Why you don’t want to be a modern day Hercules.
The way of the terrible family man and the horrific secret we’ve forgotten about Hera’s least favorite stepson.
It was a crime so heinous that it wracked the ancient world with scandal.
The greatest warrior and strongman the Greeks had ever seen.
A war hero who saved a kingdom, married its princess, and went form bastard son to prince of Thebes…
…found at his home surrounded by the corpses of his wife and children. Their bodies riddled with arrows and burned by fire. Covered in their blood, it is clear that the family had been brutally murdered by its father and husband.
Thebes’ favorite son.
So senseless were the murders at the house of Hercules (Roman for Heracles, which I will use from here on out) that the only possible explanation the Greeks could muster was superstitious:
The greatest hero the Greeks had ever known was driven mad by his evil stepmother Hera.
It’s an out for the beloved hero, to put the blame on a capricious goddess. An attempt to resolve the strongman of full responsibility.
Even so, the truth of who or what really killed Heracles’ family remains only partially hidden, visible to anyone who dares to face both it and the monstrous reflection it contains.
Half-Truths Concealing Horrors: What Myths Really Are
Myths make for great entertainment, and their fantastical elements no doubt help us to remember them across time.
We tell them over and over again the way obsessives compulsively wash their hands, trying to purify ourselves of something psychological via a ritual we know deep down to be impotent.
Getting the details of a story right will not spare us from the darkness in our nature any more than using extra soap will totally eradicate our hands of every microbial impurity.
Every myth we tell is only a half-truth that conceals a secret we know we ought to remember but don’t want to face.
So we go on repeating these myths, because it makes us feel better. And because, maybe someday, somebody will be ready to venture into the snakes’ nest of words that the myth has become and draw out the true lessons we need to learn.
Hopefully before it’s too late.
So you can either comfort yourself with the awful bowdlerization that the Rock and his team of Hollywood blockheads put out nearly a decade ago, in which the death of Herc the Merc’s family is the fault of a foreign government conspiracy (surprise, surprise). Or you can face reality.
Here’s what the massacre at Heracles’ House was really about:
In many accounts of the myth, Heracles marries and starts a family after winning a war against the Minyans during which he single-handedly defended Thebes from her enemies.
Hera, his great enemy, is the goddess of family, who protects women during childbirth.
The common interpretation of her hatred for Heracles is the fact that he is her husband Zeus's bastard son.
But he is also the product of incest (Alcmene, Heracles's mother, is also Zeus's great-granddaughter) and rape (Zeus slept with Alcmene disguised as her husband while he was off at war).
So an alternate reason for the goddess of family and childbirth's enmity might be that he is the result of an unnatural birth, both because he is illegitimate, a product of rape, and an incest baby.
Combine this with the fact that he is conceived while the men are forced to be away on campaign and cannot guard their families, and Heracles is literally a child of war.
What they mean when they call you divine spawn
“But Heracles is really the son of Zeus! It says so right in the text.”
In ancient times, saying a child was the son or daughter of a supernatural being could be a polite way of dodging the question of his parentage (either you don't know or you don't want to admit that you know).
Just imagine what the childhoods of such "sons and daughters of the gods" were like.
It wouldn’t matter how rich you were or what fancy schooling you got, the feeling would always be there that you didn’t belong. There would be an extra share of hatred and harsh punishment. Bullying by other children, whisperings by other adults, and sly glances from behind cupped palms to remind you that you are invisibly but irreparably marked. And all your life you have trouble getting a straight answer as to who your father was or why he isn’t around.
It’s the perfect recipe for resentment that no fairy tale can make up for. Pity a gullible child with the flattery that he’s the son of Zeus, and he figures that the reason a semi-perfect being like him is having such a totally miserable life must be because someone robbed him of his birthright.
Think about how most adopted children “know before they’re told” and you have a fraction of an idea of what it was like to be a bastard child in pre-modern societies.
In Heracles's case, it was enough to drive him to kill his music tutor while still a teen, which is another reason why Hera hates Heracles.
Because she is the goddess of family, the violent marauder's way that is Heracles’s makes him antithetical to all that Hera represents.
The things a man does in war must be set aside when re-entering his home life.
But what if you never really had a home? What if your entire life was war?
Poor Heracles never stood a chance: an unnatural child of war raised as an outcast and surrounded by danger, saves his city and marries its princess.
The only problem is that he did it all with a particular set of skills that come too naturally to him: those of violence.
Heracles tries to live the Hera life by starting a family, but can’t let go of his past with its "virtues" that made him a success on the battlefield/survivor of a brutal childhood.
It goes even worse than you might expect.
To enter Hera's domain with the trauma and survival instincts of a creature of war is to court disaster.
Just ask any veteran of our many recent conflicts. Read the tragedies which line our newspapers about ex-soldiers struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. Some committing crimes that bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Thebes’ most infamous son:
The reason why is unavoidable: Try for happily ever after without first working through your unresolved trauma, and sooner or later repressed memories will become unburied.
How will you react when your wife says something triggering or your children do something that reminds you of a past abuser? What happens when you get into an argument and she just. won’t. LISTEN?!?
To paraphrase Nietzsche, you either face down your monsters or become one yourself.
Thus, what we are actually saying when we claim that Heracles murdered his wife and children in a fit of Hera-induced madness is this:
Heracles let his PTSD destroy his family.
Why you may be more like Heracles than you think
If you’re especially astute or good with languages, you may have noticed that Heracles has his worst enemy’s name in his.
Heracles actually means, “pride of Hera”.
There are many explanations for why this is the case, but the two that are most interesting and relevant are:
The Greeks had another word for pride when taken to an extreme: hubris.
The fatal flaw that causes the downfall of its possessor. Thus, the pride of Hera, i.e. the family unit’s ability to tame wild men, beasts, and even thunder gods like Zeus with the feminine powers of private home life, could also be its destruction.Even though Hera wasn’t his birth mother, she nonetheless made him.
All that Heracles would later become and achieve, including the completion of his 12 labors and adventures with Jason’s heroic super team, the Argonauts, can be attributed to Hera’s torments. What gets seen as hatred at first eventually becomes understood as tough love once Heracles learns acceptance.
Either way, the name Heracles, or “Pride of Hera” is more like a title than a real name.
It isn’t even the first one for the original Heracles, whose parents had originally named him something else.
“Pride of Hera” becomes the moniker for an unruly and violent youth headed down a dark path whose fate we desperately wish to change.
And so it is that, beyond our broken veterans, we have many more “prides of Hera” in our midst. From serial killers to corrupt cops, drug dealers to wife beaters. Men (and women) who never learned to handle their violent emotions or traumatic childhoods.
Products of failed communities and dysfunctional families.
Truth be told, there may be more than a little “pride of Hera” in all of us. But there’s a way out.
We instinctively understand that the process of breaking free from the pasts we’ve allowed to define us is arduous. It’s why therapists and patients call it, “doing the work.”
But many willing to grapple with the reasons why they engage in destructive behavior and finally overcome them discover that such work is well worth it.
“The work” for Heracles lies in the 12 Labors he undertakes as penance. What begins as the suicide quest of a grieving man “doing time” for committing the unthinkable becomes the universal path by which any individual may attain true maturity.
With each labor representing an obstacle of spiritual and psychological development, Heracles takes the symbolic one way to redemption and salvation.
His is the journey of someone who tragically discovers he isn’t ready for a family, coming to terms with and realizing what it takes to become a man who is.
As nobody’s upbringing is perfect, at some point each of us must choose what it means to be “Hera’s pride”:
Allow ourselves to become Hera’s hubris and exact vengeance upon her domain by destroying our own families.
Accept that no being is perfect and embrace everything that has happened to us–good and bad–as the stuff out of which a more perfect version of ourselves is currently being made.
To blame the gods or some other authority for what Heracles did (or worse, to dismiss him as mentally ill) would not be false in a literary sense.
But it would rob us of deep unsettling truths that could actually make us better husbands, fathers, citizens, warriors, and men.
Blame denies the Heracles in all of us, and the Heracles we have yet to become.
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Thank you as always for reading. If you would like to learn more about, and help unpack, the symbolism of Heracles’ 12 Labors, you can find excellent breakdowns of each labor starting here. SnowballtheSage is an incredibly insightful friend of mine and well worth the read.
Great analysis of Heracles and humanity's innermost demons.
what a brilliant take! the metaphor clicks in the sense that violence is as true and old as humanity and it takes great effort, 12 labours in this case, to tame and channel that energy. left unresolved, our troubles will ruin lives.
I also like that you included a key aspect of Hera's role as a Greek god - family, marriage and womanhood. Something usually written off in depictions of the myth or as "hell hath no fury a woman scorned" kind of figure.