Camp Gagnon - The REAL Hercules is Darker Than the Myths

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Today, we dive into the legendary life of the Greek hero Hercules—from his divine origins and the meaning behind his name to the 12 Labors and his lasting influence on Rome and beyond. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Mudwtr, Gld, and Ekster -New Customers get 40% OFF With Promo-Code: "CAMP" When They Visit: https://GLD.com -Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off  @MUDWTR  with code 'CAMP' at https://mudwtr.com/CAMP ! #mudwtrpod -Get Up To 40% Off Through August 17th AND Use Code 'GAGNON20' To Get An Extra 20% Off When You Visit http://partner.ekster.com/campgagnon #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:35 Is Hercules Real? + Christos YAPPIN 5:27 Origin of Hercules 7:50 Meaning of “Hercules” 12:13 When Did Hercules Live? 18:40 Different Version of Hercules 20:00 Hera Manipulates Hercules 24:55 The 12 Labors 28:18 The Entire Story of Hercules 33:30 Children of Hercules 36:05 Alexander the Great Embody’s Hercules 37:50 The Roman Hercules 44:42 Christianity’s Attempt to Kill Hercules 57:13 Drop Your Thoughts! #foryou #foryoupage #history #hercules Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The strongest most beloved demigod in all of Greek history murdered his own wife and children with his bare hands. And then the mightiest hero in history dropped to his knees and begged to die. Yeah, that's the real story of Hercules. Far more complicated, dark, and devastating than you probably remember from the Disney cartoon. The actual figure from Greek legend was one of the darkest heroes ever imagined, a man whose own name honored the goddess trying to destroy him, a man forced to to serve a weaker king for years, a man who strangled lions with his arms and rerouted rivers with his bare hands. And he walked into the land of the dead and back out again. And yet somehow,

this man who probably never lived became the most powerful name in the entire ancient world, the hero that Spartan kings, Alexander the Great, and a mad Roman emperor and a lion's skin would all go to war to claim. Three thousand years later, you still know his name. No emperor could tame him, no other religion could eliminate him, and even death did not stop him, considering he died as a mortal and came back as a god. This is a fascinating look at Greek mythology and the figure of Hercules. If you are interested in these topics, well, great news, you're in the right place. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for

joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all history for all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here on this very show every single week. I try to figure out everything that has ever happened. And there's a lot of stuff happening all the time. As a matter of fact, history is made every day, as they say. And as a result, I thought I'd get through basically all of history in like a couple episodes, but there's just more stuff happening all the time. And this is no exception. And before I jump in to the great story of Hercules, I want to say a few words. Thank you to you. Yeah, dude, or girl, whoever you are, I want to say thanks for tuning in to the show.

Every time you comment or you like or you subscribe, you help the show grow, you keep the lights on in the tent, you need to keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, of course, my sort of, I should say, my obsession with Greek history is not possible without my good friend, my pal, the Greek freak himself, my pronunciation guide, and my friend Christos Pachadakadopado.

How are you? How dare you say Herculees might not have existed? What do you, okay, he obviously didn't. I mean, he existed in a cartoon, that's for sure. And in real life. And the son of Zeus. That's what they taught me. That's your religion.

You believe this. Yes. Well, we're going to find out once and for all today. And more importantly, Christos, your day has come, as it has come a few days already now, where I'm going to need your help pronouncing some words. Especially lately. Yes, especially lately. We've absolutely been on a Greek history tear.

And it wouldn't be possible without you correcting me on how I say these words. Burning the midnight oil, as I say. As they say, that's an old Greek phrase, right? I hope so. You probably will claim it. Now, look, Hercules is one of the most famous figures in world history. Like, the legend has transpired for thousands of years. I'm not just talking Greek.

Obviously, I'm talking Greek to an extent, but I'm not just talking Western history. His name is known all over the world and has survived for thousands of years. So before we can even go anywhere, we actually got to talk about literally his name. Because that alone has an entire backstory behind it and gives us so much context on who Hercules is and where he came from. So I'm saying Hercules. We know him as Hercules. We've all seen the Disney cartoon, which is my favorite Disney movie for the record. I love Hercules, or as they call him in the film, Honkulees.

Favorite character? I'd love the muses. I was just about to say that. It is a gospel film, you know what I mean? Yeah. Hot take, Hercules is kind of like a black movie. It is a black TV. It is a black film. Easy Mark.

It is. I mean, think of it. The muses. It's all gospel music. It is, in my opinion. It is, I think goes in the pantheon. It's like Dolomite and like sinners and Black Panther and Hercules. Great black movies. That's all I'll say. Now, it's actually not his name. Fun fact. Hercules is the Roman version. It's like the Latin remix that came centuries after the original. And then somehow that's the version that the entire Greek-speaking world does. defaulted to. The Greeks who actually invented Hercules, they called him Heracles. Yeah, it's the same character told by different cultures and, you know, about 2,000 years of remodeling kind of between them. You can think of like the Iliad is the Greek version and then the Aeneid is the Roman remix of the

same story. So just to keep us straight for the rest of, you know, what we're talking about, when we're in the Greek world, he's Heracles. And when we move to Rome, he becomes Hercules for the sake of this episode, I'm going to keep calling him Hercules. Sorry, Christos. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp Gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. So where does he actually come from? Well, the story starts the way that a lot of these Greek stories start. It has to do with Zeus being a bad guy. Yeah, I'm sorry. If you've watched your episode on Zeus, you know that Zeus was not a model citizen or a model God, for that matter.

You know, Zeus was the king of the gods, and he had a problem with faithfulness. And one day, he comes down to earth, and he sleeps with a mortal woman. Her name is Alkmini. Her husband is a guy named Amphitrion, and he ends up as the father on paper, and he's the one who actually raises the kid. But as we know, the kid isn't really his. The kid is half God. It's really half Zeus's kid. Now, we'd look at that and go, like, oh, a demi-euro.

god meaning like a half god what you know one divine parent one mortal parent easy case close and that works but we should flag something because it's going to be important later the ancient greeks didn't actually sort their characters into tidy little categories like that hercules wasn't a clean 50 50 50 split, 50% God, 50% human. He was more complicated. So his story starts with him as a mortal human. And then he dies and becomes a dead hero. Like the kind of hero that people would like go to his tomb, they would visit, you know, where he, where he'd laid to rest and they would give offerings. And then after all that, he becomes a full God, a true Olympian, as the Greeks would say. And he was worshipped in temples, right up there with, you know, all the immortals. So he crosses the line between

human and divine, but not just once. He does it twice. There's actually almost nobody in all of Greek mythology that does that. Like kings don't do it, other heroes don't do it, but Hercules or Heracles makes it work. Now, his name, Heracles, most scholars translate it into something to be like the glory of Hera, like Heracles. You can see where it comes from. Herra is the queen of the gods, the most powerful goddess on all of Mount Olympus, which sounds like an honor, but it's not you see hera the goddess his name literally celebrates spends the entire rest of his life trying to destroy him and to understand why the guy you know the glory of hera becomes the personal nemesis of hera herself well we have to go all the way back to the day that she birthed him now real

quick before we get into the whole story of hercules heracles i need to explain to you why there's not just one cohesive story about his life and in order to understand this we have to break down his legacy layer by layer. So let's start. When did Hercules actually live? Well, the Greeks would have had a pretty confident answer for you. They would tell you that he belonged to the heroic age. This is like a legendary golden stretch of time when demigods walked around like killing monsters

and produced the same generation that fought the Trojan War. So the poet Heziad literally described him as like, they described like a separate race of humans that were bigger and stronger and like better. than all of us regular humans. And it's dropped into history right before our own sad kind of watered-down age came along. And the later Greek scholars would even do the math for you. So they would tell you that his story lands somewhere around what we now know is the late Bronze Age. So they'd be like, oh, Hercules existed around like 13th century BC.

Now, Bronze Age just means the stretch of history when people were making their tools out of bronze. And the late Bronze Age is like the end of that period. It's pretty self-explanatory. So in Greece, that final stretch has a more specific name because a very specific civilization was living there at the time. And we now know them as the Mycenaeans. It's technically the same era with like two overlapping labels. So late Bronze Age is when and the Mycenaean people is the Who. The Mycenaeans were a real civilization of like, you know, massive stone fortresses

and warrior kings and palaces that were super organized, so organized that they kept ridden inventory of their, like, raw supplies on clay tablets. And they rose around like 1,600 BC, and they ran for centuries until they collapsed kind of dramatically and mysteriously, right around like 1,200 or 1,100 BC. And Heracles is supposed to have been alive near, like, the end of that empire. So now we have a time and a place and a people. So let's go check the.

records for any other signs of this great guy. A lot from the world actually survived from that specific time period. Those fortresses are still standing and we've dug up tombs and we can even read the clay tablets. I mean, I say we. I don't know how to read the clay tablets or I didn't dig up any tombs, but someone did. And, you know, we have the names of their kings and officials and like records of who owned what. Archaeologists have spent literal lifetimes pulling the Mycenaean world up out of the ground like piece by piece. But in all of it, every clay tablet, every tomb, every inscription, every scrap that those palaces have left behind, there's not a single mention of a man named Heracles.

Sorry. No monument, no grave, no seal, nothing. And it actually gets a little bit worse for the people who believe that Hercules or Heracles was real, because the earliest time he shows up anywhere in Greek writing, the first surviving mentions of him at all, is in the poems of Homer and of Heziat. and those are dated around like the 8th century BC. So that's like a 500 year gap after the Bronze Age hero supposedly died. So five centuries of total silence.

And then all of a sudden he's everywhere. He's in poems. He's in pottery, temples. Like he just kind of materialized out of nowhere fully formed 500 years after he was supposed to have lived. So if you time travel to ancient Greece and they tell you that he's from the late Bronze Age, you're going to have to unfortunately correct him and be like, actually we looked into it and we don't think he is.

So historians do the only thing that they really can. They treat Heracles as a complete myth, not like an actual human being. Now, could there be something real buried at the very bottom of all this? Well, some actual Bronze Age strongmen, some like local king or maybe a warrior who got forgotten whose story was exaggerated and immortalized like centuries until it became this. Well, yeah, it's possible, right? You can't rule it out, but you also can't prove it. and the evidence to nail it down simply just isn't there. So it kind of leaves us with a strange situation.

The single most famous hero of the ancient world, like the strongest man, like this hunk whose name got stamped into coins and temples and empires, probably never existed. And at best, it's based off of like the loose stories of maybe a warrior from, you know, the lay Bronze Age. But even in spite of all that, three of the most powerful men in history were about to go to war over who ultimately, got to claim him. So here's a thing that most of us tend to believe about these kinds of ancient myths. Like we assume that there's an original story. Like somewhere way back in the beginning,

there's a real version of Hercules. And everything that came after is just a copy of a copy of a getting kind of blurrier and changed and exaggerated every time someone retells it. Well, sometimes that's true. But for Hercules, that's not really what happened at all. There was never one Hercules. The myth of Hercules is actually this giant, sprawling, thalding, year-long pile of stories written by a bunch of different people in different centuries and different cities who kind of all contradict each other. So let's just kind of go through some of them and see how it all stacks up. If you're going to start with Hercules, you got to go to Homer around 8th century BC. And Homer barely engages with it. I mean, he name drops Heracles. He's like,

oh yeah, you know, the famous hero from the old days, but he never actually like sits down and tells you the story. He just assumes that the people that are, you know, hearing this already know about it. And then, of course, you have the playwrights. And this is where we get, you know, a lot of the Heracles story that we know. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because it's summertime. And I got to tell you something. There's a specific point every summer where you realize that your entire personal style has just been like the same jacket or the same pair of shoes. And that's why I've been rocking with GLD.

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Go to mudwater.com slash camp. And after you check out, make sure you tell them that the good folks here at Camp sent you. It really helps out the show. Now let's get back to it. So, for example, Euripides writes an entire tragedy built around the single most horrifying thing that Heracles ever did. We'll get to that in a second. You know Euripides, right? Yeah, he's the...

Yeah, you ripet his nuts in your mouth. All right. And then you have... I shouldn't be making these jokes. This is a good historical program. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. That's a good one.

And then, of course, you have Sophocles. And Sophocles writes a completely different story about how Hercules died. And neither of these guys is trying to be a historian. Like, this is not a historical, like, ledger of what happened. They're drama guys, right? They're chasing the version that is going to, like, you know, slap in the things.

that's going to make people get up and give the standing ovation, right? So they're going to bend the story in order to achieve that end. And then centuries later, there's a compiler that people call pseudo-apalodorus. And he finally comes along and does a thing that you'd think somebody would have done, like literally years ago. He strings all the adventures into one clean, connected account from start to finish. And it is because his version is the neat and tidy one, like technically the complete one, that people have since treated it as the story, like the true Hercules canon.

But it's not. It's just the most organized and consolidated version of his life or the myth around him. And so it shows up actually really late in the game. And then after him, you get Diodorus, Siculus, writing his own big sweeping take in the first century BC. And then you're going to get Posenius, who travels around Greece in the second century AD, actually writing down the local versions of Hercules, like literally going town by town, being like, what do you think about this guy? And discovers that every region had its own hometown spin, like its own weird little details, its own version of Hercules, like,

how some people have soda, some people have pop, like they just had their own little version of it. And then, of course, you're going to get Ovid in Rome, taking the entire thing and reshaping it into this gorgeous Latin poem for an imperial crowd. that wanted something a little more elegant, you could say. Now, it's easy to look at all of this and just be like, this is a mess. This is a broken game of telephone. This whole story is absurd. But it's not.

That is the myth. Every one of these writers inherited Hercules from the people before them, the people before them, and then remade them and recontextualized them for their own century, for their own people, for their own theater in order to fit what they needed at that time. And some of the versions that they were working from, like, the local, versions. We can't even read them anymore. There was actually an early epic about Hercules called Heracliah, an entire poem about this person, and it's just gone. It's vanished. Like, we only know it existed because other people mention it in their writings. Someone, someone, it comes to you and they're

like, what's the real story of Hercules? There isn't really one. There's so many different cities and civilizations and cultures throughout history that claim him as their guy. And in a second, we're going to see just how far some men were willing to go to prove that he's theirs. So we're just going to put a pin in the history really quick and jump back into the Heracles story, like the actual story as best we can. You know, we left off with him being, you know, fully human and having this goddess stepmother who hated him. Well, let's go back to that. So Hera, right?

You remember Hera, the god, the goddess of all the gods, right? Heracles is an insult. Heracles is living proof that her husband, Zeus, cheated her. on her. And she's not subtle about it. She wants to mess with Heracles' life. So when he's still just a baby in the cradle, she sends two serpents to kill him. But what does Heracles do? Strangles him, bang, in his crib, ties him up. That's the first thing that the child becomes famous for. And then Hera is pissed. She's like, well, my snake trick didn't work. So she plays the long game. She rigs the timing of his birth so that a weaker cousin, a man named Eurystheus, gets born first and then inherits a

kingship that would have gone to Heracles, which is why for years the strongest man alive, Heracles, ends up taking orders from a lesser king. Remember that detail because it's going to be really important for like the whole, you know, labor's story that we're going to get into in a second. But years later, Heracles is now a grown man and he has a pretty good life. He has a wife, her name is Megara, and they have children, sons, they have a home, and he's pretty happy. A nice little detail that Disney did because the, you know, the damsel in distress and Hercules his name Meg. And that's, you know, drawing on Megara, his actual wife. Kind of cool. And then Hera steps in to ruin Hercules' beautiful little life. She reaches into his mind and she breaks it.

Yeah. She sends madness upon him, a divine, like, mind-shattering insanity. And in that fog, Heracles looks at his own wife and his own children and he doesn't see them. He doesn't see people he loves. He sees enemies. He thinks that they are intruders in his. his home and what does he do, he kills them, all of them with his own hands. They didn't include that in the Disney movie. They didn't put the part where he just destroys his whole family, just goes absolutely wild on him. Would have been a good episode. It would have been an interesting little flavor to it.

You're like, oh, these muses are singing and they would have to do like the whole killing his family thing and like gospel, that'd be a little tough. And then do sex mocking to bring him back. Yeah, exactly. I just feel like the merch would not have done as well if they were like, oh, he, he, you know, committed, what they call it, patricide? Yep.

Yeah. So when the madness finally lifts, Hercules looks around, or Heracles, and he looks and he's like, oh, no, I killed my whole family. So now, if you're familiar with Greek mythology at all, you may know the rest of the story, that the next part is where Hercules, as, you know, like a form of punishment, is now commanded to do these insane, impossible tasks. they call labors. And you're probably thinking like, okay, he does these terrible things,

kills his family, and then as punishment, he's sentenced to perform the labors, right? Like he has a crime, and then he's sentenced to do these tasks that are impossible. Yeah, kind of true, but that's only one version. Because remember, there are multiple and at times conflicting versions of Hercules's story. So this is the one that's in pseudo-apalodorus. He kills the children. He staggers to the Oracle at Delphi, just drowning in guilt, wants to end his own life. And he's told to go serve Eurystheus to purify himself. And so there's the crime and then there's the punishment. But then we have the Euripides version. In his play, first performed in front of an Athenian audience in like the late 5th century BC, the labors are already over by that point. Hercules has finished

the whole legendary gauntlet. He's at the absolute peak of his life. He's a hero that conquered all of these tasks. He killed all these monsters walking back through his own front door after his final trial. And according to Euripides, that's the moment that Hera strikes him down with this madness and makes him kill his whole family. So you can see what that does of the story. One version, you have this insanity from a god or a goddess, and then there's a murder. And then that leads up to his redemption. But in the other, the murder is like almost a consequence or, you know, like the outcome of his great heroic feat. So yeah, if you give those events the opposite order, it gives a completely different meaning to the character. And I just have to include, like, not to get too nerdy here,

but to be honest, you know, who the hero actually is throughout the entire story and through history, he's complicated. And his whole journey and characterization kind of changes. And I just want to include that detail in here, not until I get too nerdy on like Greek mythology, but I think it gives a really interesting context to who Hercules is and how he was represented throughout history. He's complicated, and his whole journey and characterization really changes depending on. which version you get told. But underneath both versions, no matter which order you tell it, and the exact same question is still at the core of it,

the question that Greek tragedy must address, no matter how many times it's circled back. How do you cleanse a hero whose hands have done the worst possible thing? Especially when it's not really his fault. It's the gods who forced him to do it. So we're going to go with the pseudo-apolodorus version. So he commits this horrible act, And then that leads us to the 12 labors.

This is the version that most people know. So he has to go, you know, destroy a lion and the many-headed serpent and a trip down into hell itself. These 12 impossible tasks that he must accomplish. This is what the song Zero to Hero in the Disney movie really talks about. It's his journey to becoming a hero. And it's all these crazy things that he has to accomplish, all that stuff. And the 12 labors weren't just decided on, like, in one single version. They were kind of assembled throughout history, and you can actually follow the trail of

how they fall into place. So the earliest place that we actually see all 12 of these tasks laid out as one complete set isn't in a book at all. It's actually carved into stone. It's 12 sculpted marble panels wrapped around the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, made around 460 BC. And that's a pretty big deal, because Olympia is arguably the holiest site in the entire Greek world. But there's a problem.

Because the marble doesn't quite match what we read in the books. Like the order shifts around. Some details don't really line up with like the later written lists, which tells us something kind of fascinating, that even at that point, even carved into a temple, the official canon still isn't fully set. So, okay, what are they? What are the labor's final form?

Well, the first six keep Hercules close to home. He's basically wrestling with the wild landscape of Greece itself. So first we have the Nemean lion. This is a beast whose hide is literally so tough. Its skin is so thick that no weapon can pierce it. So Hercules just strangles it with his bare arms. And then he skins it and then wears the pelt for the rest of his life. That lion's skin kind of like becomes his logo.

And then of course you have the hydra. This is a swamp serpent that grows two heads back every single time you cut one off. So you cut a head off, two more heads, cut another two more heads off, four heads. and just keeps growing exponentially. And then you have a magical deer that he has to chase for an entire year. And then there's like this monstrous boar that he has to take down on a flock of killer birds. And then there is the famous filthy stable. Thousands of cattle stuck in like mud and muck.

And he basically has to, you know, clean them in a single day, not by grinding it out with a shovel, but by literally rerouting two rivers to blast the whole thing clean. That's just the first six. The second set, like the other six labors, changes the entire scale of the story because they fling him to the very edges of the known world. So now he's fighting a bull on the island of Crete, wrangling this man-eating horse in Thraki, stealing the belt of the queen of the Amazons, wrestling the cattle of a three-bodied monster in the far, far west, fetching golden apples from a garden at the literal edge of the world. And then finally, the big one, number 12, he walks down into the underworld, the land of the dead,

and drags the three-headed guard dog of hell named Cerberus, back up into the light alive. Those are the 12 labors, but they're just one stretch of his life. So now you've got all the pieces. Let's actually lay out the whole thing front to back in the version that most people mean when they say, the story of Hercules, the consolidated, generalized, accepted one. Zeus goes down to Earth.

He's unfaithful to his wife. He makes love to a mortal woman named Alkmini, and he has a son named Hercules. Now that makes Hercules a demigod, he's half god, half mortal, and it makes Hera, Zeus's wife, his lifelong enemy, because Hercules is manifestation. He is living proof that her husband had an affair. So while Hercules is an infant, Hera sends two serpents into the cradle to kill him. Baby Hercules, strangles him with his bare hands,

ties him up, flings him away, and it is the first sign of what he is, that he's not just a regular mortal, that he is something greater. He grows into the strongest man alive. He marries a woman named Megara. He has children with her, and that is when Hera strikes her cruelest blow.

She sends madness down upon him, and in the fog of his insanity, he can't recognize his own family, and he sees them as enemies. He kills his wife and children with his own bare hands, and then when the madness lifts, he's seen what he has done, and he's shattered, he's horrified,

he wants to die, desperate to purify himself of the horror, he goes to the oracle at Delphi, which then sends him to serve a weaker king, Eurystheus, and perform whatever tasks the king demands. Those tasks then become the 12 labors, a gauntlet of impossible feats. He strangles the,

you know, impenetrable lion and then wears the skin forever after. He kills the many-handed hydra. He captures monstrous beasts, cleans the impossible stable by rerouting rivers with his own strength until the final labor sends him into the underworld itself to drag out this three-headed guard dog from hell, the Sebrus, back into the light, alive. And then Hercules walks into death. He walks out, defeating death, and comes back the greatest man. man. But the labors don't end his story. Years later, he takes on a new wife named Dianera, and then there's a dying centaur named Nessus who tricks her, telling her that his blood is a love potion that will keep Hercules faithful. So when she fears that she's losing him,

she soaks a robe in that blood and sends it to him, not knowing that it's a lethal poison. The robe burns his flesh and the pain is just so unbearable that Hercules builds his own funeral pyre on Mount Edda and has himself burned alive. But once again, that's not the end of the story. On the funeral pyre, his mortal half burns away and his divine half rises to Olympus where he becomes a full god at last. He, you know, kind of reconciles with Hera and is now welcomed among the immortals. So you have a strong man, a murderer, now a servant, and then a monster slayer, and then finally a god. That's the story. guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about the thing in

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Like, the farther Hercules travels, the more places get to claim a piece of him. So some town in Sicily can say, oh, yeah, he passed through here. And then a rock formation in Spain, we can say, yeah, he made that actually. He made that rock thing on the mountain. And then, oh, the river in Italy, he crossed it. This is where Hercules came and crossed the river and became the greatest. So his story stops being anchored in one spot on the map and becomes, kind of like the every man hero, the hero in your own backyard,

which is exactly what the most powerful people in the ancient world were about to start fighting over. So this is the moment Hercules stopped being a story and starts being something that people actually try to own. So let me explain. Hercules supposedly had all these adventures. Remember, but in the myth, he had kids. So if you have kids, that means you have a bloodline. And that bloodline actually has its own name. Heracles, the children.

of Hercules. That's what they called them. So they were, everyone was wondering, where are the Heraclids? And that turned out to be one of the most valuable things that a person could possibly claim in the entire ancient Greek-speaking world. Because you're like, hey, I'm actually the son of Hercules. And what does that make you? All of a sudden now, you're like part demigod. Suddenly your power isn't something that you grabbed. It's, it's something that you inherited. You can see how useful it is, right? Especially in ancient cultures. You know, it launders raw power and just kind of like taking the throne into something bigger. It becomes destiny.

It becomes your fate. And nobody ran this play harder than Sparta. Yes, both of Sparta's royal houses. And yes, Sparta weirdly had like two kings at once, but that's like a whole different thing. Both of these houses claimed that they were Heraclyde's, which meant that every Spartan king could draw a family tree that ran straight back through the greatest hero who ever lived. And from him, straight back to Zeus. Remember, back in the old days, everyone was trying to.

trying to connect their power to divinity. And this is no different. The Spartans were like, hey, my authority isn't because of politics or anything. It is divine. It is stamped and signed at the very top by the king of the gods himself. Zeus wants me to be here, and that's why I'm here. So for a Spartan king, Hercules wasn't just like a little bedtime story. It wasn't a Disney cartoon.

It was their right to rule. It was a blessing from the highest beings of the known universe. So think about that for a second, right? Like, let's just deliberate. Was any of this actually true? Remember, we don't have any real evidence that Hercules actually ever existed. But it doesn't matter. Nobody claiming his ancestry needed it to be real.

They just needed to be powerful and compelling to the people that they ruled. And in the entire Greek world, there was no name that carried more weight than Hercules. And the Spartans figure this out. And Sparta was just the very beginning of this whole thing. because the next two men who reached for that, you know, same divine ancestry, they weren't content just calling Hercules their ancestor. They wanted to become a reflection of Hercules. And the other one genuinely seemed to believe that he was Hercules himself.

So let's get into that whole story. Up in the north of Greece, there is a kingdom called Macedon. It was ruled by a dynasty called the Argeids. And the Argiads, like the Spartans before them, claimed a bloodline. And the most famous argued who ever lived put his money on it. So when Alexander the Great, yeah, that Alexander, you've heard of him, when he carved out the largest empire that the world had ever seen, literally from Greece all the way to like the edge of India, he needed millions of coins.

You need coins. You got to pay armies. You got to fund cities. You got to kind of, you know, you got to pay your soldiers. You got to grease the war machine a little bit. The silver coins that financed all of it carried a very specific image. On one side, it was Zeus. But on the other side, get this, it was a young, beardless Hercules, wearing the same unmistakable lion's skin headdress pulled up over his head that he got from the very first labor.

Think about the reach of that. As Alexander the Great is conquering, at this point, literally the whole world, the face of Hercules is riding along with his army into every marketplace, into every soldier's bank account, every hand from Athens. to basically the Himalayas, Hercules was there. And it went further than just the coins. There's a gold ring that survives to this day showing Alexander the Great himself dressed as Hercules, wearing the lion's skin. Pretty bold.

I mean, if anyone can do it, I mean, I think Alexander the Great probably gets a little bit of a pass. But like putting yourself in the hero's costume is all of a sudden blurring the line between you as a man and you as a demigod. And here's the thing about Alexander. it was always a comparison, a really flattering piece of PR. He wanted you to think of Hercules when you thought of him.

But Alexander the Great never outright claimed to be Hercules. There was a guy that did that. We'll get to him in a second. Roughly 400 years after Alexander the Great, on the throne of the Roman Empire, there was a man named Cometus. And Cometus wasn't some, you know, like low-birth warlord who clawed his way up. He is the son of Marcus Array. You know Marcus Aurelius. He's the philosopher, emperor, one of like the wisest and most respected

rulers that Rome ever produced. I mean, people still read his work to this very day. Well, what he decided to do with it, he wanted to become Hercules, like literally. Like he even took the title. He was no longer comidus. He became Hercules Romanus, meaning the Roman Hercules. He had a statue of himself carved wearing the same lion's skin gripping the club. holding the golden apple of Hesperides, one of those very statues actually survived, and you can still look at it right now. He renamed a month of the year after the hero slash himself, and he stood up in front of the Roman Senate, the most powerful political body of the ancient world, and informed him, he informed all of them, hey, I'm actually not an emperor. I am Hercules.

I'm the son of Zeus, a living God. And then Comedus went down into the arena to prove it. This is a true story. The Emperor of Rome dressed as Hercules, lion's skin, club in hand, went down to fight as a gladiator allegedly hundreds of times. Crazy. And we don't just have a legend for this. We have an eyewitness. There's actually a senator named Cassius Dio, who was personally forced to sit in that arena and watch it happen, and he wrote it all down. And like what he wrote is, like, it's insane. Dio described Cometus, as one day beheading an ostrich and then walking the severed head over towards the senator's section holding it up grinning at them basically being like yo see this ostrich head this could be you

if you mess with me if you don't accept my divinity this is you my boy where do you even get an ostrich right like this is an ancient rome you're getting ostrich that's crazy like i didn't know they had i've never seen a roman ostrich do they look different he's the son of god he could get it i guess right i mean another time, the same emperor rounded up men from around Rome who had lost their feet. Like, people were losing their feet back then, like diseases and accidents. It didn't matter. He strapped on fake serpent tails to their legs so that they looked like giants and handed them sponges to throw. And then he clubbed them all to death.

Literally, he was like, hey, look at these giant men that are trying to defeat me and they're trying to kill me. And then he literally kills them all, pretending that he was Hercules slaying the monster. doing his own version of the labors. And the senators were required to chant his praises while it was happening. It's maybe the single most audacious thing that he ever did. Get this. It involves like a statue that was already a very famous landmark in the city. So right next to the Colosseum stood the Colossus of Nero.

You maybe have heard of this. It's like this giant bronze statue of the sun god standing like over a hundred feet tall. It's one of the largest statues in the entirety of the ancient world that we know about. Well, Cometus had the head. head removed. And who was he going to put on this giant 100-foot statue? He put his own face. Yeah. And then he equipped the giant statue with a club and set a bronze lion at its feet, turning the sun god of Nero near the Coliseum into a hundred-foot-tall Hercules with Comedus's face towering over the heart of Rome. I mean, the audacity. Now, in 192 AD,

the people around Comedus finally decided like, hey, this is, this is absurd. They'd try to poison it. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

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because that's kind of how Hercules died in like the original. Like from the, from the pseudo-apolodorus version where like his new wife sends the, you know, bloodied robe to him. Are you saying he wasn't him? I'm saying he might have been him, dude. The fact that he dies of poisoning, or at least they try to kill him poisoning, it didn't work.

Regardless, they sent in a row of poisoning. wrestler, like classic, you know, Greco-Roman style, go in, choke him out, didn't tap. Now, the moment that Comedus is dead, the Senate did something to him that the Romans reserved for their most hated figures. This is like a, it was this strange public kind of ritual called the Damnatio Memoriai. It was the condemnation of memory. And it is in Roman society, the official legal erasure of a person from existence. Like they would tear down his statues. They chiseled his name off of monuments.

They basically tried to scrub the man out of existence entirely. But that one statue, you know, the one of him dressed as Hercules and the lion's skin, somebody actually hit it underground and it survived. Get an image of that up on screen. It's the most insane thing. So, I mean, up into this point, you can see. We are three empires deep, right? Sparta makes Hercules its ancestor.

Alexander the Great makes Hercules like a kind of a companion piece. He's like, hey, when you think of me, think of Hercules. And then Comedus made him an identity. He was like, I'm literally Hercules. So you have all these different uses. But there was one force that wouldn't want to wear Hercules or claim him. They actually wanted to destroy Hercules forever. So here comes the part where Hercules is supposed to die.

And I don't mean like from like, you know, poisoning or, you know, from like a funeral pyre or anything like that. But like they tried to erase the idea of Hercules. So over the next few centuries, the Roman Empire slowly becomes Christian. But there is one statue of him that survived. One statue of commonest dressed as Hercules in the lion's skin with like the club, that whole thing. It's one bust that somebody hid underground and it survived to this day. You can see an image of it up on the screen here. I mean, you can see just how obsessed with this guy, this guy was,

but trying to prove to everyone that he's actually Hercules. I mean, you can see, obviously, the lion's skin, the club, he's holding, like, the apple. Like, he's leaning into the lore trying to convince all the people of Rome, hey, I'm him. It's pretty crazy. I mean, at this point, we're three empires deep here. Sparta made Hercules like an ancestor. Yes, we are the descendants of Hercules. We are the, you know, the children of Hercules.

Alexander the Great makes him a comparison, kind of like a PR opportunity. He's like, when you think of me, think of Hercules. And then Comedus made him an identity. Comedus was like, no, no, I'm Hercules. So three totally different uses. But there was actually one force that was coming that didn't want to embrace Hercules or claim him or, you know, tried to pretend that they were him. This force tried to erase Hercules for good. So this is the part of story where they tried to kill Hercules, not like in a fire, but like for real, trying to kill the idea of

Hercules. You see, if you know anything about Roman history, over the next few centuries, the Roman Empire slowly becomes Christian. And you know exactly what's supposed to happen to a figure like Hercules when Christianity comes around, right? I mean, Hercules is a pagan hero, a false god. And anytime a, you know, new, all-consuming religion rolls around, they're going to try to sweep Hercules out of the way. But the early Christians ran into a problem with getting rid of him. Hercules was everywhere. I mean, carved into buildings painted on walls, graffiti of Hercules, printed onto objects that people owned, I mean, money. Like, you couldn't just delete Hercules.

He was baked into the culture. Like, he was just imprinted on the mind of the ancient Romans. But it was even worse than that because when they actually looked at him, they were really examining this pagan straw man that they were supposed to despise. But parts of Hercules' story started to feel familiar. I mean, he's a figure who suffered enormously, who, took on these impossible agonizing trials to make the world safer for everyone else. That's what these labors really are, right?

He's going around trying to defeat all these monsters to make the world better. And if you even think of like the stations of the cross, like Jesus Christ suffering for all of humanity. And then Hercules goes down into death itself. He descends into hell and then is resurrected. He climbs back out. And at the very end of his story, his mortal body is distilled. destroyed and then his divine spirit rises up into the heavens. Now, if you're a Christian today,

you're probably like, okay, I could see some common understanding, right? If you're a Christian in the 4th century, you're like, hey, this is pretty close to home. But the thing is, Christians genuinely did not agree about what to do. Some of them actually leaned in. They looked at Hercules, like his endurance and the willingness to suffer and his triumph over death. They saw kind of like a dim kind of non-Christian kind of echo, like a shadow on the wall of a more honest truth that they believed their own faith had brought into the daylight. So to them, Hercules wasn't an enemy. He was almost like kind of a rough sketch, kind of like maybe an exaggerated version of what they believe to be true Christianity, like the story of Christ. But of course, other Christians just

shut it out. To them, Hercules was Exhibit A for everything rotten about. paganism. It was a violent, you know, cruel, womanizing brute. And then, you know, his son born out of wedlock, you know, drowning in his own sins. And this, you know, false religion had the nerve to call him a God. He wasn't a, he wasn't salvation. He was proof of how lost the old world was and all the things that were trying to improve. That's how some Christians saw it. Now, nobody just quietly swapped Hercules out and slid Christ into his place. It was never that clean. What actually happened is way messier. You have two different ideas of what a hero is and what a savior is, and they're kind of going up against each other in the same culture at the same time, refusing to, you know,

assimilate or merge them. And they're also kind of refusing to separate them. So when one world replaces another, like a whole civilization basically changing its mind about what it believes, it doesn't always burn the old images to the ground. Sometimes it kind of negotiates with them. Sometimes it borrows from them. Sometimes it takes the old god's picture off the wall and, you know, they kind of examine it and uses it to kind of help create a new one. And that's kind of where we land with this. The most powerful religion in human history, Christianity for the last 2,000 years, swept across the Roman world and toppled all of its gods one after another. And even it, even Christianity with all the force behind it, couldn't fully erase Hercules, the pagan demigod.

So let's just think about this for a second, right, at the Hercules from the cartoon, who was a demigod who fought a lot of monsters and ultimately finds a happy ending. That is not quite the Hercules that we just uncovered from history today. And honestly, when you strip away everything that the empire is really pile on top of this mythological figure, what's left is really a dark hero, like one of the most tragic stories ever. I mean, in the middle of all the glory, the son of Zeus still suffered. immensely. And that's the part that kind of sticks out to me, right? Like, the monsters are cool, you know, like the fact that, like, his greatest enemy was never the Hydra or the Giants or the

underworld. Like, he was able to overcome all those things. Really, his biggest enemy in the whole story is Hera. It's the gods themselves reaching into this man and breaking him from the inside over and over for really not his fault. Like, Hera is punishing Hercules for the sins of Zeus. I mean, Hercules' strength was that he was super human. And it was never once used to save him from the ones who were supposed to be on his side. That's something almost unbearably human buried into that, right? In the myth, that's obviously not true. But think about like a person doing everything right, carrying more than anyone should have to carry and then still getting punished anyway. There's something about that that I think is relatable in a way, right? Like, you know, as human beings were

born into this life and we try our best and we all have different struggles. And even in spite of trying your best, like you hear stories about people that did everything right and then they get some type of incurable illness and they still die. It's like, dang, they're still punished. Empires are rising and falling trying to own Hercules' story and they're trying to attach themselves for some type of divine authority. And then, of course, Christianity comes around and conquers the world and they try to erase them. And still it doesn't work. Hercules outlasts all of them. And maybe that's, if we're abstract into the real world, that's the real feat of Hercules. Like, the 12 labors are cool. Killing all the monsters is cool. You know, overcoming, like, the

tragedy of his insanity and killing his family. And despite dying as a human and then having another go at life as a demigod, maybe the greatest thing Hercules ever did was refused to die. Not only in the myth, but in real life as well. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history of the story of Hercules. I mean, a fascinating tale, no? Like, even as we were doing some of the research on this, I was like, there is an interesting correlation with Christianity here.

Many people have made the connection and people have tried to say like, oh, Christianity is just barring the Hercules story, yada, yada. I don't think that's true, but there are overlaps. We were like, okay, God has a son, the sun suffers. Like, the infidelity part is crazy. These gods just can't keep it in their pants. I mean, it's nonstop of this, no?

They're gods. But I'm saying if you're a god, you got to know like, hey, my wife is also a goddess. Right? Like, it's one thing to, like, be unfaithful to your human wife. But it's like, first off, how fire are human women that even the gods are like, yo, I'm willing to risk it all to go get some of that? That's the first piece here. Zeus is up in heaven looking down at what we got working on here.

And he's like, oh, okay. I saw the new episode of Euphoria. Seems interesting. God looked down and he was like, oh, I see this musician who will be unnamed, but you're thinking of right now, I'm sure. I mean, who is it for you? Duolipa? Zendaya?

Sure. Why not? That's what Zeus is thinking. He's like, hey, I got a goddess back home, but there's a goddess on earth, a real mortal baddie that I would love to get, you know, to get biblical with. He has the pick of the litter. I guess. But then there's also like a weird consensual part with this that I didn't dive into,

but like, it's a little bit like, hold on, power dynamic. Well, I don't know if this is all. completely above board. But then you're cheating on your wife that's a goddess. You don't think she's going to find out. Like, brother. And then technically, I don't even know what the divorce situation is like with the Olympians. Like, can Harry even be like, hey, Zeus, we're done? He's the king of the gods. He controls the whole universe. Is that even possible? And then you've, we talked about Achilles. Yeah, of course. It's a whole thing. But like, how do you even do a divorce? Like, Hera has to go down to hell, find a lawyer, get them to do the whole thing. Like,

I don't know how you even deal with all this. So I'm just saying there's just a lot of stuff here where I'm like, the Greek gods need to figure it out. Hercules, completely sinless, born out of a trist, a paramour that he had nothing to do with, tries his best, defeats snakes as a baby, and then gets driven crazy by his, like, stepmom, kind of. And Hera strikes him with madness and then he kills his whole family. Hera condemns these poor kids and a poor woman, Megara, to death, because she's mad at Zeus. Harrow, what are you doing? This is just a completely unhinged behavior. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

I guess, dude. And like a goddess scorned. It must be even crazier. So it's just like that part's sad. And then I guess to cleanse like his spirit and purify the world, he goes and kills all these labors, fire. I like that part. I mean, those monsters are pretty intimidating.

You know, the hydra. You cut off a head, two more grow. Pretty insane. And then he does all that. Remarys. And then gets tricked. by the centaur, the centaur gives his new wife some poison. And that's crazy. His new wife is really what kills him because the new wife is like, hey, I need Hercules to be faithful to me.

Like father, like son, Zeus is not faithful. Hercules won't be faithful. So what does his new wife do? Gets the blood-soaked robe to try to make Hercules faithful. And instead of making him faithful, it kills him. Maybe she got what she wanted after all. She's like, hey, you're not going to cheat on me. And oops, you're dead. You can't cheat on me. kind of wild and then he doesn't even really die he just burns off his mortal half goes to olympus and then now is a god so i guess at the end of the day hercules wins and the earth gets better but like he gets screwed over by a lot of women in the story like i don't know what the greek red pill situation is but i kind of get it where it's like harrow screws me over and then he

screws over his first wife short then his second wife screws him over because she's jealous And then, of course, we get put into the Spartans and Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great trying to claim Hercules, kind of fire. But I think that's, I'm cool with that. Well, Comedus too. Well, Comedus is just like, I'm Hercules. Right. That guy's mentally ill.

It's crazy that so many of these emperors were mentally ill. Like, you've read meditations. I mean, it's like, it's so beautiful. It's so thought out. It's like the wisest king ever talking about stoicism. He's calling on Seneca. It's just like a beautifully written book. He has a son.

commonus, and then his son is an absolute idiot, mentally ill, which goes to show, right? You meet a lot of guys that are, like, great dudes that get a bunch of wealth, they become very successful, and then their kids are just, like, addicted to, like, Xanax. That's basically what this is. Usually how it happens. Marcus Aurelius locks it down, does all this great stuff, and then he's like, my son's in charge. He's a great kid.

Turns out his kid is crazy, and his kid's like, I'm actually Hercules. The fact that he went down there as an emperor and did gladiatorial battles, I'm assuming they were rigged. I'm assuming they were rigged and that anyone fighting commonus was like, all right, Hercules Romanus, you can win. And then just like lay down and let him, let him kill him. Also the senator, they sent to go document all of it. He was probably exaggerating. Probably exaggerating. He was like, oh, he killed 10 guys because he knows that Comedus is going to read this. So he's got to like blow it up. The whole thing is just insane. And then the fact that they took him out by just a wrestler in a bathtub,

That is hot. Right? Like, I don't know if that was in, uh, in heated rivals, but it sounds like something that could be, right? Like just sending him in there just to choke him out in the bath. Come on, huh? I wouldn't put it like that, but go ahead. It's insane. And then the fact that he remade this entire sculpture of Nero in his own face.

I mean, get a break, dude. Get a grip, Comedus. You're looking foolish out here. You had the entire Roman empire and you're remembered as an absolute buffoon. Just a shame. I would love to do a, like a news show where I just. cover like Roman history. Like, like, think like Rush Limbaugh, but for like Roman history. Sounds like a lot of work. It'd be fun, dude. I think that'd be cool. Anyway, what do you guys

think? What is your take on Hercules here? I still love the Disney movie. It hasn't changed a thing for me. And I'd love the muses. There's one that I'm quite fond of. I remember as a boy, being like, oh, okay. What do you guys think? Tell me your takes. I would love to know what you think about Hercules. If you're a Greek historian, anything that I missed, anything that I overlooked, please drop a comment, YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them. And great news. If you like religious content, similar to what we talked about today, but like kind of the big four, like the main religions that people are still actively attending services of. I'm talking Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam. You can check that out of religion camp. If you like crazy deep dives on conspiracies and mysteries and unsolved stuff and occult stuff and everything else under the sun, well, great news, Camp Gagnon's for you. That's the main channel where I do interviews to people way smarter than me. And also, we have a secret society. Yes. There's our very own secret gathering of people. And every single month we do, Zoom calls with everyone where we chop it up and just hang. We also do exclusive episodes of this show that never got to the public, and you get every

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