do? Strangles him, bang, in his crib, ties him up. That's the first thing the child becomes famous for. And then Herra's piss. She's like, well, my snake trick didn't work. So she plays the long game. She rigs the timing of his birth so that a weaker cousin, a man named Eurystheus, gets born first and then inherits a kingship that would have gone to Heracles. Which is why for years the strongest man alive, Heracles ends up taking orders from a lesser king. Remember that detail because it's going to be really important for like the whole, you know, labor's story that we're going to get into in a second. But years later, Heracles is now a grown man. And he has a pretty good life. He has a wife, her name is Megara, and they have children, sons, they have a home, and he's pretty happy. A nice little detail that Disney did because the, you know, the damsel and distress and Hercules is named Meg. And that's, you know, drawing on Megara, his actual wife. Kind of cool. And then Herra steps in to ruin Hercules's beautiful little life. She reaches into his mind and she breaks it. Yeah. She sends madness upon him, a divine like mind shattering insanity. And in that fog, Heracles looks at his own wife and his own children. And he doesn't see them. He doesn't see people he loves. He sees enemies. He thinks that they are intruders in his home. And what does he do? He kills them all of them with his own hands. They didn't include that in the Disney movie. They didn't put the part where he just destroys his whole family just goes absolutely wild on them. Would have been a good episode. It would have been an interesting little little flavor to it. You're like, oh, these muses are singing. And they would have to do like the whole killing his family thing in like gospel. That'd be a little tough. And do six mocking to bring them back. Yeah, exactly. I just feel like the merch would not have done it as well. If they were like, oh, he can, he committed what they call patricide. Yep. Yeah. So when the madness finally lifts, Hercules looks around, Hercules, and he looks and he's like, oh no, I killed my whole family. So now if you're familiar with Greek mythology at all, you may know the rest of the story that the next part is where Hercules, as you know, like a form of punishment, is now commanded to do these insane impossible tasks that they call labors. And you probably think it like, okay, he does these terrible things, kills his family. And then as punishment, he sentenced to perform the labors, right? Like he has a crime. And then he sentenced to do these tasks that are impossible. Yeah. Kind of true. But that's only one version. Cause remember, there are multiple and at times conflicting versions of Hercules' story. So this is the one that's in pseudo appaladors. He kills the children. He staggers to the Oracle at Delphi, just drowning in guilt, one stand his own life. And he's told to go serve Eurystheus to purify himself. And so there's the crime. And then there's the punishment. But then we have the Euripides version in his play first performed in front of an Athenian audience in like the late fifth century BC. The labors are already over by that point. Hercules has finished the whole legendary gauntlet. He's at the absolute peak of his life. He's a hero that conquered all of these tasks. He killed all these monsters, walking back through his own front door after his final trial. And according to Euripides, that's the moment that Hera strikes him down with this madness and makes him kill his whole family. So you can see what that does with the story. One version you have this insanity from a god or a goddess. And then there's a murder. And then that leads up to his redemption. But in the other, the murder is like almost a consequence or like the outcome of his great heroic feet. So yeah, if you give those events the opposite order, it gives a completely different meaning to the character. And I just have to include not to get too nerdy here, but to be honest, you know, who the hero actually is throughout the entire story and through history. He's complicated and his whole journey and characterization kind of changes. And I just want to include that detail in here, not to like get too nerdy on like Greek mythology, but I think it gives a really interesting context to who Hercules is and how he was represented throughout history. He's complicated and his whole journey and characterization really changes depending on which version you get told. But underneath both versions, no matter which order you tell it in the exact same question is still at the core of it. The question that Greek tragedy must address, no matter how many times it's circled back. How do you cleanse a hero whose hands have done the worst possible thing, especially when it's not really his fault. It's the gods who forced him to do it. So we're going to go with the pseudo Apollodorus version. So he commits this horrible act. And then that leads us to the 12 labors. This is the version that most people know. So he has to go, you know, destroy a lion and the many headed serpent and a trip down into hell itself. These 12 impossible tasks that he must accomplish. This is what the song zero to hero in the Disney movie really talks about. It's his journey to becoming a hero. And it's all these crazy things that he has to accomplish all that stuff. And the 12 labors weren't just decided on like in one single version. They were kind of assembled throughout history. You can actually follow the trail of how they fall into place. So the earliest place that we actually see all 12 of these tasks laid out as one complete set isn't in a book at all. It's actually carved into stone. It's 12 sculpted marble panels wrapped around the temple of Zeus at Olympia made around 460 BC. And that's a pretty big deal because Olympia is arguably the holiest site in the entire Greek world. But there's a problem because the marble doesn't quite match what we read in the books. Like the order shifts around some details don't really line up with like the later written lists, which tells us something kind of fascinating that even at that point, even carved into a temple, the official canon still isn't fully set. So okay, what are they? What are what are the labors final form? Well, the first six keep Hercules close to home. He's basically wrestling with the wild landscape of Greece itself. So first, we have the Namean lion. This is a beast whose hide is literally so tough. Its skin is so thick that no weapon can pierce it. So Hercules just strangles it with his bare arms. And then he skins it and then wears the belt for the rest of his life. That lion skin kind of like becomes his logo. And then of course, you have the Hydra. This is a swamp serpent that grows two heads back every single time you cut one off. So you cut a head off, two more heads, cut another, two more heads off four heads and just keeps growing exponentially. And then you have a magical deer that he has to chase for an entire year. And then there's like this monstrous boar that he has to take down and a flock of killer birds. And then there is the famous filthy stable. Thousands of cattle stuck in like mud and muck. And he basically has to you know, clean them in a single day, not by grinding it out with a shovel, but by literally rerouting two rivers to blast the whole thing clean. That's just the first six. The second set like the the other six labors changes the entire scale of the story because they fling him to the very edges of the known world. So now he's fighting a bull on the island of Crete wrangling this man eating horse in Thraki stealing the belt of the queen of the Amazon's wrestling the cattle of a three-bodied monster in the far far west fetching golden apples from a garden at the literal edge of the world. And then finally the big one number 12. He walks down into the underworld, the land of the dead and drags the three headed guard dog of hell named Cerberus back up into the light alive. Those are the 12 labors, but they're just one stretch of his life. So now you've got all the pieces. Let's actually lay out the whole thing front to back in the version that most people mean when they say the story of Hercules, the consolidated generalized accepted one. Zeus goes down to earth. He's unfaithful to his wife. He makes love to a mortal woman named Alchmeini and he has a son named Hercules. Now that makes Hercules a demigod. He's half god, half mortal and it makes Hera Zeus's wife his lifelong enemy because Hercules is manifestation. He is he is living proof that her husband had an affair. So while Hercules is an infant, Hera sends two serpents into the cradle to kill him. Baby Hercules strangles him with his bare hands, ties him up, flings him away and it is the first sign of what he is that he's not just a regular mortal that he is something greater. He grows into the strongest man alive. He marries a woman named Megara. He has children with her and that is when Hera strikes her cruelest blow. She sends madness down upon him and in the fog of his insanity, he can't recognize his own family and he sees them as enemies. He kills his wife and children with his own bare hands and then when the madness lifts, he's seen what he is done and he's shattered, he's horrified, he wants to die, desperate to purify himself of the horror he goes to the oracle at Delphi, which then sends him to serve a weaker king, Eurystheus, and perform whatever tasks the king demands. Those tasks then become the 12 labors, a gauntlet of impossible feats. He strangles the impenetrable lion and then wears the skin forever after. He kills the many-handed hydra. He captures monstrous beasts, cleans the impossible stable by rerouting rivers with his own strength. Until the final labors sends him into the underworld itself to drag out.
out to this three headed guard dog from hell, the Severus, back into the light alive. And then Hercules walks into death, he walks out defeating death and comes back the greatest man. But the labors don't end his story. Years later, he takes on a new wife named Dianara, and then there's a dying centaur named Nessus who tricks her, telling her that his blood is a love potion that will keep Hercules faithful. So when she fears that she's losing him, she soaks a robe in that blood and sends it to him, not knowing that it's a lethal poison. The robe burns his flesh and the pain is just so unbearable that Hercules builds his own funeral pyre on Mount Eda and has himself burned alive. But once again, that's not the end of the story. On the funeral pyre, his mortal half burns away and his divine half rises to Olympus where he becomes a full god at last. He kind of reconciles with Herra and is now welcomed among the Immortals. Whew. So you have a strong man, a murderer, now a servant, and then a monster slayer, and then finally, a god. That's the story. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I wanna talk to you about the thing in your back pocket that's probably a disaster. Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Extra and the new Wallet Pro. I switched to this and I'm not going back. This is genuinely the wallet that I use every day. It is next gen Italian leather and it's got this metal ejector trigger, so you hit the button with your thumb and all your cards instantly fan out. One hand, instant, no more digging around at the counter. And yeah, you're not gonna be holding up the line next time you're trying to like cash out. And here's what gets me, it's the slimmest leather wallet that Extra has ever made, but it actually holds more. Yeah, up to 14 cards plus your cash and it sits flat in your pocket, no plastic anywhere. It is all recycled aluminum and real leather and it comes with a lifetime warranty. So yeah, this is basically the last wallet that you will ever buy and here's the kicker. It is Extra's 10th anniversary sale right now. So you're gonna get up to 40% off through August 17th. You go to partner.extra.com/campgagnon. It's linked in the description too and use the code gagnon20 to get an extra 20% off on top of that. Yes, it comes with Extra's 100 day money back guarantee. So there is literally zero risk. Upgrade that beat up wallet that you have this falling apart. Get this wallet that is perfect Italian leather. It smells great. It has no plastic and it holds everything you need and more you will thank me later. Now let's get back to the show. But notice something about the middle part of the story, the labors, these insane tasks. The further they push him from home, the more the story stops belonging to any one place. Like the farther Hercules travels, the more places get to claim a piece of him. So some town and Sicily can say, oh yeah, he passed through here and then a rock formation in Spain. We can say yeah, he made that actually. He made that rock thing on the mountain and then, oh the river and Italy, he crossed it. This is where Hercules came and crossed the river and became the greatest. So his story stops being anchored in one spot on the map and becomes kind of like every man hero, the hero in your own backyard, which is exactly what the most powerful people in the ancient world were about to start fighting over. So this is the moment Hercules stopped being a story and starts being something that people actually try to own. So let me explain. Hercules supposedly had all these adventures. Remember, but in the myth, he had kids. So if you have kids, that means you have a bloodline and that bloodline actually has its own name. Heracles, the children of Hercules, that's what they called them. So everyone was wondering, where are the Heracles? And that turned out to be one of the most valuable things that a person could possibly claim in the entire ancient Greek-speaking world. Because you're like, hey, I'm actually the son of Hercules. And what does that make you? All of a sudden, now you're like part demigod. Suddenly, your power isn't something that you grabbed. It's something that you inherited. You can see how useful it is, right? Especially in ancient cultures. It launders raw power and just kind of like taking the throne into something bigger. It becomes destiny. It becomes your fate. And nobody ran this play harder than Sparta. Yes, both of Sparta's royal houses, and yes, Sparta weirdly had like two kings at once, but that's like a whole different thing. Both of these houses claimed that they were Heracles, which meant that every Spartan king could draw a family tree that ran straight back through the greatest hero who ever lived, and from him, straight back to Zeus. Remember, back in the old days, everyone was trying to connect their power to divinity. And this is no different. The Spartans were like, hey, my authority isn't because of politics or anything, it is divine. It is stamped and signed at the very top by the king of the gods himself. Zeus wants me to be here and that's why I'm here. So for a Spartan king, Hercules wasn't just like a little bedtime story. It wasn't a Disney cartoon. It was their right to rule. It was a blessing from the highest beings of the known universe. So think about that for a second, right? Like let's just, let's just deliberate. Was any of this actually true? Remember, we don't have any real evidence that Hercules actually ever existed, but it doesn't matter. Nobody claiming his ancestry needed it to be real. They just needed to be powerful and compelling to the people that they ruled. And in the entire Greek world, there was no name that carried more weight than Hercules. And the Spartans figured this out. And Sparta was just the very beginning of this whole thing because the next two men who reached for that same divine ancestry, they weren't content just calling Hercules their ancestor. They wanted to become a reflection of Hercules. And the other one genuinely seemed to believe that he was Hercules himself. So let's get into that whole story. Up in the North of Greece, there's a kingdom called Macedon. It was ruled by a dynasty called the Arguids. And the Arguids, like the Spartans, before them, claimed a bloodline. And the most famous Arguid who ever lived put his money on it. So when Alexander the Great, yeah, that Alexander, you've heard of him. When he carved out the largest empire that the world had ever seen, literally from Greece all the way to the edge of India, he needed millions of coins. You need coins. You got to pay armies, you got to fun cities, you got to pay your soldiers, you got to grease the war machine a little bit. The silver coins that financed all of it carried a very specific image. On one side, it was Zeus. But on the other side, get this. It was a young, beardless Hercules wearing the same unmistakable lion skined headdress pulled up over his head that he got from the very first labor. Think about the reach of that. As Alexander the Great is conquering, at this point, literally the whole world, the face of Hercules is riding along with his army into every marketplace, into every soldiers bank account, every hand from Athens to basically the Himalayas. Hercules was there. And it went further than just the coins. There's a gold ring that survives to this day showing Alexander the Great himself dressed as Hercules, wearing the lion skin. Pretty bold. I mean, if anyone can do it. I mean, I think Alexander the Great probably gets a little bit of a pass. But like putting yourself in the hero's costume is all of a sudden blurring the line between you as a man and you as a demagogue. And here's the thing about Alexander, it was always a comparison, a really flattering piece of PR. He wanted you to think of Hercules when you thought of him. But Alexander the Great never outright claimed to be Hercules. There was a guy that did that. We'll get to him in a second. Roughly 400 years after Alexander the Great on the throne of the Roman Empire, there was a man named Commodus. And Commodus wasn't some like low birth warlord who clawed his way up. He is the son of Marcus Aurelius. You know Marcus Aurelius. He's the philosopher, emperor, one of like the wisest and most respected rulers that Rome ever produced. I mean, people still read his work to this very day. Well, what he decided to do with it, he wanted to become Hercules. Like literally. Like he even took the title. He was no longer a Commodus. He became Hercules Romanus, meaning the Roman Hercules. He had a statue of himself carved wearing the same lion's skin, gripping the club, holding the golden apple of disparities. One of those like very statues actually survived and you can still look at it right now. He renamed a month of the year after the hero slash himself. And he stood up in front of the Roman Senate, the most powerful political body of the ancient world and informed him, you informed all of them. Hey, I'm actually not an emperor. I am Hercules. I'm the son of Zeus, a living god. And then Commodus went down into the arena to prove it. This is a true story. The Emperor of Rome, dressed as Hercules, lion skin, club in hand, went down to fight as a gladiator, allegedly hundreds of times. Crazy. And we don't just have a legend for this. We have an eyewitness. There's actually a senator named Cassius Dio, who was personally forced to sit in that arena and watch it happen and he wrote it all down. And like what he wrote is like, it's insane. Dio described Commodus as one day beheading an ostrich and then walking the severed head over towards the senator's section, holding it up, grinning at them, basically being like, yo, see this ostrich head? This could be you. If you mess with me, if you don't accept my divinity, this is you, my boy. Where'd you even get an ostrich? Right, like, well, this is an ancient Rome, you're getting ostriches? That's crazy. Like, I didn't know they had, I've never seen a Roman ostrich. They look different. He's the son of God. get it. I guess, right? I mean, another time the same [BLANK_AUDIO]
Remember, rounded up men from a roundroom who had lost their feet, like people were losing their feet back then, like diseases and accidents, didn't matter. He strapped on fake serpent tails to their legs so that they looked like giants and handed them sponges to throw. And then he clubbed them all to death literally. He was like, hey, look at these giant men that are trying to defeat me and they're trying to kill me. And then he literally kills them all, pretending that he was hercules slaying the monsters, doing his own version of the labors. And the senators were required to chant his praises while it was happening. It's maybe the single most audacious thing that he ever did get this. It involves like a statue that was already a very famous landmark in the city. So right next to the Colosseum stood the Colossus of Nero. You may be have heard of this. It's like this giant bronze statue of the sun gods standing like over a hundred feet tall. It's one of the largest statues in the entirety of the ancient world that we know about. Well, comedists had the head removed and who is he going to put on this giant hundred foot statue? He put his own face. Yeah. And then he equipped the giant statue with a club and set a bronze lion at its feet, turning the sun god of Nero near the Colosseum into a hundred foot tall hercules with comedists' face, towering over the heart of Rome, I mean, the audacity. Now in 192 AD, the people around Comet has finally decided like, hey, this is absurd. They tried to poison him and then the poison didn't finish the job. They sent an arrest alert to strangle him to death in his bath. The true story. Which is kind of funny. They tried to poison him because that's kind of how hercules died in like the original. Like from the pseudo-apolidorus version where like his new wife sends the, you know, bloodied robe to him. I was saying he wasn't him. I'm saying he might have been him. The fact that he dies of poisoning or at least they tried to kill him in poisoning. It didn't work. Regardless, they sent an arrest alert like classic, you know, Greco-Roman style go in, choke him out, didn't tap. Now the moment that Comet is dead, the Senate did something to him that the Romans reserved for their most hated figures. This is like a, it was this strange public kind of ritual called the Damna Tio memory eye. It was the condemnation of memory. And it is in Roman society, the official legal erasure of a person from existence. Like they would tear down a statue. They chiseled his name off of monuments. They basically tried to scrub the man out of existence entirely. But that one statue, you know, the one of him dressed as Hercules and Lineskin, somebody actually hid it underground and it survived that we get an image of that upon screen. It's the most insane thing. So I mean, up into this point, you can see we are three empires deep, right? Sparta makes Hercules its ancestor, Alexander the Great makes Hercules like a, a, a, kind of a companion piece. He's like, Hey, when you think of me, think of Hercules. And then Comet has made him an identity. He was like, I'm literally Hercules. So you have all these different uses. But there was one force that wouldn't want to wear Hercules or claim him. They actually wanted to destroy Hercules forever. So here comes the part where Hercules is supposed to die. And I don't mean like, from like, you know, poisoning or, you know, from like a funeral pyre or anything like that, but like they tried to erase the idea of Hercules. So over the next few centuries, the Roman Empire slowly becomes Christian. But there is one statue of him that survived one statue of Communist dressed as Hercules in the lion skin with like the club that whole thing. It's one bust that somebody hid underground, and it survived to this day. You can see an image of it up on the screen here. I mean, you can see just how obsessed with this guy. This guy was with trying to prove to everyone that he's actually Hercules. I mean, you can see obviously the lion skin, the club, he's holding like the, the apple. He's leaning into the Lord trying to convince all the people of Rome, Hey, I'm him. It's pretty crazy. I mean, at this point, we're three empires deep here. Sparta made Hercules like an ancestor. Yes, we are the descendants of Hercules. We are the children of Hercules. Alexander the Great makes him a comparison, kind of like a PR opportunity. He's like, when you think of me, think of Hercules. And then Communists made him an identity. Communists was like, no, no, I'm Hercules. So three totally different uses. But there was actually one force that was coming that didn't want to embrace Hercules or claim him or tried to pretend that they were him. This force tried to erase Hercules for good. So this is the part of story where they tried to kill Hercules, not like in a fire, but like for real trying to kill the idea of Hercules. You see, if you know anything about Roman history, over the next few centuries, the Roman Empire slowly becomes Christian. And you know exactly what's supposed to happen to a figure like Hercules when Christianity comes around, right? I mean, Hercules is a pagan hero, a false god. And anytime a new, all-consuming religion rolls around, they're going to try to sweep Hercules out of the way. But the early Christians ran into a problem with getting rid of him. Hercules was everywhere. I mean, carved into buildings, painted on walls, graffiti of Hercules, printed onto objects that people owned. I mean, money. Like, you couldn't just delete Hercules. He was baked into the culture. Like, he was just imprinted on the mind of the ancient Romans. But it was even worse than that because when they actually looked at him, they were really examining this pagan straw man that they were supposed to despise. But parts of Hercules' story started to feel familiar. I mean, he's a figure who suffered enormously, who took on these impossible, agonizing trials to make the world safer for everyone else. That's what these laborers really are, right? He's going around trying to defeat all these monsters to make the world better. And if you even think of like the stations of the cross, like Jesus Christ suffering for all of humanity. And then Hercules goes down into death itself. He descends into hell and then is resurrected. He climbs back out. And at the very end of his story, his mortal body is destroyed and then his divine spirit rises up into the heavens. Now, if you're a Christian today, you're probably like, "Okay, I could see some common understanding, right? If you're a Christian in the fourth century, you're like, "Hey, this is pretty close to home." The thing is, Christians genuinely did not agree about what to do. Some of them actually leaned in. They looked at Hercules like his endurance and the willingness to suffer and his triumph over death. They saw kind of like a dim kind of non-Christian kind of echo, like a shadow on the wall of a more honest truth that they believed their own faith had brought into the daylight. So to them, Hercules wasn't an enemy. He was almost like kind of a rough sketch, kind of like maybe an exaggerated version of what they believed to be true Christianity, like the story of Christ. But of course, other Christians just shut it out. To them, Hercules was exhibited for everything rotten about paganism. It was a violent, cruel, womanizing brute and then his son born out of wedlock, drowning in his own sins and this false religion had the nerve to call him a god. He wasn't salvation. He was proof of how lost the old world was and all the things that were trying to improve. That's how some Christians saw it. Now, nobody just quietly swapped Hercules out and slid Christ into his place. It was never that clean. What actually happened is way messier. You have two different ideas of what a hero is and what a savior is, and they're kind of going up against each other in the same culture at the same time refusing to assimilate or merge them. And they're also kind of refusing to separate them. So when one world replaces another, like a whole civilization basically changing its mind about what it believes, it doesn't always burn the old images to the ground. Sometimes it kind of negotiates with them. Sometimes it borrows from them. Sometimes it takes the old god's picture off the wall and they kind of examine it. It uses it to kind of help create a new one. And that's kind of where we land with this. The most powerful religion in human history, Christianity for the last 2000 years swept across the Roman world and toppled all of its gods one after another, and even it, even Christianity with all the force behind it couldn't fully erase Hercules the pagan demigod. So let's just think about this for a second, right, at the Hercules from the cartoon. Who was a demigod who fought a lot of monsters and ultimately finds a happy ending? That is not quite the Hercules that we just uncovered from history today. And honestly, when you strip away everything that the Empire is really pile on top of this mythological figure, what's left is really a dark hero, like one of the most tragic stories ever. I mean, in the middle of all the glory, the sun of Zeus still suffered immensely. And that's the part that kind of sticks out to me, right? Like the monsters are cool, you know, like the fact that like his greatest enemy was never the Hydra or the Giants or the Underworld, like he was able to overcome all those things. His really his biggest enemy in the whole story is Hera. It's the gods themselves reaching into this man and breaking him from the inside over and over for really not his fault. Like Hera is punishing Hercules for the sins of Zeus. I mean, Hercules' strength was that he was superhuman. And it was never once used to save him from the ones who were supposed to be on his side. That's something almost unbearable.
human buried into that right in the myth that's obviously not true but think about like a person doing everything right carrying more than anyone should have to carry and then still getting punished anyway there's something about that I think is relatable in a way right like you know as human beings were born into this life and we try our best and we all have different struggles and even in spite of trying your best like you hear stories about people that did everything right and then they get some type of incurable illness and they still die it's like dang they're still punished empires are rising and falling trying to own Hercules' story and they're trying to attach themselves for some type of you know divine authority and then of course Christianity comes around and conquers the world and they try to erase them and still it doesn't work Hercules outlasts all of them and maybe that's if we're abstract into the real world that's the real feat of Hercules like the 12 labors are cool killing all the monsters is cool you know overcoming like the tragedy of his insanity and killing his family and despite dying as a human and then having another go at life as a demigod maybe the greatest thing Hercules ever did was refuse to die not only in the myth but in real life as well and that ladies and gentlemen is a brief history of the story of Hercules I mean a fascinating tale no like even as as we were doing some of the research on this I was like there is a interesting correlation with Christianity here many people have made the connection and people have tried to say like oh Christianity is just barring the Hercules story out of out of I don't think that's true but there are overlaps you're like okay God has a sun the sun suffers like the infidelity part is crazy these gods just can't keep it in their pants I mean it's not stop of this no they're gods but I'm saying if you're a god you got to know like hey my wife is also a goddess right like it's one thing to like be unfaithful to your human wife but it's like first off how fire are human women that even the gods are like you know I'm willing to risk it all to go get some of that that's the first piece here that like Zeus is up in heaven looking down at what we got working on here and he's like oh okay that's not the new episode of euphoria seems interesting God looked down and he was like oh I see this musician who will be unnamed but you're thinking of right now I'm sure I mean who is it for you do Alipa and daya sure why not that's what Zeus is thinking he's like hey I got a goddess back home but there's a goddess on earth a real mortal baddie that I would love to get you know to get biblical with he has the pick of the litter I guess but then there's also like a weird consensual part of this that I didn't dive into but like it's a little bit like hold on power dynamic well I don't know if this is all completely above board but then your cheat on your wife that's a goddess you don't think she's gonna find out like brother and then technically I don't even know what the divorce situation is like with the Olympians like can hair even be like hey Zeus were done he's the king of the gods he controls the whole universe is that even possible and then you would talk about Achilles yeah of course it's a whole thing but like how do you even do a divorce like hair has to go down to hell find a lawyer get them to do the whole thing like I don't know how you even deal with all this so I'm just saying there's just a lot of stuff here I'm like the Greek gods need to figure it out Hercules completely sinless born out of a a trist a paramor that he had nothing to do with tries his best defeat snakes as a baby and then gets driven crazy by his like stepmom kind of and Harrah strikes him with madness and then he kills his whole family Harrah condemns these poor kids and a poor woman Megara to death because she's mad at Zeus Harrah what are you doing this is just a completely unhidged behavior hell hath no fury like a woman scorned I guess dude and like I got a scorned it must be even crazier so it's just like that part sad and then I guess to cleanse like his spirit and purify the world he goes and killed all these laborers fire I like that part I mean those monsters are pretty intimidating you know the Hydra you cut off ahead two more grow pretty insane and then he does all that remarries and then gets tricked by the centaur the centaur gives his new wife some poison and that's crazy his new wife is really what kills him because the new wife is like hey I need Hercules to be faithful to me like father like son Zeus is not faithful Hercules won't be faithful so what is his new wife do gets the blood soaked robe to try to make Hercules faithful and instead of making him faithful it kills him maybe she got what she wanted after all she's like hey you're not gonna cheat on me and oops you're dead you can't cheat on me kind of wild and then he doesn't even really die he just burns off his mortal half goes to Olympus and then now is a god so I guess the end of the Hercules wins and the earth gets better but like he gets screwed over by a lot of women in the story like I don't know what the Greek red pill situation is but I kind of get it where it's like Harris screws me over and then he screws over his first wife short then his second wife screws him over because she's jealous and then of course we get put into the Spartans and Alexander the great so Alexander the great trying to claim Hercules canifier but I think that that's I'm cool with that those comedists too well comedists is just like I'm Hercules right that guy's mentally ill it's crazy so many's emperors were mentally ill like you've read meditations I mean it's like it's so beautiful it's so thought out it's like the wisest king ever talking about stoicism he's calling on Santa Cuts just like a beautifully written book he has a son commonus and then his son is an absolute idiot mentally ill which goes to show right you meet a lot of guys that are like great dudes that like get a bunch of wealth they become very successful and then their kids are just like addicted to like Xanax that's basically what this is usually how it happens Marcus Arraileus locks it down does all this great stuff and then he's like my son's in charge he's a great kid turns out his kid is crazy and his kids like I'm actually Hercules the fact that he went down there as an emperor and did gladatorial battles I'm assuming they were rigged I'm assuming they were rigged and that anyone fighting comedists was like all right Hercules Romanus you can win and then just like lay down and let him let him kill him also the senator they sent to go document all of it he was probably exaggerating probably exaggerating he was like oh he killed 10 guys because he knows that comedists are gonna read this so he's gonna like blow it up the whole thing is just insane and then the fact that they took him out by just a wrestler and a bathtub that is hot right like I don't know if that was in in heated rivals but it sounds like something that could be right like just sending him in there to choke him out in the bath come on I wouldn't put it like that but go ahead it's insane and then the fact that he read made this entire sculpture of Nero in his own face I mean get a break dude get a grip comedists you're looking foolish out here you had the entire Roman empire and you remembered as an absolute buffoon just a shame I would love to do a like a new show where I just cover like Roman history like like think like Rush Limbaugh before like Roman history sounds like a lot of work it'd be fun dude I think that'd be cool anyway what do you guys think what was your take on Hercules here I still love the Disney movie hasn't changed a thing for me and I'd love the muses the there's one that I'm quite fond of I remember as a boy being like oh okay what do you guys think tell me your takes I would love to know what you think about Hercules if you're a Greek historian anything that I missed anything that I overlooked please drop a comment you to spot if I read all of them and great news if you like religious content similar to what we talked about today but like kind of the big four like the main religions of the people are still actively attending uh services of I'm talking Christianity Judaism Hinduism Islam you can check the data religion camp if you like crazy deep dives on conspiracy mysteries and unsolved stuff and occult stuff and everything else under the sun well great news camp gagnons for you that's the main channel where I do interviews to people way smarter than me and also we have a secret society yes and there's our very own secret gathering of people and every single month we do zoom calls with everyone where we chop it up and just hang we also do uh exclusive episodes of this show that never got to the public and you get every single episode of this show plus all the other channels in 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