Heracles, half-god, half-man, eventually became immortal. He’s a hard guy to admire, much less love.
Yesterday’s note on the rape of Auge is the kind of story that the ancient Greeks told about the heroes and gods. Heracles did a lot of good, but he murdered, plundered and raped as he went along.
As a schoolboy, I learned Heracles was assigned a series of impossible tasks to atone for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness. But the lesson stopped there. Had the story continued, I’d have learned that Heracles was slow to learn.
Having completed his labors, Heracles killed yet another man and, as penance, consented to be sold into slavery for a year. He was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia.
She was looking for sex, not the usual labor that heroes provided. Heracles, being Heracles, rid the country of bandits and killed a giant, marauding serpent.
But if you were writing a biography of the god, this chapter would be “Heracles: the sex-slave period.” This chapter is not taught in schools.
I’ve been thinking about the gods, trying to find something in the world that I know that I could compare them to.
Greek thinkers had different views of the gods. One was that a god was a kind of force you neither loved nor hated but simply accepted because you couldn’t do anything about it. I heard Old Timers in Texas speak of the Neches Rivers that way. People lived by the river because they needed the water. But it flooded often, carrying away kin and cattle, and occasionally the house.
• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 162-8.
No comments:
Post a Comment