Heracles

Heracles (Hercules in the Roman tradition) is the greatest of the heroes of Greek mythology, son of Zeus, king of the gods, and of the mortal Alcmena, wife of the Theban king Amphitryon. Zeus united with Alcmena taking the appearance of her husband, and from that night twins were born: Heracles, son of the god, and Iphicles, son of Amphitryon. Hera, jealous of the infidelities of Zeus, hated Heracles from his birth and sent two serpents to his cradle to kill him, but the child, endowed with supernatural strength, strangled them with his own hands. Raised in Thebes and educated in the arts of war and music, Heracles fell victim to an attack of madness provoked by Hera, during which he killed his wife Megara and his own children. To atone for this crime, he consulted the oracle of Delphi, which ordered him to put himself at the service of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae.

At the service of Eurystheus, Heracles had to carry out the twelve labors, enterprises apparently impossible conceived to finish him off. He killed the Nemean Lion, of invulnerable skin, and covered himself with its hide; he slew the Lernaean Hydra, monster of multiple heads that regrew when cut, cauterizing the necks with the help of his nephew Iolaus and burying the immortal head under a rock. He captured alive the Ceryneian Hind and the Erymanthian Boar, cleaned in a single day the stables of Augeas by diverting two rivers, and exterminated the Stymphalian Birds. He tamed the Cretan Bull, seized the man-eating mares of Diomedes, obtained the belt of the queen of the Amazons Hippolyta, took the cattle of the giant Geryon, stole the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides and, in the last and most fearsome test, descended to the underworld to take out of it Cerberus, the three-headed dog. These feats, narrated above all in the Library of Apollodorus, consecrated him as the victor par excellence of the monsters.

Once the labors were completed, Heracles continued accumulating feats: he participated in the expedition of the Argonauts and in the hunt of the Calydonian boar, and freed Prometheus from his torment. His death came by a deception: the centaur Nessus, mortally wounded by an arrow of Heracles poisoned with the blood of the Hydra, convinced his wife Deianira that his blood was a love filter. When Deianira impregnated a tunic with it and gave it to him to wear, the poison burned Heracles without remedy. Unable to bear the pain, the hero had a pyre erected on Mount Oeta and burned in it; but his divine part ascended to Olympus, where Zeus made him immortal, reconciled with Hera and married him to Hebe, the goddess of youth. Venerated as a hero and as a god, the foundation of the Olympic Games is attributed to him, and his figure, incarnation of strength at the service of order against chaos, has inspired art, literature and philosophy until today, and even gives its name to a constellation.