Once upon a time....

​

In those days....

​

"Heracles's TENTH Labour was to fetch the famous cattle of Geryon from Erytheia, an island on the Ocean stream ... Geryon was the king of Tartessus in Spain...." 

 

Thus begins Robert Graves' narration in his compendium of mythology, THE GREEK MYTHS, regarding the reason for Hercules's passing by archaic Rome shortly prior to the Trojan War, in fulfillment of the 12 impossible tasks.

​

When I settled in Rome in 2008 and began to learn about its archaeological history including "footsteps" of the mythological Greek hero, Hercules (Herakles in Greek), son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, I smiled at this godfathering into Roman history of a fabulous Greek superman: in essence, it was a way of saying, "Hercules slept here."

 

In fact, he acted here for the benefit of Romans, and then slept here, before going on to complete the roster of Labours that included the slaying of the Hydra and of the Nemean Lion, and the stealing of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides to give to mankind not merely golden fruit of forbidden trees, but the knowledge of the heavens and its golden stars, with its by-product : Navigation.

 

By directing, I thought, Hercules's 12-task itinerary so that he passed through Rome as he carried out the tenth of those missions, the city would one day pride itself of being part of that narrative of heroics, and it would teach new generations to see their good quality of life as somehow resulting from that heritage. This is why, too, Romans would build memorials to Hercules in the Eternal City for centuries to come. The Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii are but two other archaeological sites of the ancient Roman world that boast of Herculean pedigree -- as evidenced by their very names and by rich culttural troves including temples, statuary, fresco paintings, silver and gold finery, etc. Similarly, in Rome's ancient port town of OSTIA ANTICA, the Hercules pedigree is illustrated as well -- but not by stories of his having slept there, since the town was constructed during the days of the early Republic, in the 4th-century B.C., much after the Trojan War, but in  the "Hercules" places of cult and political life, in the urban fabric of the town.  This makes sense in a navigation center as ostia was. The port city of OSTIA, located on the mouth of the Tiber River, and it was a great import/export center for marble, foodstuffs, textiles, gold and silver, slaves, circus animals, and information in all its forms. Making Hercules present in a port town such as Ostia was a way of putting it on a global map of mythical and heroic proportions, and of elevating the tenor of those jobs in the town associated with commerce to an "Olympian" level.  But other stories of Hercules, perhaps of a minor scale, also vibrated in the Ostians' way of revering Hercules so that they would see the results in the education and athletics of the young (the Olympics were said to have been founded by Hercules in his day!), and in the systems of taxation and commercial tariffs regulating the rental, buying, and selling of goods or services in those urban centers.

 

The consequence of having a Hercules building or statue, or a Hercules "corporation" in the towns of ancient Greece or Rome, was a way to ensure that the citizenry, including those members of the population who were slaves, would see that if an underdog like him could rise up and fight his way out of superhuman challenges, anyone or Everyman could do this -- through imitation of Hercules-like thinking and acting as evidenced in his various exemplary narratives. In other words, he was a role-model.  

 

What made him such a role model was not always easy to see. For example, his murder of his own children is the subject of Euripides' play, The Madness of Hercules, written and performed in the 4th century B.C.

 

 

In the play, Euripides shows that his Twelve Labours were assigned to him by the Orcale at Delphi both as expiation for the murder of his children and as a way eventually to reclaim the inmortality he deserved as a natural son of Zeus.  While the causes of his genocide were sung by many oral traditions then to be the result of drunkeness, Heracles goes further back in the events of the hero's life and shows it as a consequence of his lack of self-control and of his excessive pride or hubris, stemming from his successes and early fame. This hubris blinds him to boast of his overcoming a tyrannical invader of the city of Thebes by desecration of his corpse and thus violation of funerary customs in the early Hellenic world, even with respect of the enemy: his stepmother, Hera, blinds him so that in a fit of rage he kills several of his children and those of his best friend Iphicles as they were performing athletic exercises. However, 4th-century B.C. playwright Euripides, in the aforementioned tragedy, shows the hero's contrition and despondence after committing this crime, and thus even his negative deeds become part of his roster of achievements, making him fit as an example or role-model of such atonement and repair of horrible crimes.  When in the autumn theater festivals held throughout the Hellenic world, The Madness of Hercules was performed, it was to teach audiences attending these shows how to live better lives, by the examples of the tragic figures in their plots. This also ensured that social prosperity and health were shown as intimately connected with right action and one's coming to one's senses in order to merit acceptance by the Immortals, as well as to the prosperity of the agriculture and the harvesting and commerce of the products of the lands where these plays were celebrated.

​

Be the reasons for his wide criss-crossing and travels of the Mediterranean world then, one of these two causes, or yet possibly the command by his step-mother Hera, wife of Zeus, to fulfill these tasks in order to gain acceptance to the company of all the Immortals on Mount Olympus, despite Hercules's birth out of wedlock, to a mortal lover of Zeus, Alcmene --- ancient Roman traditions, oral traditions, and later, texts like those of LIVY or Virgil or OVID, testify to the hero's stopping off  by a cattle market located in an area by the Tiber River where one day Rome would be located, with the herd of cattle belonging to the King of Tartessus (present-day Seville, Spain).

 

Moreover, Livy and other authors tell us that when Hercules disembarks at the Foro Boario (cattle market) of the Rome Tiber River, he finds commercial chaos there. A thug named CACO had been stealing the herds of cows from the pens of local cattleranchers  and terrorizing the entire population with his antics, so all market activity at the site had pretty much come to a halt!  (In Latin languages, the word "caco" denotes thief, thug.)