There seems to be no end of material for a book on Heracles, be it in ancient sources, treatments and allusions in literature through the ages, or contemporary popular culture. S. has risen to the challenge of selecting and sorting the matter of Heracles to offer us a picture of the figure. The result is a clear account of the evidence for most aspects of the mythology of Heracles.
The introduction is a little daunting. The reader is swept immediately into a discussion of the earliest fragmentary works devoted to Heracles and from there to a synopsis of the stories about him. This overview touches on the incidents, major and minor, in the life of Heracles, mainly following Apollodorus, but such is their profusion that only very few can receive any elaboration and the whole is often a welter of unfamiliar names. Then Heracles' place in a series of interpretative models dating from antiquity to the twenty-first century is traced. As something of an alternative to these interpretations, S. offers a short geographical and chronological survey of the ancient literary and artistic evidence for Heracles, but draws no conclusions from it.
S. continues in this vein, tracing ‘first appearances, popularity in particular places/periods, significant variations in the story and its iconography’ (p. 51) and occasionally mentioning interpretations, through the main body of the text. This is especially true of the first two chapters on Heracles the monster-slayer. The first of these discusses the Labours, the collocation of the canonical twelve and then each of them individually. The next treats the other contests of Heracles against opponents who are monstrous in either form or conduct.
S. then moves on to the Heracles of tragedy. The Athenian stage receives the lion's share of the attention, but Seneca's Roman adaptations are also discussed. S. sums up her approach in concluding that ‘[t]ragedy takes the monster-slaying Herakles of archaic tradition and explores the potential for disaster when he returns to the confines of the everyday domestic world’ (p. 103). The appearance of Heracles in other literary genres is treated – altogether less thoroughly – in a separate chapter, tellingly entitled ‘Vice or Virtue Incarnate’. Here S. concentrates on comedy, philosophical or sophistical works, and the presentation of Heracles as a lover. The picture of Heracles as the slave of his enormous appetites is contrasted with that of the hero as the conqueror of temptation and the champion of aretê. The two images, S. suggests, go together to offer us some insight into Heracles' ‘inner life’.
From the more personal examination of Heracles' character S. turns to his exploitation for political ends, which is discussed under a number of headings. Heracles as ancestor, to the Heracleidae (the whole problem of whose existence and putative role in early Greek history might have received more substantial treatment), the Spartan royal houses, the Macedonian kings and their Hellenistic successors, and various Roman potentates; Heracles as founder of colonies as well as panhellenic games; and Heracles as an ambivalent symbol in the contests between tyranny and democracy in Athens.
S. finally treats the worship of Heracles. The basis of much of this discussion is the distinction between rites offered to an Olympian god as opposed to those offered to a hero as a ‘chthonic deity’. While the distinction serves to problematise the existence of Heracles in the afterlife and as a recipient of worship, it is used too often to identify certain rituals as falling on one side or the other of the divide and not often enough to emphasise the confused, uncertain and pregnant place of the god who died and the hero who dwells on Olympus. This chapter is arranged by the regions of Greece, with emphasis on particularly well documented cult sites and some treatment of the cult of Hercules at Rome.
The last chapter, on Heracles' appearances and significance in the post-classical tradition, is least like a comprehensive survey and betrays the especial interests of S. The immediate, and largely negative, reaction to Heracles by decidedly Christian writers which sets the stage for later reception comes first, but five pages covering the ground from Justin Martyr to Milton can only contain so much detail. The medieval intellectual world is presented – by its absence – not as the conduit for the classical tradition or a lens through which it is descried by later generations, but as a gap in the interest and attention of S. And that not on account of ignorance, as a well hidden reference to L. Nees, A Tainted Mantle (1991) demonstrates. S.'s coverage picks up again in the fourteenth century, and finds instances of the treatment of Heracles in literature and art up to the present day. She offers a particularly well researched and engaging discussion of the symbolic value of Hercules in both monarchial and revolutionary France (an intriguing corollary to her earlier discussion of Heracles in Pisistratid and Cleisthenic Athens). The Hercules of Hollywood and out of the way English stage productions receives a disproportionate amount of space. Popular perceptions, of which everyone is aware, are in less need of attention than the often obscure paths by which we arrived at those perceptions, of which many are not aware.
On the whole, this book, while not a specialised study, expects too much prior knowledge and is too concentrated on the fine details of the evidence to be offered as an introduction to undergraduates or the general reader. For those very reasons, however, it is an excellent handbook for scholars in a number of fields from classics to art history and film studies who wish to track down the first attestation and development over time of the important aspects of Heracles' appearance and narrative.
