The Strongest Hero, and the Labours That Were Penance

Herodotus already noticed a puzzle in Heracles's status that later Greek religion never fully resolved: some Greek communities honoured him with the sacrifices due to a god, others with the more modest offerings due to a mortal hero at a tomb, and Herodotus himself reports visiting Egypt partly to investigate how old the cult was and concluded that Greeks worshipped, in effect, two Heracles figures under one name, an ancient Egyptian god and a later Greek hero who had absorbed his cult. Whatever the truth of that explanation, the ambiguity was real: Heracles is the clearest Greek example of a figure who moved from mortal hero to full Olympian god within his own mythology, granted immortality and marriage to Hebe on Olympus only after a lifetime, and death, spent entirely as a suffering mortal.

His cult was also unusually tied to athletic competition. Ancient tradition credited Heracles with founding or refounding the Olympic Games after completing his labours, and gymnasia across the Greek world commonly kept a shrine or altar to him as patron of physical strength and training. Rome absorbed him early as Hercules, worshipped at the Ara Maxima near the Forum Boarium under a title, Hercules Invictus, the Unconquered, that later Roman emperors invoked for their own military self-image, so that a hero born of penance for a Greek killing became, centuries later, a favoured patron of Roman imperial power.