(Gk.; Lat. Hercules).
Legendary hero of Greek mythology, born the mortal son of Zeus and Alcmēnē. Renowned for his preternatural strength and his 12 labours in the service of Eurystheus, he was later granted immortality. Heracles is usually depicted as a hero, with courage equal to his strength, but his temperament and various appetites eventually led to his portrayal as a tragic figure, a bully or even a buffoon (e.g. Sophocles, Trachiniae; Aristophanes, Frogs).
In literary sources Heracles is rarely associated with music. Apollodorus (ii.4.9) and Diodorus Siculus (iii.67.2) record the tale of the young hero as the student of Linus, son of Apollo and master of the lyre. Enraged by the chastisement of Linus, Heracles used his lyre as a weapon and murdered his teacher. Elsewhere (e.g. Euripides, Alcestis, 756–60) his musical performances serve only to display his ineptitude.
From about 530 to 480 bce Heracles appeared as a musician on Athenian vases. Typical of these depictions is Heracles mounting a platform, preparing to play a kithara or lyre. In one scene he is tuning the kithara; in another Athena also mounts the platform while playing the pipes. Sometimes the performance is less formal, with Heracles seated and playing the barbitos. A consistent feature of these scenes is the presence of Athena. Boardman has argued that the association of Athena, Heracles and musical performance is an example of the political imagery employed by the tyrant Pisistratus and his sons in late 6th-century Athens, perhaps alluding to the introduction of Homeric recital into the celebration of the Panathenaea. On other vases from approximately the same period Heracles is depicted playing the lyre or pipes, often in a procession and accompanied by Dionysus and satyrs. Such scenes, associating Heracles with drunken revelry, are common throughout antiquity.
In the Hellenistic and Roman periods Heracles occasionally appears in the company of the Muses. In 187 bce M. Fulvius Nobilior built the Temple of Hercules of the Muses (Herculis Musarum Aedes) in Rome. The temple contained statues of the nine Muses and one of Heracles, perhaps the model for the playing Heracles found on the coins of Q. Pomponius Musa dating to 66 bce and inscribed ‘Hercules Musarum’. Ancient sources report that Fulvius, when in Greece, learnt about a cult of Heracles Musagētēs (‘leader of the Muses’). Plutarch offers a different explanation that links the association of Heracles and the Muses to Rome: he wrote that Heracles taught the art of writing to Evander, the legendary founder of a settlement on the Palantine Hill (Quaestiones Romanae, lix).
L.R. Farnell: Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (Oxford, 1921/R)
G.K. Galinsky: The Herakles Theme (Oxford, 1972)
K. Schauenburg: ‘Hercules musikos’, Jb der deutschen archäologischen Instituts, xciv (1979), 49–76
J.P. Uhlenbrock, ed.: Herakles: Passage of the Hero through 1000 Years of Classical Art (New Rochelle, NY,1986)
J. Boardman: ‘Herakles’, Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (Zürich, 1988), iv/1, 728–838; iv/2, 444–559
L. Richardson: ‘Hercules Musarum, Aedes’, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, 1992), 187
MICHAEL W. LUNDELL