Mainstream contemporary culture isn’t into the idea of a masculine hero being a cold-blooded murderer or having a young male lover. Weird, right?
Paramount Pictures
The new Hercules apparently wants its masculine hero to be eminently relatable. "I only want to be a husband and a father," he says. "I am no hero," this humble Hercules, played by Dwayne Johnson, contends. "Become the Legend," offers the website of the new Hercules, pressing you to put an image of your face in a hole underneath the hero's lion skin. Yet this modern modesty twist — Hercules as a family man who sees himself as a normal person who happens to be exceptionally strong — is fundamentally at odds with the hero's ancient origins.
The first written reference to Herakles (his Greek name) is found in Homer's Iliad; here and for centuries after, he was a Greek hero of the very old school. Classics professor G. Karl Galinsky explains that the "Iliadic hero is not a fiercely independent individualist but almost makes a cult of proper procedure (themis) and of paying proper respect (aidōs) to whomever proper respect is due." The very ancient Herakles was not even as modern as the Iliadic heroes. Thus in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Herakles is seen as hubristic and his behavior as shocking — he fights against the gods and is said to have killed a guest in his home, both sickening and inherently repulsive transgressions. The only way Herakles would have been "relatable" in the ancient world was as an athlete — poetry likened Herakles' deeds to athleticism, a line of thinking that suggests athletes should try to emulate Herakles. (Athlos, the word used to describe a sporting contest, was also the word used for his 12 labors.)
Herakles was, by ancient accounts, very sexually promiscuous. In one tale, he had sex with 50 sisters in one night. According to Aristotle, his virility produced 72 sons and a single daughter, but others report even more offspring. The canonical ancient stories tell of the hero murdering his wife and their (legitimate) children in a fit of madness brought on by the goddess Hera. His last mortal wife, Deineira, inadvertently kills him because she is jealous of the slave-concubine he's brought home to live in their house. His is a story that makes little sense, perhaps, in the modern context, hence its sanitization.
During the Renaissance, the tale of his "choice between Vice and Virtue" became a popular Hercules story — he inevitably chooses Virtue. The Hercules of the Kevin Sorbo-led 1990s TV show was characterized in the opening credits as having "a strength the world had never seen — a strength surpassed only by the power of his heart." Hercules was born at a time when there was no chasm between thought and deed as now, hence the acceptance then of his brutality. To be a hero of antiquity meant to perform superhuman feats; to be a hero of modernity means to possess a capacity for deep morality.
In Greece, Herakles became much more popular as a comic figure than a serious figure — Classics scholar Emma Stafford terms him a "a cheerfully promiscuous glutton." Many statues remain of a drunken Hercules urinating, some of which were designed as fountains. A fragment from Hesiod suggests that Hercules had a sense of humor about himself, which was likely present in oral folktales of the hero. His "active" sexual appetites are highly masculine — Classics professor Giulia Sissa writes that "[desire] is the reaction of a mature male body to another body, whose femininity strikes and stimulates (whether or not that femininity belongs to a woman or a young man)." Although insatiable sexual desires were usually associated with women and receptive male partners, Herakles was nonetheless a paragon of manhood, down to his perfect small penis. Galinsky writes that his prodigious progeny are an affirmation of patriarchal values, in which his many sons spread the glory of his own immortal father, Zeus.
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