Aparin Alexey - Hercules

An old fable, largely forgotten today, bears repeating here: A youth walking through a wood finds two roads diverging. Two beautiful maidens stand before him, one on the right fork, the other on the left. In a lovely poem by American classicist Richmond Lattimore the girl on the left beckons him forth, hailing him by his name:

Hercules. Here your way lies, my way. Here.

Take my hand, I will show you, but see how temperate, gentle and green

It goes. So shall your dearest life go with your hand in mine. Never fear,

I shall not leave you. Between

Here and your days end think nothing but cool progress, soft-soled
Walking, sleep for hours, blithe company, agemates outwrestled, girls yes,
creamy legs, blond

Looks; long nights of shorn white rosefall; for sedate age, goods and gold;
Green sinews, honors lightly lifted, good memories. Look not beyond.

This is real.

The girl on the right, no less lovely for being so grim of expression, offers something else entirely: struggle, battle, blistering sun by day and ferocious beasts by night. Hunger, want, thirst, and endless battle under all these conditions, and worse. He will die a horrible death, but live a hundred adventures beforehand. Those who love him will betray him, but he will be loved a thousand times more by countless millions he will never meet.

You dont need to be a mythology expert to know which fork he chose.

I knew almost nothing about Hercules when my editor at Marvel Comics called me in the summer of 2007 to co-write with Greg Pak a series starring that companys version of the most legendary of all legendary heroes. While I was waiting for the first face-to-face meeting to kick off the book, I grabbed a yellowing library-reject copy of Edith Hamiltons ubiquitous Mythology paperback off my shelf and began boning up on the character, slightly skeptical that these too-oft-told tales would have anything to bring to a modern reader.

How wrong I was.

Hercules at the Crossroads (Corbis)

The old myths, like a bad game of telephone, have been retold into amorphous blandness like Will Rogers old joke that its not what you dont know that hurts you, but what you think you know, but dont.

You dont know Hercules. Worse, you think you do, but youre wrong.

What I discovered, and continued to discover throughout what turned out to be an astoundingly successful collaboration between myself and Pak that lasted until last year, was a complex, tormented, violent, passionate character. He was not good because he was noble, but because when he saw a wrong he acted without thought to right it; but, enslaved by impulse, he committed as many crimes as he rectified.

Ultimately, what Hercules is, is a man: the man, the epitome of all that is right and wrong with that gender, and that is why our paternalistic society has remained obsessed with him for centuries. He is a hero, and a worker, and a breadwinner, and a warrior, and a lover. Also, a wife-beater, a philanderer, a murderer, a drunkard, and a lazy good-for-nothing.

He did not choose just one road, Virtue, and walk down it never to be seen again. He has faced that crossroads and had to make that choice most days of his life. And at times he has chosen wrongly. Many times.

So have we all, and thats why we see ourselves in him.

This is his story.

Fred Van Lente, Brooklyn, 2012

C LASSICAL S OURCES

Wherever possible Ive tried to follow the ancient sources to construct my Hercules narrative. As these sources, written across centuries, often contradict each other, Ive synthesized as best I could these oxymoronic elements into a seamless cause-and-effect narrative without sacrificing, I hope, much accuracy, whatever that means in this context, in terms of the original, accepted legends.

Some of the most moving accounts of Hercules life are in the dramas of the ancient tragedians. Euripides Heracles served as the basis for my and Greg Paks modern series of graphic novels, The Incredible Hercules. The poet and classicist Anne Carson adapted that play and three others into a wonderful book called Grief Lessons; Im using her translation here. Euripides earlier play, The Children of Hercules, provides great insight into other players in this great drama, his mother, Alcmene, his sidekick and lover Iolaus, and his son Hyllus. Euripides Alcestis tells of Hercules rescue of the titular queen while performing his Eighth Labor. Sophocles The Women of Trachis is a character study of his doomed wife Deianira.

Any survey of Classical poetry involving Hercules should start at Ovids justly beloved Metamorphoses (Transformations), a Roman account of the ancient myths written at around the same time as Christs birth. Here Im using a very modern free verse translation from Charles Boer. The Shield of Heracles is a ballad of the battle between the hero and Ares monstrous son Cycnus by Hesiod. As one might tell from the name, Apollonius Rhodiuss Argonautica narrates the adventures of Jason and the crew of Argo, of which Hercules was a member. Bacchylides Ode V relates the heros journey into the Underworld.

Bust of Hercules in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Si Sheppard)

Other, non-fiction ancient sources include the great travelogue Description of Greece, written by Pausanias in the second century AD, which Ive used to invoke the landscape of the Mediterranean world as explored by Hercules during his adventures. Diodorus Siculuss Library of History helps us understand how ancient peoples tried to separate fact from myth. Apollodoruss The Library is an invaluable collection of those myths from the Classical Greeks themselves.

P RINCE OF T HEBES

The Family of Hercules

Hera, Queen of Olympus, dreamt of War in Heaven. Her husband and brother, Zeus, wielder of the thunderbolt, had seized power from their forebears, the Titans, the monstrous sons of Mother Earth (Gaea) and Father Sky (Uranus). The more human-looking gods were direct descendants of the youngest Titan, Cronus, who agreed to help his mother slay his father for imprisoning her other children, the Cyclopes, in the subterranean depths of Tartarus. After Cronus castrated Uranus and hurled his manhood into the sea, the dying Sky-Father warned his treacherous son that he, too, would be slain by his own offspring. A panicked Cronus swore to avoid that fate, becoming as ruthless a tyrant as his father. Betraying his mother, he assumed the throne of Heaven and swallowed each of his children as they were born. He missed only wily Zeus, who was spirited away by his mother, Rhea, to be raised in a nearby cave. She tricked Cronus into devouring a rock swaddled in a babys blanket instead.