Heracles

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.

Heracles is the rare mortal hero the Greeks believed had crossed fully into divinity. His death comes through the poisoned robe of the centaur Nessus, which burns his flesh unbearably; unable to die, he builds his own funeral pyre on Mount Oeta and is consumed, and from the fire is taken up to Olympus, reconciled at last with Hera and made a god. This double status made him unique in Greek cult: he received worship both as a hero, at tombs and with chthonic rites, and as an Olympian god, with the sacrifices due a deity. He was the patron of gymnasia and of the ephebes, an emblem of endurance and civilizing labour, the hero who clears the world of monsters, and the Romans, who called him Hercules, made him a favourite of emperors seeking to advertise their own toils on the state's behalf. Few figures better show the Greek sense that the boundary between the human and the divine could, through suffering and achievement, be crossed.