Hercules

Abstract

Hercules is the Roman version for the Greek hero Heracles, his Greek name means “Hera’s glory.” His existence comes as a result of an adulterous intercourse of Zeus, who unleashed the Hera’s rage engendering Hercules in Alcmene while was making himself pass for Amphitryon. Hercules carries along his journey a duality which brands him and defines him: on the one hand gets the Zeus’ benefit and on the other hand a furious Hera hinders the hero’s development. Hercules shows himself up as a fighter of uncanny strength and values. A strength that occasionally comes up as excessive and dangerous if it’s not channelled with discernment. Citing as an example, the tragic fratricide in which is involved after being punished to the derangement by Hera. Hercules’ works are an improvement to perfection and individual release: the hero starts from a potential strength and a lust out of control, just passing the challenges imposed to him gets a gradual perfection that leads, in its climax, to the stars, turned into a constellation. In this moment takes place the reconciliation with Hera. Hercules represents in this way, the seeking towards virtue, the spirit’s strength and the civilizing drive. He often appears as a victim of his own weakness that drives him to states of decadence and spiritual negligence, these crises generate a dialectic that finds its culmination in the individual redemption, becoming in this way the image of the virtue and the strength that combined with the control of the passions leads to transcend the own vices. The polyvalence of its sign makes it satisfy the iconographic necessities that let it overcome the chronological barriers and get metamorphosed in different allegories, getting adapt to different concepts. It is thus possible to find Hercules represented in the funerary art as a constellation in treatises on astrology, as an allegory of the Christian strength and resistance and finally as a figure representing the politic projection/effect.