When I first photographed this marble bust a few weeks ago at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, I thought I recognized the face of Marcus Aurelius, known to many as the philosopher emperor due to the continued worldwide popularity of his Meditations. On closer inspection, the man trussed up with a club and lion skin as Hercules is actually Marcus's son and successor, the Emperor Commodus, the narcissistic villain everyone loves to hate in such films as The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator. This makes much more sense, as Commodus was known a showman who fostered a cult of personality that included fighting in the arena as a gladiator. Commodus may have used the iconography of Hercules as a symbol of his own imperial power, but he was far from the first ruler to do so!
Before Herodotus gets to the reign of Croesus, he backtracks to explain how the Lydian Empire was originally ruled by a dynasty who traced their bloodline back to Heracles. This claim renders the subsequent twenty-two generations of kings as the Heraclids, with the first being Alcaeus, son of Heracles, and the last being Candaules, whose tale of erotic tragedy will play out next in The Histories and whom I shall discuss in tandem with that of his legendary ancestor in this and the following blog posts.
Commodus and the Heraclid kings linked themselves to Heracles/Hercules in a bid for power in the ancient world, while in the twentieth century a number of Italian pelpum films, a genre I talked about in the previous post, connected themselves with the successful Hercules franchise in hopes of scoring at the box office. Not only where several films about Italian folk hero Maciste retitled to identify the protagonist as the son of Hercules, but later fourteen unrelated pelpum films were repackaged together into a series for American television entitled The Sons of Hercules. The theme song is pretty catchy. But before we can get to the sons, we need to go back to the father.
Herodotus writes that Alcaeus was the son of Heracles and an unnamed slave girl owned by Iardanus, who according to mythology is the father of Omphale. We last met Omphale in my recap of the pre-credits sequence of Hercules Unchained, although we did not see her face for reasons of suspense. Time to get back to that film so we can see one screenwriter's interpretation of just how Hercules found himself in Lydia.
When we come back from the opening credits, Hercules and friends disembark from the Argo, whose voyage they must have joined in the previous film. Hercules sets off for Thebes along with his love interest Iole and his teenage sidekick Ulysses, a peppy pre-Trojan War Odysseus. They get into several adventures unrelated to Omphale, which I will skip over, except to mention that Hercules gets involved with the feud between Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of the incestuous union between Oedipus and Jocasta, proving this movie is just as much a mashup as this blog.
About half an hour in, Hercules and Ulysses have dropped off Iole to sit out the rest of the movie in Thebes. Hercules stops to drink water from a nearby spring. An ominous voiceover clues in the audience, but not Hercules, that "these are the waters of forgetfulness. Those who drink from them will forget all."
Hercules hears voices and acts confused, much to the dismay of Ulysses. By the time he collapses on the ground, the Lydian soldiers are already on the scene. Omphale must send them out regularly to pick-up any handsome man that happens to drink from the spring, or at maybe just when she's ready to replace her consort. Ulysses pretends to be a deaf-mute to save himself. I'm not sure why this works, but it does. The soldiers load up the unconscious Hercules onto the stretcher and transport him by boat over to Lydia. How fitting, after so many posts of women being carried off, it's now happening to men! If you think abductions are only the primary plot device in ancient narratives, just watch any a contemporary action movie, people get kidnapped all the time.
We have a replay of what we saw before in the pre-credits sequence with the soldiers bringing Omphale her new prize and then killing her boy toy, except now Hercules is on the stretcher and it is the man from the pre-credits who meets his end. The other difference, we finally see Omphale's face, that of stunning French actress Sylvia Lopez! Hercules is in her clutches, and as we've seen, things tend to end badly for her lovers. As we will explore in the next post, both Hercules and his descendent Candaules would get into dangerous liaisons, but only one of them would survive a bad romance!
No comments:
Post a Comment