Heracles/Hercules as the Hero of a Hopeful Culture in Ancient Poetry and Contemporary Literature and Media for Children and Young Adults

Since Greek and Roman Antiquity Hercules has staying power as the embodiment of heroism constituted by qualities like superhuman power, excessive emotionality, immense suffering and triumphant apotheosis. This ambivalence has become characteristic of the heroic temper established within Greek literature above all in the epic cycle and in Attic tragedy. Apart from the manifold personality of the hero, a decisive element of hope lies in his stunning achievements as cultural hero eliminating primordial monsters and dangers threatening civilization. This chapter first follows the traces of Hercules’ “mythopoesis” which made him a cultural icon in Greek and Roman Antiquity. It can be demonstrated that this process already then was multimedia, since literary evidence, e.g.. from Sophocles’ or Euripides’ tragedies is to be situated in a dialogue with visual art and other forms of self-representation of the polis. The postmodernistic reception of this multimedia Heracles myth(s) in Ovid’s Metamorphoses builds the bridge to examples of hopeful images of the ambivalent cultural hero in contemporary media for children and young adults. From this heuristic perspective we can follow the traces from the fallen hero of civilization in Attic tragedy to the messianic Hercules in contemporary blockbusters. Heracles/Hercules emerging particularly as Hero of Hope in ancient tragedy and poetry had a recent and very impressive revival in children’s literature, namely in Athena the Wise by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams within the The Goddess Girls series.