The foregoing remarks on the history of Hercules, give us an insight into the ideas which, based upon the explanations given by the authors of antiquity, the Abbè Banier, one of the most accomplished scholars of his age, entertained on this subject. We will conclude with some very able and instructive remarks on this mythus, which we extract from Mr. Keightley’s Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. He says—
“Various theories have been formed respecting the mythus of Hercules. It is evidently one of very remote antiquity, long perhaps, anterior to the times of Homer. We confess that we cannot see any very valid reason for supposing no such real personage to have existed; for it will, perhaps, be found that mythology not unfrequently prefers to absolute fiction, the assuming of some real historic character, and making it the object of the marvels devised by lively and exuberant imagination, in order thereby to obtain more ready credence for the strange events which it creates. Such, then, may the real Hercules have been,—a Dorian, a Theban, or an Argive hero, whose feats of strength lived in the traditions of the people, and whom national vanity raised to the rank of a son of Zeus [Jupiter], and poetic fancy, as geographic knowledge extended, sent on journies throughout the known world, and accumulated in his person the fabled exploits of similar heroes of other regions.
“We may perceive, by the twelve tasks, that the astronomical theory was applied to the mythus of the hero, and that he was regarded as a personification of the Sun, which passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. This, probably, took place during the Alexandrian period. Some resemblance between his attributes and those of the Deity, with whom the Egyptian priests were pleased to identify him, may have given occasion to this notion; and he also bore some similitude to the God whom the Phœnicians chiefly worshipped, and who, it is probable, was the Sun. But we must steadily bear in mind, that Hercules was a hero in the popular legend long before any intercourse was opened between Greece and Egypt; and that, however (which is certainly not very likely) a God might be introduced from Phœnicia, the same could hardly be the case with a popular hero.—A very ingenious theory on the mythus of Hercules is given by Buttmann (Mythologus, vol. i., p. 246). Though acknowledging that Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules may have been real persons, he is disposed, from an attentive consideration of all the circumstances in the mythus of the last, to regard him as one of those poetical persons or personifications, who, as he says, have obtained such firm footing in the dark periods of antiquity, as to have acquired the complete air of historic personages.
“In his view of the life of Hercules, it is a mythus of extreme antiquity and great beauty, setting forth the ideal of human perfection, consecrated to the weal of mankind, or rather, in its original form, to that of his own nation. This perfection, according to the ideas of the heroic age, consists in the greatest bodily strength, united with the advantages of mind and soul recognised by that age. Such a hero is, he says, a man; but these noble qualities in him are of divine origin. He is, therefore, the son of the king of the Gods by a mortal mother. To render his perfection the more manifest, the Poet makes him to have a twin brother, the child of a mortal sire. As virtue is not to be learned, Hercules exhibits his strength and courage in infancy; he strangles the snakes, which fills his brother with terror. The character of the hero throughout life, as that of the avenger of injustice and punisher of evil, must exhibit itself in the boy as the wild instinct of nature; and the mythus makes him kill his tutor Linus with a blow of the lyre. When sent away by Amphitryon, he prepares himself, in the stillness and solitude of the shepherd’s life, by feats of strength and courage, for his future task of purifying the earth of violence.
“—The number of tasks may not originally have been twelve, though most accounts agree in that number, but they were all of a nature agreeable to the ideas of an heroic age—the destruction of monsters, and bringing home to his own country the valuable productions of other regions. These are, however, regarded by Buttmann as being chiefly allegorical. The Hydra, for instance, he takes to have been meant to represent the evils of democratic anarchy, with its numerous heads, against which, though one may not be able to effect anything, yet the union of even two may suffice to become dominant over it.
“The toils of the hero conclude with the greatest and most rare of all in the heroic age—the conquest over death. This is represented by his descent into the under world, and dragging Cerberus to light is a proof of his victory. In the old mythus, he was made to engage with and wound Hades; and the Alcestis of Euripides exhibits him in conflict with Death. But virtue, to be a useful example, must occasionally succumb to human weakness in the power of the evil principle. Hence, Hercules falls into fits of madness, sent on him by Hera [Juno]; and hence—he becomes the willing slave of Omphale, the fair queen of Lydia, and changes his club and lion’s skin for the distaff and the female robe.
“The mythus concludes most nobly with the assumption of the hero into Olympus. His protecting Deity abandons him to the power of his persevering enemy; his mortal part is consumed by fire, the fiercest of elements; his shade (εἴδωλον), like those of other men, descends to the realms of Hades, while the divine portion himself (αὐτὸς) mounts from the pyre in a thunder-cloud, and the object of Hera’s persecution being now accomplished, espouses youth, the daughter of his reconciled foe.
“Muller (Dorians, vol. i. part ii. ch. 11, 12) is also disposed to view in Hercules a personification of the highest powers of man in the heroic age. He regards him as having been the national hero of the Dorian race, and appropriates to him all the exploits of the hero in Thessaly, Ætolia, and Epirus, which last place he supposes to have been the original scene of the Geryoneia, which was afterwards transformed to the western stream of the ocean. He thinks, however, that the Argives had an ancient hero of perhaps the same name, to whom the Peloponnesus adventures belong, and whom the Dorians combined with their own hero. The servitude to Eurystheus, and the enmity of Hera, he looks on as inventions of the Dorians to justify their own invasion of the Peloponnesus. This critic also proves that the Theban Hercules had nothing to do with the Gods and traditions of the Cadmeians; and he thinks that it was the Dorian Heracleides who introduced the knowledge of him into Thebes, or that he came from Delphi with the worship of Apollo, a Deity with whom, as the tutelar God of the Dorians, he supposes their national hero to have been closely connected.”