HERCULES

I. Names

The Latin name for the god did not come to Rome from the Greeks directly. Ἡρακλῆς (Herakles, "the glory of Hera"), had come to Latium via Etruria, where we find the syncopated form Hercle on bronze mirrors and votive bronzes from the fifth century BCE onwards. Michiel de Vaan and Ernout and Meillet have considered Latin Hercules as a loanword of that Etruscan form instead of the Greek one. ^1,2,3

Nancy Thomson de Grummond has documented the Etruscan examples of Hercle, appearing in scenes unknown to Greek mythology; being suckled by the vaunted Uni as an adult and adopted into the company of immortals. The Etruscan aristocracy claimed him as the model for a mortal raised by his own actions. When Rome got their hands on the hero, they followed that sort of design.⁴

The foreign adaptastion aside, the earliest Latin attestations of the name are all votive and attest to an old form of worship. John Penney discusses the archaic dedication of the brothers Cestius: Q. K. Cestio Q. f. Hercole donu dedero (CIL 12.61) in which the dative Hercole retains the vowel of the Etruscan form before the paradigm of Herculi established in Classical Latin.⁵

The earliest closely datable literary attestation is an oath. Plautus, writing between roughly 205 and 184 BCE, swears by the god constantly in the forms hercle, mehercle and edepol hercle, and the frequency shows that the name was already worn smooth by ordinary use before Latin literature began. A god whose name has become an interjection is a god long since domesticated.⁶

Roman antiquarians never resolved how many individuals bore the name. Cicero lists six figures known as hercules in the theological survey of 45 BCE; he distinguishes the son of Jupiter and Alcmena from those claiming to be Egyptian, Cretan, & Indian; Varro reports roman cult practices without harmonizing them; and plurality of hercules was consensus among scholars of late Republic.^7,8

The great roman altar preserved archaisms as Macrobius transcribes ritual detail of the Ara Maxima where ritual practice was conducted head uncovered like that used by Greeks. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports the same practice as evidence for a foreign origin of the cult.^9,10

Sources: de Vaan and Ernout and Meillet for the etymology and the route of borrowing; Bonfante and Bonfante and de Grummond for the Etruscan forms; Penney for the archaic Latin dedication; Plautus for the earliest datable literary use; Cicero, De natura deorum; Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae;^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,11,12}

II. The Roman History of Hercules Worship

The Ara Maxima

Livy claimed that the Romans contended that Hercules had been present in the city before there was a city. He claims that while Hercules was driving the cattle of Geryon, he stopped in the valley which would become the Forum Boarium, lost his beasts to the thief Cacus, killed him, and was welcomed by the Arcadian, Evander, who founded the Ara Maxima at the spot. Virgil also elucidates on the same story as part of Aeneas' journey through the city in the Eighth Book of the Aeneid. The story is part of the ceremony which has Aeneas being observed when he arrives at the site of Rome.^13,14

The altar had characteristics which were recorded as evidence of its age. No woman could participate in the sacrifice, no other deity was mentioned in the rite, the head was bare instead of veiled during sacrifice, and Pliny claims that neither flies nor dogs were according to popular opinion inclined to go inside the precinct. Plutarch collected the same irregularities as questions to which no Roman could give an answer.^9,15,16

The Potitii and the Pinarii

In ancient times the cult was maintained by two noble families, the Potitii and the Pinarii as their private preserve, according to Livy. The Potitii were permitted to serve at the altar by hereditary right but had to exclude themselves from the intestines because they had arrived too late to join in the first festival; and so it continued until 312 b.c., when Appius Claudius Caecus as public censor compelled the Potitii to instruct public slaves in the rite and within a year both the Gens Potitia and Appius Claudius himself were extinct, having fallen victim to their sacrilege.^13,17

Historians felt that this transaction represented a larger movement where Roman family cults were incorporated into state machinery with adverse consequences. Rome took possession of its oldest altar and told itself a terrible story about what price it paid for doing so. ^17,18

The Tithe and the Bankers

From then on, Hercules would be the god to whom Romans would pay a portion of what they earned called the decuma herculius. Whether it was merchants or generalissimos, there are numerous instances of a tithe offered to Hercules and they would eat the share at a public banquet. Plutarch describes a banquet that Sulla held with some of the money he had set aside for such offerings; Macrobius preserves for us a description written by an antiquarian regarding this practice. Filippo Coarelli has suggested that this is due to the commercial nature of the Forum Boarium and harbor near which stood the altar of Hercules.^9,19,20

Republic and Empire

Temple building to Hercules followed Roman victory. Marcus Fulvius Nobilior dedicated the temple of Hercules of the Muses after his triumph over Ambracia in 187 BCE, the round marble temple in the Forum Boarium rose about 120 BCE, and Pompey attached his name to a further Herculean shrine too.^20,21,22

Under the empire hercules moved outward with legions and merchants. Stefan Ritter traced imagery of Hercules through art of Rome. Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price include Hercules in a small group of deities like Hermes whose worship has been documented in every province of Rome. The river market altar became a world wide cult of hercules.^23,24

III. Epithets

The Roman epithets of Hercules describe functions and owners rather than myths. Georg Wissowa observed that the titles cluster around victory, guardianship and commerce, which is what a god worshipped at a cattle market and a triumphal route would be asked to supply. Jean Bayet argued that this practical titulature is the most Roman thing about him.^22,25

Two of Hercules' titles carried the official state cult. Hercules Invictus was responsible for the Ara Maxima (the altar) and the Roman calendars, while Hercules Victor was responsible for the circular temple in the Forum Boarium (market), and the large stepped sanctuary at Tibur with an image of him in the city, dressed in the attire of a victorious general.^9,11,20

A second category of titles belong to Roman families and Roman patrons. Hercules Pompeianus, Hercules Sullanus and Hercules of the Muses are all named after men who rebuilt or constructed their temples. This practice clearly shows that a Roman nobleman had no qualms about attaching his gens to a god. In fact, ownership of a cult was a way of advertising.^20,26

The third category consists of those from outside of Italy. Hercules Magusanus in Batavia (modern-day Holland), Hercules Saxanus in the quarries of the Rhineland (Germany), Hercules Gaditanus at Gades (Spain), and Hercules Curinus in the Paeligni region (Italy), show how a provincial deity was associated with a Latin title. Ton Derks showed for the Lower Rhine that the resulting god was neither solely Roman nor exclusively indigenous. Interpretatio was a means of translating gods into one another, it was not simply a translation error.^12,27

Sources and first attestations: Invictus and Victor in the Roman calendars and the Forum Boarium temples, Degrassi, Inscr. Ital. 13.2, with Coarelli; Magnus Custos, Ovid, Fasti 6.209–212; Musarum, Ovid, Fasti 6.797–812, with Pliny; Pompeianus, Vitruvius 3.3.5; Comes and Conservator in the imperial coinage catalogued by Mattingly and Sydenham; Magusanus and Saxanus in the Rhineland dedications discussed by Derks; Gaditanus in the Spanish evidence discussed by Rives; Wissowa and Bayet for the analysis of the whole titulature.^{9,11,12,15,20,21,22,25,26,27,28,29}

IV. Temples and Sacred Sites of Hercules

V. Hercules as Model for Sporting Heroes

The international organization of athletes of the Roman world also identified themselves through Hercules. The international association of competitors called itself the Sacred Traveling Association Devoted to Herakles, kept their archives at Rome, and received charters from Roman Emperors; Peter Frisch wrote about the papyri that show how Hadrian and Antoninus Pius confirmed their rights and location near the Baths of Trajan. The strongest man in mythology became the registered sponsor/patron of a professional athletic organization.^31,32

Zahra Newby has demonstrated just how completely he supported them visually. Statues of Hercules stood in both gymnasia and imperial thermae, the public baths. Men trained in front of statues of Hercules in the palaestrae and thermae, since he represented laborious effort; and the colossal Weary Hercules signed by Glykon that was found in the Baths of Caracalla is perhaps the best preserved example of this practice.^33,34

The Roman festival calendar gave Greek athletics a Latin home. Augustus founded the Sebasta at Naples in 2 CE on the Olympic model, Domitian established the Capitoline contest at Rome in 86 CE, and Jason König has examined the literature these institutions generated, in which the athlete's training is habitually described in the vocabulary of Herculean labour. Rome imported the gymnasium along with its patron.^33,35

The moral content of the model is labour rather than strength. Karl Galinsky observed that the Roman Hercules is defined by endurance and by tasks completed, so that the athlete who invoked him was claiming discipline rather than brute force. Effort is the whole of the lesson.³⁶

VI. Roman Poets and Hercules

Virgil assigned Hercules a foundational position in the Roman landscape. The killing of Cacus occurs in Book VIII of the Aeneid as the first liberation of the site of Rome and, according to Philip Hardie, serves as a cosmological triumph of order over chaos that anticipates the achievements of Augustus^14,37

In comedy, Propertius took the same altar and made a farce out of all of it because in the ninth elegy of his fourth book the thirsty god, fresh from killing Cacus, was refused water by the priestess of the Bona Dea. Curiously, he retaliates by excluding women from his own rite forever, or so the justification for the prohibition goes.³⁸

Ovid adapted the figure to the mechanism of the calendar and to the mechanism of metamorphosis. While providing the date of the Ara Maxima and of the temple of the Muses in the Fasti, he gives the shirt of Nessus, the pyre on Mount Oeta and the apotheosis wherein his mortal portion is consumed by fire in Book IX of the Metamorphoses.^21,39

Horace made him the paradigmatic model for measuring a ruler as his odes locate Hercules among those mortals who won immortality through labor and compare him to Augustus when he returns from Spain. This sort of comparison is presented as a demand rather than flattery.⁴⁰

Among the Stoics, Seneca developed two tragedies featuring Hercules. In Hercules Furens he depicts the hero being destroyed by the insanity which followed upon his own triumph, and in the Hercules on Oeta transcribed under his own name, he narrates at length the hero's death and deification; Karl Galinsky interprets both works as testaments of the Stoic hero pushed beyond his own bounds.^36,41

Then Statius wrote two poems: one for the sea-side temple of Hercules erected by Pollius Felix and another for the bronze figurine of Hercules at table owned by Novius Vindex; and Martial praises the same miniature masterwork, while Silius Italicus begins his Punica with the Spanish shrine of Hercules and concludes its Book XV with Scipio's dilemma between Virtue and Pleasure.^42,43,44

VII. Hercules and Roman Rulers

The pattern begins with the greatest of the republican commanders. Livy records the aura of the divine that attached to Scipio Africanus, and Silius Italicus later gave him a formal choice between Virtue and Pleasure modelled on the fable of Prodicus, so that the conqueror of Hannibal was shown to posterity as a Roman Hercules at the crossroads..^44,45

Sulla and Pompey with their dictatorial ambitions used the god in a more cynical manner as Plutarch describes the tithe Sulla paid at the Ara Maxima and the vast public feast that consumed it, while Pompey attached his name to a Herculean temple in the Forum Boarium and celebrated his triumphs along the route the god's altar commanded. A Roman noble displayed his fortune by giving a tenth of it away in the god's name.^19,20

Augustus preferred Apollo and permitted the comparison nonetheless. Horace welcomes him home from the Spanish campaign in the manner of Hercules returning from the same country, and J. Rufus Fears traced how such associations were converted into the formal language of imperial virtues. The comparison was made by the poets and left uncollected by the prince.^40,46

Trajan brought the Spanish god into the centre of imperial coinage. Hercules Gaditanus appears on the issues of an emperor born in Baetica in Hispania. The types of Hercules the Companion and Hercules the Preserver run through the second and third centuries as statements that the labor of defending borders and ruling well was a difficult task^29,46

At the end of Rome, the name was attempted to be used in power plays as Diocletian took the title Jovius. He Maximian the title Herculius, dividing the empire between the god who commands and the god who executes. Scholars of late Rome like Roger Rees have shown how carefully the theology was tied in public to the administrative structure, for better or for worse.⁴⁷

VIII. The Army

Hercules was among the commonest gods on the military frontiers and it appears soldiers chose him as a great deity to emulate. Eric Birley's survey of the religion of the Roman army found him second only to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the dedications of officers and units. Other historians show the pattern across the western provinces.^48,49

The Rhineland produced the densest evidence. Hercules Saxanus received dedications from legionary detachments quarrying stone in the Brohl valley, and Hercules Magusanus was worshipped by Batavian auxiliaries and by the local aristocracy who supplied them; Ton Derks has demonstrated that the cult served as the meeting point between a native ancestral figure and the Roman military career. The god was the bargain struck between an empire and its recruits.^12,49

Britain supplies the same evidence at the far edge. Altars to Hercules stand among the garrison dedications collected in the Roman Inscriptions of Britain, set up by prefects and centurions in the forts of the northern frontier alongside those to Jupiter and to the emperor's spirit. Frontier religion was practical, personal and paid for out of pocket.^48,50

The reason for the preference is stated in the imagery rather than in any text. Stefan Ritter has traced the military versions of the type, in which the club and the lion skin become emblems of endurance under order, and the titles Defensor and Invictus attach themselves to the same figure. Virtus was the soldier's word, and Hercules was its picture.^23,46

IX. The Popularity of the Cult Across the Empire

Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that scarcely a place in Italy could be found where Hercules was not beloved. Every province of Rome seemed to be dedicated to him in some form. Jörg Rüpke's survey of Roman religion placed Hercules among the handful of deities attested continuously and endlessly from Britain to Syria. He required no priesthood, no temple and no calendar to receive a vow; ultimately, though, to a learned eye, he also represented the hope of apotheosis.^10,51

In the west he absorbed local powers wholesale. In addition, historians note the extent to which Batavaian and Gallic elite figures would adopt Roman divine names for their own religious practices. That applied to African provinces as well. Hercules is often depicted alongside Liber Pater as an ancestral deity of Lepcis Magna. These regional pairings were transported to Rome itself by the Severans of Libya.^12,27,52,53

Spain produced the most well-known shrine of Hercules (Gades) as well as the western-most ocean border. Visitors to the Gades temple recognized it as the western most holy site within the known world associated with the Geryon tale even though it was nominally founded as a shrine to Melqart. It attracted military leaders and emperors providing the Empire with images of boundaries crossed. The deity Hercules defined the end-of-the-world boundary and earned thanks for crossing it.^27,44

Beyond the western borders of the Empire, Hercules continued to be worshiped. Many deities of the east were assimilated into the interpretation of being Hercules or Hermes. Tacitus reported that German warriors invoked Hercules as the "first of bold heroes" when going into battle, for instance.^52,54

X. Stoicism

The philosophical Hercules begins as a myth, systematized into a dogma of sorts. Xenophon preserved the legend of Prodicus in which Hercules encounters Virtue and Vice at a cross-roads and selects the difficult path. Cicero translated this story into Latin moral philosophy as the paradigmatic example of each young man's decision regarding the course of his life, a strong influence on the Stoics. ^55,56

Seneca used Hercules as the quintessential example of wisdom as his essay on the Constancy of the Wise Man invokes Hercules as an exemplar of one who endured no labor. His treatise on Benefits depicts his journeys as service to humanity (as opposed to seeking honor). Furthermore, Seneca's Tragedies test the dogma to its limits. It should not surprise us that the strongest expression of it and the most incisive critique are attributed to the same writer, as Seneca was interested in testing moral limits.^41,57

Maybe Epictetus provides perhaps the most radical representation. He represents Hercules as one who fulfilled Zeus' will without complaint, possessed nothing, felt at home wherever he went because he believed that Zeus was the Father of all people, and was summoned to join the noblest company after clearing the earth of what defiled it. To endure in obedience is a goal.⁵⁸

Allegory elevated him from example to principle. Cornutus interpreted Hercules as Reason, that pervading all things and imparting vigor to every part of Nature; while Dio Chrysostom identifies Hercules as the exemplary ruler, who rules through labor rather than through pleasure. This concept did not begin with the Stoics. Ragnar Höistad has documented that the entire tradition extends back to the Cynic teachers from whom the Stoics derived this theme. ^59,60,61

Marcia Colish and Emma Stafford have both demonstrated how much of subsequent European moral thought passed through this portal; since the heroic laborer who gains immortality through his service was available to Christian writers as a figure to both viciously condemn and emulate at once. While the imagery of a strongman in lionskin and club survived long after the altars disappeared, a god who ascended to Heaven by virtue of uncompleted labors is the kind of god that the Romans found the most glorious. As Hercules Invictus he bore his oldest title, which was given to him by the Ara Maxima prior to Rome building its walls.^36,62,63

XI. Festivals