Hercules, Caesar, and the Roman Emperors

This chapter schematizes the different ways that Roman emperors, their surrogates, and their detractors deployed Hercules as a way of framing, authorizing, or delegitimizing imperial rule. In looking at the evidence from Augustus to the Tetrarchs, it identifies three primary relationships that Roman emperors occupied or were seen to occupy relative to Hercules: like Augustus, they could be viewed as similar to Hercules; like Commodus, they could claim to be identical with Hercules; or, like the Tetrarchs, they could self-fashion as simply associated with Hercules. The best emperors therefore merely sought a connection with Hercules, while the worst longed to collapse the distinction between emperor and hero to become Hercules himself.