1Herakles in cult and art is an extremely complex subject. This is evident from the immense literature that has grown around him in the last generation. The complexity is due in part to some fairly simple facts about him, and I want to deal with these briefly since it affects treatment of the rest of the subject. We worry about Herakles’ role as hero or god because in effect he is neither hero nor god. That is to say, he is not a hero in the sense of either the locally-derived heroes such as Perseus or Theseus, nor the semi-historical heroes such as Agamemnon; and he is not a god in the Olympian sense. Greek mythographers liked to make the mythology of their divinities tidy, without irregularities that could not be explained, so they filled gaps and provided footnotes to justify them. What we have to work with is generally the result of centuries of rationalization by poets and priests, much of it even pre-literate. But Herakles remained a problem to deal with in cult since, though a hero, he was ubiquitous and not an obvious recipient for the usual chthonic rites to inhabitants of Hades; while as a god he never attracted all the usual impedimenta of Olympian worship. And in art, although Greek narrative soon found a ready subject in his varied heroic activities, he was never given a truly comfortable position in the Olympian family. Moreover his functions were never as well definable as those of an Olympian, and seem to take second place to the stories and the important religious or historical truths that lay behind them. His name may not be read in Linear B, but in many ways he seems a more essential divinity to Greece than even the Olympians, and just possibly therefore older, which would help account for his ubiquity. If we accept this quite exceptional place that he held it might help explain why it never seems possible to explain him in the usual terms applied to the cult and art of other gods and heroes. I find Burkert’s argument persuasive, that an essential element was his role as master of animals, both removing those that threatened and acquiring those that can be eaten; the major and essential preoccupations of early man.

2We have to deal with possible eastern aspects of some of his stories, so it is worth observing also that, unlike certain other gods and heroes, he is very obviously not a simple translation or alternative version of any oriental or Egyptian deity, but home-grown. Assimilations to foreign deities were readily made in antiquity, from both sides of the fence, but these are incidental and of no more than local significance. At many stages of his history, and certainly from before we can judge him in literature and art, stories from foreign sources worked upon Greek views of his career, but we regard this as a commonplace of Greek cultural history by now. He is a comparable phenomenon to some eastern heroes, but the thought that he was in any way an alter ego of Gilgamesh is dispelled as soon as one reads the Gilgamesh epic, and similarities to Nergal or Melqart are intermittent.1 He is not even a real amalgam of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but they all share a stock of heroic behaviour and anecdote. Some features he seems to share even with the Egyptian hunter Onuris (Inw-hr.t) who chases and tames animals: “he who brought back the Distant One”, while his athletic skills have recently been compared to those of Ba’al.2 There are no animal-fight stories in eastern literature that so closely match in detail any of Herakles’ that any equation is convincing. Similarities are generic; the eastern Bull of Heaven has nothing seriously in common with the Cretan bull; most eastern monsters to be fought by gods or heroes are unreal composites, cosmogonic, and even the lions are more a function of a god, hero or king’s courage than attached to any location or story. I am aware that parallels are often drawn but they generally fade in significance once their context is examined.

3When it comes to borrowings from eastern iconography rather than stories the problems are different.3 There is no reason to believe that eastern stories travelled with their iconography, and it is at any rate very difficult to detect the iconography of popular eastern stories, because eastern artists never devised the formulae and signals of myth narrative to the degree that Greeks did in the Iron Age. The apparently successful attempts to identify figures of eastern epic on early cylinder seals are extremely few and created no lasting iconographic schemata. Many of the problems that arise in attempting to trace Herakles’ eastern complexion derive from the assumption that, for the Greek world, stories and pictures from the east arrived together and were understood together. Heraklean elements have been detected by many on eastern cylinder seals of the 3rd millennium B.C. The time gap, as Burkert says, is frightful, but he goes on to say that there was a “continuity of texts as of iconography”;4 and here I part company, for if there were a continuity of iconography from the 3rd millennium it is not apparent for the relevant motifs, yet the material on which it could be recognised is plentiful. One 3rd-millennium figure with a lionskin, bow and mace (Fig. 1)5 is nothing to argue from as long as there are so many images in mainly Syrian art of the 8th century B.C. that so very clearly influenced the way Greeks created their narrative art and even much of its story content, and do not include such a figure, let alone in any even vaguely Heraklean context.

4When we turn to the narrower problems of Herakles’ relationship to the animal kingdom our record is again highly complicated by the Greek genius at invention and borrowing. What we have come to regard as essential elements in a story are very often, I think, comparatively late adjustments, made in the interests of explaining some local cult or tradition or under the influence of foreign story-telling or art. Perhaps we should regard such additives, even it may be the importance of his lionskin, as simply part of Greek mythographical dressing up of a simpler and basic figure of myth and cult.

5Thus, in his dealing with animals, what is essential to his story is the fact that they are all the natural quarry of the early hunter, many of them threatening to life and property as well as being edible: lion, boar, bull, stag, snake, even perhaps shark (the ketos). I think that any magic elements they may acquire for various reasons are late additions to make them seem more terrible by being unnatural. Which explains why, unlike other heroes, Herakles is still able to deal with them without magical aids. He is truly in this regard the god and role model of the ordinary Greek hunter/farmer everywhere, not just of their ruling or priestly classes, although in the historic period they are quick to claim close association with him. He is the hero of those farmers and shepherds who fear for their flocks and crops in Homer’s similes, not a supernatural terminator.

6All these animals were also the quarry of early hunters of the eastern world. Not all of them, however, are quarries for divinities, and when they are, they represent various cosmic forces. Of this there is little or no hint in narratives about Herakles, although some of these concepts are adopted as Greek religion becomes more mystical in its content and open to borrowing from the non-Greek. It is bad method to argue back from these and try to reconstruct early Herakles from them. The confrontation of hero and wild beast is a commonplace of all early cultures, but they are narrated and depicted in different ways according to the character and social or religious needs of those cultures. Herakles’ exploits in this area were probably far more everyday, until they were enhanced by foreign example.

7My main concern is with depictions. Here the eastern example is more obvious though it can generally be shown to be additive rather than contributing to original form; and sometimes, reinterpreted or misunderstood by the Greeks, eastern art may seem to make narrative contributions to the Herakles stories which become part of the canon.

8Take the lion. There were surely lions in the early Greece that generated stories about local heroes who faced particularly destructive specimens. And even if there were not, its reputation was such as to make it the obvious semi-monster but real adversary for a hero. It is depicted realistically enough in Mycenaean art. That its basic threat was as a ravager of flocks seems certain. This is very much the role of the lion in Homeric simile, and on the earliest probable representation of Herakles facing the lion, on the late 8th-century Kerameikos tetrapod, a figure, either the hero or a shepherd, is seen carrying an animal, in the tableau beside that in which the hero fights the beast. The good-shepherd role is thus explicit.6 But the fight itself follows an eastern convention which had been introduced to Greece in Syrian or Syrian-inspired work of the 8th century where an eastern king-hero fights a lion that rears up before him. The subject had already been taken up in Greek art without any obvious heroic identification, as in Crete.7 The weapon, as in the east, is usually a sword (a spear on the tetrapod). We cannot know whether the sword was simply taken over with the group from the east, or whether the need to kill the lion with his bare hands was already essential for Herakles; probably not. An animal-skin wearing figure on the Cypriot bowl from Idalion repeatedly fights a lion with bare hands, as did Samson, and carries one, but the bowl may be 7th-century and owe more to Egypt,8 while most other lion-fighters in eastern and Egyptian art behave differently, including Bes. Bes could neither inspire the Herakles scenes in this form, nor, because he wears an animal skin, could he be readily equated with Herakles, because at this date Herakles has no animal skin.

9Homeric heroes can wear lionskins when they are off duty; thus Agamemnon, Menelaos (pard) and Diomedes in Iliad 10, 23f, 29f, 177f. Otherwise, as Greek poets observed, the animal skin is the mark of the countryman or brigand,9 which is what Herakles surely was before Zeus was awarded paternity. The question must remain whether the whole idea of the magical lion with an invulnerable skin was simply an invention, perhaps of the late seventh century, to explain what, for other reasons, seemed a proper dress for a country hero, as it had been for a Homeric or eastern king but hardly for any contemporary notable. So too the bow and club, the club at least being also a late acquisition for the hero and an extremely rough equivalent to an eastern metal mace, although there are early Herakles clubs that look slim and metallic.10 In Greece a wooden club was more familiar as a rustic weapon11 and not on the battlefield. In Iliad 7, 138-44 Nestor’s knowledge of a warrior with an iron club belonged to the distant past,12 but the eastern metal mace was known, if not used, in orientalizing Greece.13 The eastern mace and skin becomes the rustic Greek club and skin, and being rustic was less acceptable in the archaic period in parts of Greece, the Peloponnese, where Herakles was claimed as ancestor and made to appear more like an ordinary Homeric hero.14

10It may be important to observe that while the invulnerable lion is a proper subject for art, and its skin may on rare occasions be seen to deflect Herakles’ sword,15 once the skin is worn by Herakles no artist bothers to show it repelling the arrows or swords of Amazons or other anthropoid enemies, and it is soon worn in a way that protects nothing. It starts to be worn like a corslet, becomes a shield, and ends as a fashion accessory. The invulnerable lionskin is a rather literary concept. The eastern monster Anzu,16 which is birdlike, could return arrows to sender, but not, it seems, thanks to an invulnerable feathered body.

11The continuing exposure of Greeks to eastern art confirms the importance of the eastern scheme of the standing lion-fight, including the motif of the hind leg raised to scratch at Herakles’ leg. But in the 6th century Greek artists try other schemes, anthropomorphizing the wrestling match, even while retaining the scratching leg, and going even as far as the throw.17

12The Hydra is a difficult case.18 For one thing its story also involves Iolaos from as early as we know it, on Boeotian fibulae of around or soon after 700 B.C. Most heroes have their trusty companions, whether related or not, and the Herakles-Iolaos pair need have nothing direct to do with Gilgamesh-Enkidu. But Iolaos’ function is to deal with magical functions of the Hydra, burning off the severed stumps, which seem to me uncharacteristic of a natural animal enemy for Herakles. He sometimes does face a single massive and therefore in Greek terms unrealistic snake on 6th-century Attic and Corinthian pottery, which is probably not a deviant hydra since there are no other signals of the Hydra story.19 If the snake is a necessary and archetypal foe, it is made more of a real proposition for a hero by giving it many heads, a very common device everywhere. Pausanias (2, 37, 4) was right to say that the Hydra originally had only one head, but wrong to wait for Pisander in the late seventh century to give it more, though again right to say that the intention was to make it more horrible. Greek artists had got there a century earlier. A 100-headed Hydra or Kerberos is of course a literary monster, not a pictorial one. From the beginning the Greek Hydra is a real snake but with multiple heads which do not emerge from a single thin body but from a plump combination of many bodies. It is not just multi-headed but multi-bodied, though they are fused together; not, therefore much like twin-headed snakes with a single thin body, such as appear in Egypt and on an early Cypriot vase with a Herakles-like hero;20 and only a little more like the device on several Assyrian and Syrian cylinder seals which get into Greece (Lindos and Perachora) by around 700 B.C. On these (as Fig. 2) a bowman faces one or two rearing snakes, at first as adversary, but later they do not face him.21 We cannot set too much store by the use of a bow since this was a more heroic weapon in the east than in Greece.

13I find no convincing parallel for the Hydra or the fight in the east, least of all the creatures of 3rd millennium cylinder seals where the multi-headed creature still has a single body, but sometimes also four animal legs and flames rising from its body (Fig. 3).22 It does indeed have a successor on a relief at Malatya in Syria probably of the later 9th century (Fig. 4),23 but here the two-headed body is disposed horizontally, not coiled, there are still the flames and the weapon is a spear, so there is no iconographic model for Greece. The Storm God killing the dragon Illuyanka is not a story on which the confrontation with a sea-marsh monster (at Lerna) could be based. The Greek Hydra always rears up vertically from its plump, fused body, and seems to me a Greek invention requiring no eastern model. The massed heads are an obvious device to make it more horrific; imagine the terrifying appearance of a nest of rearing snakes, and multi-headed snakes are a commonplace among eastern and Greek monsters, from the mountain-monster on the Hasanlu gold beaker to the three-headed drakon decorating Agamemnon’s belt (Iliad 11, 39).24 If seven heads are an important feature for any of the eastern monsters it may be observed that the earliest Greek hydras have six, and “to the 5th century B.C. it is usually shown with nine, then with seven heads”, and later with various numbers up to ten.25

14There is, however, a possibility that the crab which plays a regular role in the story and appears in the earliest scenes might have been suggested by a lizard or scorpion that appears in the field of various eastern scenes.26 It was translated to a crab for the watery setting. If so, it is a good example of how inventive a Greek can be in creating a story out of misunderstood iconography, which I believe to be a source more common than is generally admitted. On the other hand the idea that the Hydra’s blood was poisonous comes from story, and indeed fact, since snakes are venomous, and not from picture, although Greek artists were able to remind viewers of it by showing Athena with the phial for the blood.27

15Herakles’ other encounter with snakes was as a baby. The story is no earlier than the 5th century, it seems, and the iconography shows no signs of influence from the Egyptian/eastern Bes, or any earlier snake-handlers.

16Recalling the possibility of iconographic inspiration from eastern iconography of quite different content, other possible examples may be cited. The notion of the sun travelling in a bowl around the heavens is unremarkable outside Greece but, for the episode of the Herakles story, could easily have been encouraged by the figures of eastern, and not necessarily sun-deities carried in an open winged disc. In art Herakles could only challenge Helios while he was still at sea level, and in the Archaic period overhead opponents were not accommodated by narrative frieze and panel conventions. For a bowman threatening the sun, the disconnected motifs of eastern art could have given a lead, with a bowman below a sundisc.28 The bizarre notion of Herakles shipping the cattle of the sun in the bowl itself might have been encouraged by the most popular subject of many Syrian bowls decorated with bulls inside. An early gold example of mixed style from Sicily (San Angelo Muxaro) is a good example from a significant area,29 and the type inspired a number of Attic Late Geometric cup interiors.30

17This leads us naturally to the sea. It is perhaps surprising that Herakles dealing with sea monsters, kete, was not admitted as a major labour, although Euripides (Heracl. 400-402) comes close to doing so by listing it with eleven others, most of them canonical (except for Kyknos and Centaurs) and Pindar (Nem. 3, 20-26; Isthm. 4, 73-79) says he cleared the seas of monsters, which seems a very proper task for a culture hero doing similar deeds on land. Possibly the story had little other currency early on, or did not fit as well topographically as did the stories with land animals, or had no individual identity like the other monsters.31 Ketos can mean virtually any big sea creature, real or imaginary. In the Mediterranean sharks would have been the obvious originals, rather than whales. There are even white sharks in the Mediterranean, archetypal killers and swallowers. There is an early one in action on the well-known Late Geometric crater from Ischia.32 The Greeks created their own threatening sea monsters in the 7th century, multi-headed. The ketos had also to meet Herakles rescuing Hesione, just as it did Perseus rescuing Andromeda, but these are other matters and depend on Poseidon. When it helps Thetis against Peleus in Attic black figure it is most like a shark, with its single lion-head, but it is well on the way to that sublime Greek invention compounded of fact and fiction and a very little of the east, the Classical ketos.

18I shall not discuss Herakles with Nereus or Triton. Here the appearance of the sea god as half fish could owe something to the east but is an obvious form. The wrestling motif, not using weapons, may recall the lion but was necessary because of the mutating character of Greek sea deities. When, in Athenian art, the iconography is borrowed for Herakles’ fight with Triton (and Nereus returns to human form) we may suspect local or even political motivation. Eastern sea gods that look like Nereus/Triton are generally benevolent.

19For the iconography of the other animal fights there seem to be no dominant eastern sources rather than generalised scenes of the chase. The scenes of Herakles delivering the Boar to Eurystheus derive from the story not images, though the story of an underground refuge could easily have been borrowed from abroad. However, man-sized pithoi are rather obvious hiding places, down to Al Baba’s Forty Thieves. Bull fights in the east follow no very distinctive pattern, and the one eastern bull-swinger which appeared in early Crete, on the Idaean Cave tympanon, seems not to have anything to do with Herakles rather than a Cretan Zeus.33 With the cattle of the Sun Herakles is just another rustic cattle thief in a heroic setting. The iconography of Herakles and the Birds is borrowed from Egypt. The carnivorous traits of the Birds and Horses are, I am sure, secondary, magic additives, to make them seem more formidable. The horses story may, I suppose, go back to a time in Greece when horses were near-fabulous monsters from the north.

20Of the weapons in the animal encounters the earliest for Herakles are the sword or bow. The sword is obvious heroic equipment; the bow was somewhat more respectable in the east than in Greece, as I have remarked, and in Homer it was famously carried by an easterner, Paris, or by a Greek who bore the name of the first king of Troy, Teukros. The club is nowhere as conspicuous as a weapon outside Greece as it is for Herakles. Except in so far as it recalls metal maces. Its eastern-cum-rustic function has been remarked already. One cannot, of course, divorce consideration of the hero’s relationship with animals from consideration of how he had to deal with them and the appropriate weaponry.

21There are few general conclusions to be drawn. I remain sceptical about any serious borrowing of the basic animal stories from the east, rather than a response common to most areas of antiquity to the threat of and need for animals. Eastern iconography was, however, influential in providing Greece with some formulae for depicting the animal labours, and may well have suggested interesting additives to the stories, some of which came to occupy an important place in the narrative. People are more susceptible to influences received through their eyes than through their ears, and images can often make a point of lasting effect that words cannot.

22Captions

23Fig. 1: From an Akkadian cylinder seal, once Southesk Collection.

24Fig. 2: Faience cylinder seal from Camirus, Rhodes. London, British Museum GR 1861.4-25.5.

25Fig. 3: Akkadian cylinder seal from Tell Asmar (As. 32/738).

26Fig. 4: Relief from Malatya. Ankara Museum.

27Fig. 5: Restored impression of a cylinder seal from Tell Asmar.