Heracles was the greatest of the Greek heroes, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae (Ἡρακλεῖδαι), and a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modernWest, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian, often identified themselves. – Wikipedia
The Three Sins of Heracles
Excerpt from Georges Dumézil
Heracles is the Greek reflex of a far more ancient Indo-European mythic figure, arques Dumézil-a warrior figure who commits three sins, violating each stratum of tripartite Indo-European society. Dumézil here follows the account of Heracles’ three sins preserved in the work of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century B.. Heracles’ twelve-year servitude to Eurystheus was only the first of three “penalties” the hero would suffer, each the consequence of his sin, each bound up with mental or physical ailment. Coqnate heroic figures among other Indo-European peoples to whom Dumézil makes reference in this selection are Indra, warrior deity par excellence of India, and Starcatherus, the Danish avatar of a well-known Scandinavian hero (Old Norse Starkar), whose tale is preserved in the Gesta Danorum of the twelfth/thirteenth-century cleric Saxo Gram-
maticus. (RDW)
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