Hearcles, the son of Zeus and Alcmena, seemed like a good figure with which to take the course from tales of the gods to tales of heroes, as he bridges the gap between the two. He is thus a fundamentally ambiguous character, and this is what I wanted to get across in the lecture: that his mythology isn’t all black & white, as in Disney’s ‘Hercules’ (which turned out to be most students’ main source for their knowledge of the myth). It was important, as we went through the major details of his life story, to understand the opposition we see in tales of this hero between the figure of Heracles as a culture hero/founding father and Heracles as a brutish barbarian – within the context of other ambiguities in his representation. And, as with all the myths studies in this course, it was important to look at different versions of the myth in literature and why they are privileged in different texts.
The lecture focused on Heracles’ birth, his labours, his amours, and his death. A number of paradoxes emerged, which seem central to our understanding of the hero: the son of Zeus who spends most of his life labouring as a slave; his persecution by Hera when his very name means ‘glory of Hera’; his function as both a dynastic hero and wild-man fighting monsters on the edges of civilisation; the uncertainty of his fate as chthonic hero/Olympian diety; and his hyper-masculinity vs. the issue of gender ambiguity in his myths (i.e., Omphale).
We discussed several possible interpretations of this phenomenon, but I favour Sergent’s (1987) theory: that two parallel traditions of Heracles existed, one of his ‘cultural’ exploits and one of his labours, which were then conflated (perhaps by the epic tradition?). This is consistent with other mythical cycles (e.g. the Trojan War), in which a number of unconnected myths seem to be drawn into the orbit of a famous character or event by subsequent retellings/poets. The result is a fascinating yet confusing figure, who perhaps can only be truly understood (if even then) within the context of each representation.
Tags: ambiguity, gender, Greek literature, Greek myth, Heracles
January 11, 2010 at 3:52 pm |
I think Herodotus may have mentioned something about the dual nature of Heracles. He (or some ancient writer anyway!) suggested that there was a distinction between the God Heracles, and the Hero Heracles and that even back in the 5th Century people were mixing them up. It’s interesting that even back then writers were well aware of the paradoxes of Heracles.