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Documentary, History Channel - Clash of the Gods - S01E02 Hercules
#Hercules
#Hercules
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00:00He is the greatest action hero in mythology.
00:06His name is Hercules.
00:10A man tormented by a horrifying sin.
00:14Driven to take on twelve impossible challenges in a quest for redemption.
00:21To us, it is myth. But to the ancients, it was reality.
00:26A legend based on an actual warrior.
00:29Filled with hidden codes about the real world.
00:33This is the truth behind the myth of Hercules.
00:51In a strange and unfamiliar world, something stirs just below the waterline.
00:59It breaks the surface.
01:03A giant serpent.
01:05With not one, but nine dragon-like heads.
01:10It spews poisonous vapors.
01:14And then eats its victims alive.
01:22But today, the monster has met its match.
01:28The strongest hero who ever lived.
01:31Mythology's ideal man.
01:33Hercules.
01:37He is the most popular hero in history.
01:42A half-god, half-mortal.
01:44With superhuman strength.
01:46Who is destined to rid the Greek world of evil.
01:50But that's only the beginning of his story.
01:52Hercules was something special and at the same time, extremely ordinary.
01:58He was a man of the people.
02:00He was a little bit like Babe Ruth in American mythology.
02:04He was a womanizer.
02:06He was a heavy drinker.
02:07And he was an extraordinary athlete.
02:09He was a little bit like a god.
02:12But he was very definitely a human being.
02:14Today, a lot of people think heroes have superhuman strength.
02:20They get the girl.
02:21They have superhuman powers.
02:23Can fly through the air.
02:24It's a different conception in the Greek world.
02:26A hero is someone who has superhuman strength, but someone that has to suffer.
02:32And Hercules is the consummate hero in Greek society.
02:37He's destined to suffer more than anyone else.
02:39In his myth, Hercules confronts a legion of terrifying enemies.
02:48And endures suffering on a scale no human has ever known.
02:59His story begins with Zeus.
03:01The sex-crazed king of the gods having an illicit affair.
03:05Hercules is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Alcmene.
03:12Classical mythology is loaded with stories of gods who impregnate mortal women
03:17and give birth to gods or demigods.
03:20So this demigod idea means that this person has some features that are very godly,
03:28some divine powers, but at the same time he is mortal.
03:31He can die.
03:32I suspect that the Greeks invented this idea because they wanted to reach the gods as much as possible.
03:39To create images of themselves that are closer and closer to the gods.
03:45Hercules would grow up to be Greece's model hero.
03:49But he has one powerful enemy who wants to see him destroyed.
03:54Zeus's wife, the goddess Hera.
03:57She's the queen of the goddesses.
04:01And she has wonderful beauty.
04:04She's supremely intelligent.
04:05She's mighty.
04:06But she's also exceedingly jealous because Zeus is always running after other women.
04:11Zeus fathers countless children with a variety of mortal women.
04:15And Hera hates them all.
04:19But she decides it is Hercules who must pay the ultimate price for the sins committed by Zeus.
04:25Hera's hatred of Hercules is actually very, very irrational.
04:30It's almost as if she knew that he was going to challenge her favor in heaven in some way.
04:33She knew there was something about Hercules that was different than the other children.
04:38And maybe she felt threatened by this.
04:40But every day of his life, he seemed to have been paying for this hatred of hers.
04:44One night, while Hercules is still a baby, Hera sends two poisonous snakes into his nursery.
05:02He's got one snake in each hand and he's squeezing them to death.
05:05A little tiny infant squeezing to death these two giant serpents.
05:09Everyone knew at that point that there was something a little bit different about Hercules.
05:12This is one of the reasons why Hera will hate him, because she cannot kill him.
05:18She can make his life wretched, but she cannot kill him because destiny says he will become immortal.
05:25And even a god has to obey destiny.
05:29But Hera is just getting started.
05:32Her vendetta against Hercules will determine the course of his life.
05:37From the cradle to the grave.
05:39So goes the myth.
05:42But what is the link to reality?
05:44February 2004.
05:46In a Greek town called Thebes, archaeologists discover stunning evidence that sheds new light on the story of Hercules' birth.
06:03They uncover a buried temple beneath an ordinary residential lot.
06:10In its center are the remains of an altar.
06:14Around the altar are hundreds of ceramic vases and small statues.
06:19They all portray one thing.
06:22Hercules.
06:23After the discovery, researchers linked the findings to a 2,500-year-old text that describes a mysterious house of Hercules at Thebes, just outside the gates of the ancient city.
06:40The description and the site match perfectly.
06:43But there's more.
06:46The ancient text says that this shrine was erected on the precise spot of Hercules' birth.
06:54Could the hero have been real?
06:57The hunt for clues leads back to the myth.
07:00As the story continues, Hercules comes of age, a man-god straddling two worlds, the human and the supernatural.
07:14He is too strong to be a human.
07:18He's sort of like a god trapped in a human's body.
07:21Often, he accidentally does bad things to people around him, like he accidentally kills people, he accidentally damages property.
07:28He can't really control himself.
07:30This superhuman strength makes it impossible for Hercules to blend into Greek society.
07:35He was unable to form emotional contacts with anyone.
07:40In fact, there seems to have been a kind of schizophrenic quality to his makeup.
07:46He was half human and half divine.
07:49And yet he had a father who would not protect him from the terrible trials and tribulations that Hera inflicted upon him.
07:58He was left alone, suspended between heaven and earth, and having nowhere to go.
08:10Desperate for some semblance of normalcy, Hercules marries a beautiful princess who bears him two sons.
08:20But his domestic bliss is short-lived.
08:24His nemesis Hera soon returns, determined to make sure he never knows happiness.
08:33This time, she'll transform him from family man to murderer by driving him mad.
08:42She sends madness to him as he sleeps.
08:46And he, in his madness, believes that his wife and his children are his enemies.
08:52In the dead of night, Hercules commits an unspeakable horror.
09:08When Hercules wakes up from this madness, from this ravenous madness...
09:15He finds himself covered in the blood of his own family.
09:23He doesn't really even know that he's the one that did it.
09:27But nevertheless, he has the blood stains on him.
09:30It is the physical mark of guilt.
09:35And this is the guilt he must bear.
09:38And it's from this horrible incident that the rest of Hercules' story unfolds.
09:43The strongest man on earth has slaughtered his entire family.
09:55When his blind rage subsides, it is replaced with intense remorse.
10:01A horrible anguish that will plague him forever.
10:05The ancient Greeks called this a blood guilt.
10:09In antiquity, a blood guilt was understood to be a kind of curse that clung to you from the blood of the person whose murder you were involved in.
10:17This is a little bit like a kind of Christian penance, where you do certain good acts on the earth in order to make up for bad things that you might have done.
10:25From here on, he's going to have to try to get rid of this stain of blood guilt from this horrible act.
10:33This is the very pivot of Hercules' whole life.
10:36To purify his soul, Hercules will have to survive the most excruciating series of challenges ever confronted by man or the gods.
10:45It is a journey that will take him across the Greek world and beyond and leave a trail of real evidence that sheds new light on the truth behind the myth.
10:56Mythology superhero, Hercules, has just butchered his wife and children under a spell cast by his stepmother, Hera.
11:11Now, the strongest man on earth must atone for his crime.
11:18But he is lost, disoriented.
11:22For guidance, he seeks out ancient Greece's greatest prophetess.
11:28Hercules' crime is so great that only one, the most powerful religious authority of his time, could help him solve it, and that's the Oracle of Delphi.
11:36Delphi, its sacred temple, plays a key part in many Greek myths.
11:43But it's not just a mythical place.
11:46Ruins of the Oracle temple can still be found in the mountains of central Greece.
11:562,500 years ago, a priestess stood here in a trance-like state as mysterious vapors rose up around her.
12:03She spoke in riddles and supposedly channeled the word of the gods.
12:09It was a direct phone line up to heaven to ask the answer to anything you wanted.
12:14A new discovery may reveal where the Oracle's powers originated.
12:20A recent geological survey has shown that the Delphi temple sits precisely on the intersection of two fault lines.
12:28This may explain the magical vapors that surrounded the prophetess.
12:35The new evidence suggests that movements of the earth around these faults might actually have released ethylene gas that would have leaked through these cracks in the earth.
12:45People who breathe a lot of ethylene will fall into a trance that sounds almost exactly like what the Oracle of Delphi experienced.
12:56So basically, the Oracle of Delphi was a stoner that everyone in ancient Greek society trusted a lot.
13:05At Delphi, the Oracle tells Hercules that only a terrible penance can absolve him of his crimes.
13:15To receive that penance, he must go to his cousin and arch-rival, King Eurystheus.
13:21But it's a trick.
13:26Hera is using the Oracle and King Eurystheus to crush Hercules.
13:31Hera will pursue him with everything she has.
13:36Hera will be his implacable enemy.
13:40And the dangers, the enemies she will put in his way will not cease.
13:46Eurystheus assigns Hercules 12 challenges, all designed by Hera.
13:52They will forever be known as the labors of Hercules.
13:57In them, the hero is challenged to rid the Greek world of its greatest evils.
14:04To confront its most savage beasts, forces of nature, evil tyrants and monsters.
14:10No man could be expected to survive even one of these challenges.
14:16But Hercules must overcome 12.
14:20These labors serve a function.
14:24Their primary function is to remove the pollution from having killed his family.
14:31He will need to purify himself, to purify his hands, to purify his soul later on,
14:36of the grievous crime he has committed.
14:40It seems a little unfair to us because the acts that he's doing penance for weren't really his fault.
14:47He was under the influence of the madness sent to him by his stepmother Hera.
14:52In the Greek mind, it didn't really matter that it wasn't his fault.
14:56He still needed to perform these acts to wash away the stain of these violent acts that he committed.
15:03The quest for redemption begins with the first labor.
15:11To kill a savage beast that symbolizes mankind's animal instincts.
15:16The Lion of Nemia.
15:22The problem for Hercules is even though he's a magnificent archer,
15:26the lion's skin is impervious to his arrows.
15:28So it's only through brute strength that he manages to overcome the lion.
15:53And when he does, he skins the lion and he adopts it as his own armor that he begins wearing.
16:02So from then on, Hercules is always depicted wearing the lion's skin, which protects him from harm.
16:07King Eurystheus is stunned.
16:11He thought Hercules' first labor would be his last.
16:15Now he lays out a series of even more monstrous challenges, sure to put an end to the hero.
16:22A theme becomes evident in these early labors.
16:26It's man versus nature.
16:30The ancient Greeks viewed nature as a scary place.
16:34They wanted to live in harmony with it.
16:36But nature was a bitch that if you didn't watch would kill you.
16:40And that was their view.
16:41They did not have a romantic view of nature.
16:43There are a few great heroes, Hercules is prominent among them, who can tame nature,
16:47who can actually bring it under control.
16:48And this is the mark of a truly great hero to bring this unstoppable force to heed.
16:54The second labor challenges Hercules to kill another monstrous freak of nature.
17:00The dreaded nine-headed Hydra.
17:03A poison-spitting serpent that devours men in one bite.
17:09Hercules draws his sword and attacks.
17:12He slices through one of the Hydra's necks.
17:19Then another.
17:22Decapitating the monster one head at a time.
17:27But as soon as each head is cut off, two more grow in its place.
17:32This represents the human lust for pleasure, which the Greeks believed to be unkillable.
17:39The more you attack it, the more you cut its heads off, the more heads you have to deal with.
17:47Hercules needs a new strategy.
17:50Against this enemy, his success hinges on more than muscle.
17:55Hercules grabs a torch and scorches the skin of the beast.
17:59He comes up with the idea of burning off the stumps to cauterize the neck so that a head can't grow back in there.
18:10With a final thrust,
18:13Hercules severs the last head from the body.
18:17It is a stunning triumph of man over monster.
18:22So after he's slain the Hydra, Hercules dips his arrows into the blood of the Hydra, and from then on he has poison arrows.
18:34Our word toxic, meaning poisonous, comes from the Greek word toxon, which is a bow that you fire arrows with.
18:41And so toxicos in Greek simply means relating to the bow.
18:47So it's a strange word in English because it preserves the legend of Hercules inside the word.
18:52Two labors conquered.
18:54Like a fighter in training, Hercules is honing the skills necessary to survive in a hostile world.
19:01Physical strength, mental toughness, and relentless endurance.
19:06In these labors, Hercules is overcoming evil, and he comes as an avenger and a bringer of justice.
19:15In his next two labors, Hercules conquers another pair of nature's most formidable beasts.
19:22The golden stag of Artemis, an animal so fast it could outrun an arrow in flight.
19:28And a vicious, man-eating boar, a monster Hercules manages to capture alive.
19:41Eurystheus, who set him these tasks, never expected any of them to be accomplished.
19:45So we start to see Hercules as the prototypical superhuman.
19:50He seems unstoppable at this point.
19:53To break the hero's momentum, King Eurystheus tries changing tactics.
19:59He introduces a different kind of natural obstacle.
20:05Raw sewage.
20:08For his fifth labor, Hercules must take on a dirty job that symbolizes the foul side of human nature.
20:16He must clean out a massive complex of manure-filled stables.
20:20Now, this labor is different from the others because it involves menial labor in a way that Hercules hadn't really submitted to before.
20:30In the earlier labors, he has to slay beasts that are ravaging the countryside, and he's trying to protect human beings or to promote civilization.
20:37But in this one, it's simply a matter of cleaning dung out of a stable that hasn't been cleaned in many years.
20:42And he has one day to accomplish the task.
20:50Hercules notices that these repulsive stables lie between two powerful rivers.
20:55And he gets an idea.
20:56What he does is, using his great strength, he diverts two different rivers and have them flood into the stables and flush everything out.
21:08One labor at a time, Hercules is making amends for killing his family.
21:19So far, he has proven himself greater than any obstacle that Hera and her puppet king Eurystheus have dreamed up.
21:26And with each struggle, he is only getting stronger.
21:35To the ancient Greeks, his success in the face of such overwhelming odds was an inspiring story.
21:41But could it have been more than just a story?
21:44Intriguing historical clues suggest Hercules was not a myth, but a real hero.
21:57Hercules is mythology's ultimate superhero.
22:01The combination of strength and suffering in the same character made him relatable to the people of the ancient world.
22:07They saw in Hercules a hero to be both pitied and admired.
22:13Someone whose tragic story was connected to their own reality.
22:17Myths reflect historical events that have long since been passed.
22:22So they are a kind of code and an ancient history that gets passed down from generation to generation.
22:28The stories of Hercules come together from people getting together in different cultures
22:33and sharing their own tales of local heroes that they know who overcome great difficulties.
22:39And as they share these stories, they start to realize,
22:42wait a minute, our strong man seems to be a little bit like your strong man.
22:46And then the traditions all weave together.
22:48In ancient Greece, Hercules was the model for the ideal man.
22:53But did he actually exist?
22:56It might be possible that behind each of these great Greek heroes there is some single historical figure.
23:02But history has frustrated all of our attempts to find and locate the actual persons.
23:11Some versions of the Hercules myth say his family came from a Greek settlement called Tirins.
23:17And ancient sources suggest it was once home to a real warrior who was renowned for his great strength
23:24and even thought to have a direct connection to the gods.
23:27This warrior, whose name is lost to history, served the ruler of a powerful kingdom called Mycenae.
23:37In the myth, Hercules also serves the king of Mycenae, his cousin Eurystheus, who assigns him the 12 labors.
23:46Is this coincidence? Or something more?
23:48Other clues about the man behind the myth can be found at one of Greece's most legendary sites.
23:58This is Olympia.
24:02In the year 776 BC, the first Olympic Games were held here.
24:13There were hundreds of games around the Greek world, but the Olympics were the finest and the most prestigious.
24:19If you won at the Olympic Games, it was being elevated in a way amongst men.
24:24It was as close as a mortal could get to the gods.
24:30There are striking parallels between the challenges Hercules faced in his labors and those of the Games.
24:37Both were feats of strength and endurance that only the most disciplined athlete could achieve.
24:43But the connection between Hercules and the Olympics may run deeper.
24:47Hercules reportedly founded the Olympic Games after one of his labors.
24:54So the labors are directly connected with the original foundation of the Games.
24:59These are the remains of the stadium at Olympia.
25:03Its track measures 600 feet.
25:06According to the ancient Greeks, that's 600 of Hercules' own feet.
25:10According to legend, Hercules himself paced out the stadion, which was 600 little steps.
25:15And it's 192.27 meters.
25:18So historians have deduced that Hercules' feet were actually 12.6 inches long.
25:24That's a size 13 shoe.
25:27More traces of Hercules can also be seen in the main temple here.
25:31Reliefs salvaged from the exterior walls depict his 12 labors.
25:37He was revered by all athletes and one measured oneself up against Hercules.
25:42Well, it's very important to the Greeks never to surrender.
25:46So many athletes died rather than give up.
25:54In the myth, it is the same perseverance that sustains Hercules.
25:59Hercules' message is always one of keep going and you'll eventually succeed.
26:03No matter how tough things seem, success is possible.
26:08In his sixth labor, Hercules must face a flock of ferocious man-eating birds who symbolize mankind's unreachable goals.
26:17He drives them off with his poisonous arrows and reaches an important milestone, the halfway mark in his 12 labors.
26:24But six more challenges still remain, and each one will only get tougher.
26:31His stepmother, Hera, will make sure of it.
26:35As the labors go on, they become more and more extreme.
26:39And they make him go to further and further and more mystical places.
26:43The next three labors will take Hercules beyond Greece for the first time and pit him against powerful foreign enemies.
26:52Stories like these resonated with the ancient Greeks in an age when they were anxious to expand their empire.
26:59The Greeks, pressed by land hunger, are beginning to colonize as far out as the south of France.
27:09And they're sending colonies throughout the Mediterranean.
27:14And reports are coming back about various monsters or various things.
27:19For his seventh labor, Hercules travels to the island nation of Crete to find and capture the prized bull of the king, Minus.
27:30The bull is a code for Crete's dominance over mainland Greece, at the time when the myth was created.
27:38In the late Bronze Age, Crete really was the most important power in that part of the Mediterranean.
27:45The places that, in the classical period, like Athens and Sparta, which would have a lot of importance and would really become the most significant powers, really weren't anything very important at all.
28:00In fact, they had to pay tribute to Crete because it was the major power in the region.
28:06In the myth, Hercules is about to change that.
28:11He tracks down King Minus's bull, wrestles it into submission, and sails it back home.
28:26No longer will Greece answer to Crete.
28:30Seven labors down.
28:32With his conquest of the Cretan bull, Hercules has won his war against nature.
28:41Now it will be man versus man.
28:44In the earlier labors, Hercules was performing services that benefited mankind, ridding them of pests and beasts and these other various things.
28:52But at this point, we start to see a darker side of Hercules, and it maybe foreshadows things to come.
29:00In his next set of labors, Hercules confronts two foreign rulers who pose a threat to Greece.
29:07First, he targets Diomedes, the tyrannical king of the Stonia.
29:12Diomedes has trained his horses to eat the flesh of his enemies.
29:19Hercules makes him their next meal.
29:24This labors sent a powerful message to the ancient Greeks that the evil you create will ultimately destroy you.
29:33This is the first labor where Hercules actually kills someone.
29:38This is the pivotal moment for the first time that he's actually drawn human blood.
29:46The killing spree continues in his next labor, when Hercules slays the Amazons, a ferocious tribe of female warriors, after stealing the belt of their leader, Hippolyta.
29:57With that, Hercules has completed nine of his twelve labors.
30:03His bravery, strength and stamina have carried him through the most impossible series of tasks ever attempted.
30:13But the final battles will prove to be the hardest.
30:16They will take Hercules beyond the outer limits of the known world,
30:20through territory no Greek has ever seen,
30:25in search of a realm with intriguing parallels to the Biblical Garden of Eden.
30:39The mythical hero Hercules has endured nine daunting labors in a quest to atone for the crime of killing his family.
30:46Every challenge represents a tougher test of his strength, stamina and resolve.
30:53In his labors there is kind of a crescendo of difficulty.
30:57That Hercules is able to overcome even harder and harder labors shows him to be incredibly powerful in a way that no other ancient hero is able to do.
31:06But as the challenges go on, it becomes clear that no amount of physical pain can ease his mental anguish.
31:15Hercules is a prisoner of his own guilt.
31:19No matter how many labors he performed, no matter how much heroism he exhibited,
31:25no matter how extraordinary his physical strengths were,
31:30inside of him there was no peace, there was no satisfaction.
31:34Three more tests remain for Hercules.
31:37They will take him to the edge of the earth and into an abyss of death.
31:44And what happens is that Hercules continually has to go further and further afield from Greece.
31:51The further you go out into the unknown, you actually cross the plane between mortal world and immortal world.
31:58In his tenth labor, Hercules sets out to capture the cattle of the Gyrion.
32:04A vicious monster with three sets of legs, three heads and a lethal pedigree.
32:10He's actually the grandson of Medusa, so he too is a kind of semi-monsterous figure.
32:18And he's not going to let these cattle go without a fight.
32:21But destroying the Gyrion is only half of the challenge.
32:27The other half is getting there.
32:33To reach the Gyrion, Hercules must venture beyond the Mediterranean Sea, into the Atlantic Ocean.
32:40But one massive obstacle stands in his way.
32:45A mountain range that joins Europe and Africa into one continent and seals off the sea from the ocean.
32:53Hercules decides not to go around the mountain.
32:57He goes through it.
32:58He splits the mountain in two with one blow from his sword.
33:08This part of the myth was created to explain how the Atlantic and Mediterranean were joined.
33:15The cliffs on each side are forever linked to Hercules.
33:20The Straits of Gibraltar are known to the ancient Greeks as the Pillars of Hercules.
33:25And no one could go beyond there. No one knew what was beyond there.
33:29To the people of the ancient world, the Pillars of Hercules were not just a gateway into an unexplored ocean.
33:38They were a portal between reality and myth.
33:42For a Greek to talk about somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules is kind of like you and I talking about somewhere over the rainbow.
33:47And that Hercules has actually gone there and come back would have only added to his reputation.
33:55All ancient sailors bound for the Atlantic had to sail between the Pillars of Hercules.
34:02And one recent discovery suggests there were many who dropped anchor here to pay respects to the hero himself.
34:09In a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar, archaeologists have turned up hundreds of artifacts, believed to be linked to Hercules.
34:17So we took samples and sent them away for radiocarbon dating, and they're all perfect matches within each other.
34:27And they all seem to point to a period of about 400 years, from about 800 BC to about 400 BC.
34:32These were objects that were being placed very specifically for a particular reason.
34:35And we're quite confident that what we have here is a big shrine.
34:42Experts believe Greek sailors came to the shrine to pray for their lives as they prepared to follow Hercules into the unknown.
34:50They did not know what, if anything, lay beyond the Pillars.
34:54In the myth, Hercules faces the same uncertainty as he crosses this threshold into the unknown.
35:11Beyond the Pillars, the three-headed Jirion and his cattle await.
35:15The monster comes out fighting, hurling huge boulders down the mountain at Hercules.
35:24But Hercules has a secret weapon.
35:27Arrows dipped in the poisonous venom of an earlier conquest, the Hydra.
35:36He takes aim and fires.
35:38The Jirion falls dead.
35:41And Hercules claims his cattle.
35:49Ten labors down.
35:54Next, Hercules must go to the edge of the world
35:58to steal golden apples from a garden guarded by a dragon with a hundred heads.
36:02Apples, a garden, and a dangerous serpent.
36:09This labor parallels the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
36:14There are early Christians who made a comparison between the apple of the Hesperides
36:20and the tree of life in the garden.
36:23That's one of those things dealing with ancient material,
36:26is that these folks talk to each other.
36:28And they knew each other's stories.
36:30In the Hercules story, there's a deadly twist.
36:35The apples he seeks belong to his enemy, the goddess Hera.
36:40Not only do these apples belong to Hera, but they are signs of her sacred marriage to Zeus.
36:48Apples and marriage are very commonly combined in Greek mythology.
36:53Hercules wanders for years in search of Hera's apples, with no luck.
37:03Finally, he reaches the end of the world and meets a god with a heavy burden to bear.
37:10Atlas.
37:11Atlas was one of the titans, and his job is that he needs to carry on his shoulders the weight of the world.
37:22Literally, he bears the world on his shoulders.
37:26This modern-day phrase, to carry the world on your shoulders, is derived directly from the myth of Atlas.
37:33Hercules is exhausted and lost, but Atlas knows where the golden apples are.
37:42So, Hercules volunteers to hold the world while he retrieves them.
37:51Atlas eventually returns with the apples, but there's a catch.
37:55He tells Hercules that he doesn't want to take the Earth and sky back.
38:02Atlas, of course, says,
38:05Thanks very much, I've been trying to get rid of that for a long time, and is about to walk away.
38:10Hercules says, Oh, you know, you're right, I'm really sorry.
38:14Do you mind, could you just take it back for just a second?
38:17I'm going to pad my shoulders with my lion skin.
38:19Atlas takes the world back, and Hercules walks away.
38:26Hercules has avenged Hera by stealing her precious apples.
38:32Now he is one challenge away from winning his freedom.
38:37And it will send him to a place no mortal has returned from alive.
38:42The land of the dead.
38:45Hades.
38:49Hercules has confronted 11 of the toughest challenges ever attempted by man or the gods.
38:59He's fought wild beasts.
39:02Evil kings.
39:04Hideous monsters.
39:06And crossed over to an unknown world.
39:09In a relentless quest to make amends for killing his family.
39:12Hercules spends his life toiling, trying to get rid of a guilt that he doesn't really feel like he has earned.
39:21Always suffering, always enduring.
39:23Now, one last test remains.
39:25For his 12th and final labor, Hercules must find his way to the mysterious underworld of the dead.
39:34Hades.
39:36There, he must capture Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates.
39:43Hercules' final labor is by far the most outrageous.
39:48Humans had never done anything like this before. Heroes couldn't typically go to the underworld.
39:53Hades, master of death, is the keeper of all human souls.
39:59And Cerberus is his enforcer.
40:02Now, the dog isn't so much to keep you, the living, from going in, because if you're crazy enough to do that, that's your problem.
40:14It's to keep the dead from coming out.
40:17One of the biggest problems you have in most ancient civilizations is the fear that if someone dies, they may not realize they're dead and come back to you.
40:26Hercules tries a diplomatic approach with Hades.
40:31He asks for permission to take his guard dog up to Earth.
40:36Hades agrees on one condition.
40:40Hercules must overpower the beast with nothing but his fists.
40:45This is the final moment of truth.
40:52Hercules wrestles the dog to the ground.
40:56And beats it into submission.
41:07The fact that he was able to bring Cerberus back from hell is an extraordinary event.
41:16Because what it was showing was that a Greek hero could go in and break the cycle of life and death.
41:26At last, Hercules has completed his penance.
41:32He has conquered every obstacle that has been put in his path.
41:36And endured physical and mental torment beyond measure.
41:41By all rights, he should finally be at peace.
41:44Hercules is someone who struggles, who overcomes, he suffers, but he always gets back up.
41:52And there's some vague promise that life is going to be better for him after this adventure is completed.
41:56But of course it never is.
41:57Hera holds an undying grudge against Hercules for being Zeus's illegitimate son.
42:05There is only one escape from her curse.
42:17Death.
42:19He builds a huge funeral pyre.
42:22His life on earth ends just as he endured it.
42:30In torment.
42:32He wants to have a heroic death.
42:36The proper death of a hero.
42:37He wants to burn on a funeral pyre.
42:39Well, when this happens, it seems to be the final cleansing.
42:44What burns away is not Hercules.
42:46What burns away is his mortal flesh.
42:48And this releases his soul.
42:50So he himself ascends to the heavens.
42:52In death, Hercules is finally redeemed.
42:56Zeus, the king of gods, believes his son has suffered enough.
43:04He invites him to join the immortals on Mount Olympus.
43:09And his nemesis, Hera, finally relents.
43:14What we see here, I think, is that Hercules is the hero of heroes.
43:18He's the greatest of the great.
43:20And at the very end of it all, Zeus says,
43:21Okay, Hercules, you've suffered enough and you're so great,
43:24I'm actually going to go ahead and just make you a god.
43:30Hercules is finally going to get a kind of reward that will last forever.
43:34The suffering is finally over.
43:36In the end, Hercules is resurrected and joins his father in the eternal kingdom.
43:43It is an ending with an eerie similarity to another divine mortal.
43:49Jesus Christ.
43:51Hercules' final act is one of self-sacrifice.
43:55And again, there's an interesting Christian parallel with the hero who has to suffer to obtain immortality.
44:00And when he lights himself on fire, it burns away all the mortality and all that's left is his essence.
44:07And that's what ascends into heaven.
44:08This is the myth of Hercules.
44:13A timeless story of strength, suffering, and redemption.
44:20It's the kind of story people like to hear.
44:23Because everyone has experienced trouble and toil and suffering in their lives.
44:27They've all faced monumental tasks that they don't think they'll be able to complete.
44:32And they want to hear a story of someone who's been through such things but has still gotten through and made it into the end.
44:40That Hercules can achieve success at the end points out to us that there's a kind of always a possibility of success no matter how difficult our life might seem.
44:49That's it.
44:50That's it.
44:51That's it.
44:52That's it.
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