THE SCENE: The Sicilian historian Diodorus uses some pretty solid logic to reason out some of the chronology of the heroes of legendary times. In this passage, he reasons that Heracles must have been a stone-age hero, rather than being the Trojan war era figure that he was popularly believed to be.
THE TEXT: In general, they say, the Greeks appropriate to themselves the most renowned of both Egyptian heroes and gods. Heracles, for instance, was by birth an Egyptian, who by virtue of his manly vigour visited a large part of the inhabited world and set up his pillar in Libya; and their proofs of this assertion they endeavor to draw from the Greeks themselves. For inasmuch as it is generally accepted that Heracles fought on the side of the Olympian gods in their war against the Giants, they say that it in no way accords with the age of the earth for the Giants to have been born in the period when, as the Greeks say, Heracles lived, which was a generation before the Trojan War, but rather at the time, as their own account gives it, when mankind first appeared on the earth; for from the latter time to the present the Egyptians reckon more than ten thousand years, but from the Trojan War less than twelve hundred. Likewise, both the club and the lion’s skin are appropriate to their ancient Heracles, because in those days arms had not yet been invented, and men defended themselves against their enemies with clubs of wood and used the hides of animals for defensive armour.
The account of the Egyptians agrees also with the tradition which has been handed down among the Greeks since very early times, to the effect that Heracles cleared the earth of wild beasts, a story which is in no way suitable for a man who lived in approximately the period of the Trojan War, when most parts of the inhabited world had already been reclaimed from their wild state by agriculture and cities and the multitudes of men settled everywhere over the land. Accordingly this reclamation of the land suits better a man who lived in early times, when men were still held in subjection by the vast numbers of wild beasts.
– Bibliotheca Historica, Diodorus Siculus, 1st Century BC
[Image Credit: Ercole Farnese by Glykon]
