The subject of mythology deals mainly with the
notion of battle, or
good
versus evil. In this struggle many individuals are singled
out for either the
evil
they cause, or
from the good they bring to people. When
you mention heroes
in mythology,
there are two distinct names that a majority of people bring up,
those names are
Achilles and Hercules.
Achilles was born to King Peleus and the
sea-nymph Thetis.
Soon
after
Achilles was born
his mother dipped him in the River Styx, she was told, by
doing this, that the water would make every part of his
body that it touched
invincible. Little did she know that the one part of his heel which he was
held
by would not
touch the water.
When Achilles mother found out about the war in
Troy between the
Greeks and the
Trojans she did not want her son to fight because she knew
that he would
eventually be killed there. The way that
she tried to prevent
him
from going into the
army was to hide him among the women of the court so
that
he could not be
persuaded by his close friend Odysseus to join the Greek
forces. While trying to find Achilles, Odysseus
easily spotted him among the
women, and
persuaded him to join the Greek army.
After many years of battle with the Trojan
forces, Achilles ended up in
a
famed duel with
Trojan hero Hector, over the slaying of Achilles close friend
Patroclus. After killing Hector, Achilles tied his dead
body behind a chariot
and
dragged around
the walls of Troy seven times to show his hatred and anger
towards the
Trojans and their hero. Shortly after
the famed battle, Achilles
was
killed when he
was struck, with a poisonous arrow, in the one small spot on
his
heel which was
vulnerable. The arrow was fired by the
Trojan prince Paris
and
was guided by the
sun god Apollo.
Hercules was the strongest and swiftest man
ever to walk the earth.
As
the son of Zeus
and mortal woman Alcmene, Hercules was destined to be a
hero. This destiny was shown before he was one year
old. Enraged at his
affair with a
mortal woman, Zeus' wife Hera set out on a plot to kill Hercules.
One night after Alcmene put her children to
bed, Hercules' twin brother
Iphicles was awoken
by two huge serpents that were sent by Hera to kill the
son of Zeus. When Hercules awoke he grasped the two snakes
in order to
play with them,
and squeezed the life right out of them.
When Alcmene
awoke
to see what all
the commotion was about, she was amazed at the sight of her
infant son
holding two snakes that he had killed with his bare hands.
When Hercules grew to manhood, he married and
had six sons, and
again fell victim
to Hera's hatred towards him. What Hera
did was send a fit
of
madness upon
Hercules who mistook his wife and children for enemies and
killed them. When his sanity returned he realised what he
had done he shut
himself up from
the world for a long time. After a long time in seclusion
Hercules finally
emerged and went to the Oracle of Delphi to beg for
punishment for
his crime. Hercules was sent to King
Eurystheus and told
that
the king would
assign a punishment to Hercules. The
punishment was to
perform twelve
nearly impossible tasks which are known as the twelve
labours
of Hercules.
The first of these tasks was to kill and skin
the Nemean Lion, whose
skin could not be
punctured by any weapon. His second
labour was to kill
the
Hydra of Lerna
which had numerous heads, one of which was immortal.
Every
time one of the
mortal heads was cut off two or three new heads would grow
in
its place. The third of his tasks was go to the
Ceryneian Hill and capture a
beautiful
bronze-hoofed hind without spilling one drop of its blood. For his
fourth task
Hercules was to capture alive a huge wild boar which often killed
humans and lived
on Mount Erymanthus. The fifth task
assigned to Hercules
was to clean the
filth of many years out of the stables of King Augeias of Elis.
The sixth labour
of the great Greek hero was to get rid of a flock of birds
which
resided in the
Stymphalian Marsh. The birds had long
straight bronze
beaks, sharp
bronze claws, and a taste for human flesh.
For his next labour,
Hercules was to
capture the wild bull of Crete. For the
eighth task Hercules
was to bring King
Eurystheus the mares of the King Diometes. These mares
were fed human
flesh for food. The ninth labour
Hercules was to perform
was
to go to the
tribe of the feared Amazon women and steal the golden girdle of
Hippolyta, the
Amazon queen. Hercules tenth task was to
bring King
Eurystheus the
cattle of Geryon. Geryon was the owner
of the cattle and he
split above the
waist into three bodies which were difficult to defeat.
Hercules'
eleventh task was
to try and find the Garden of Hesperides and fetch the fruit
from the golden
apple tree, this was difficult for him because he had no idea
where the Garden
of Hesperides was. For his twelfth and
final labour
Hercules
was venture the
most feared place on earth, the realm of Hades, and bring
up
the three-headed
watchdog Cerberus.
After spending nearly his entire life
completing the twelve labours,
Hercules decided
to settle down and he married the fair maiden Deianeira.
When Deianeira
was captured by a centaur named Nessus, Hercules shot
the
centaur with a
poisoned arrow. With the centaur's dying
breath he gave
Deianeira a vial
of his poisoned blood telling her she could use it to rekindle
Hercules' love
for her if it ever faded. One day when
she felt that his lovewas
fading, she made
him a robe that was dipped in the blood.
When Hercules
received the gift
from his wife he was overjoyed and put it on, almost
immediately his
skin started to burn and he caught on fire.
Knowing his
death
was near he
called his servants to bring him a funeral pyre which he placed
himself on. As
the pyre burned it was carried up to Mount Olympus where he
became the god of
strength.
Each of these heroes have at least one thing
that separate them from
regular men,
something that is special about them.
For Achilles it is his
invulnerability
and his incredible courage that make him a great Greek hero.
For Hercules it
is his god-like strength, and his luck of being the son of the
king of the
gods. Each of these Greek heroes was
destined to be great at a
very early
age. Just after Achilles was born he was
dipped in the River Styx
by
his mother which
made him invincible. In the case of
Hercules, his heroic
effort was shown
when he was less than one year old when he saved himself
and his brother
from two deadly serpents.
Both of these warriors fought great battles and
suffered tremendous
hardships,
neither of them were perfect, they both had their faults. In the
case of Achilles,
during the Trojan War, in the middle of battle his favourite
slavegirl
was taken away
from him and instead of continuing to battle, he stayed in his
tent and sulked
until his close friend ,Patroclus, was killed.
For Hercules, his
temper was his
weak spot, it could be easily become
deadly if he was told to
do something that
he did not want to do.
One thing that both men possess a great deal of
is courage. Neither of
these great
heroes would back down to any challenge or battle that would
come before them,
no matter how hard the battle may be both of these great
men would die
trying.
Out of all the
many stories told about mythology, the stories of thesetwo
great men will
never be forgotten. Both of these men
conquered hardships,
and turmoil. They overcame all of these ailments to
conquer their task and
fulfil their
goal, qualities which could regard them as two of the greatest
heroes of all
time.
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