Note 100 — Chapter XIII · THE RELATION OF THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION.

(3) Allegory applied to heroic myths. Besides the legends of the Gods, the legends of the heroes attracted considerable attention in the Stoic Schools. Specially were the persons of Hercules and Ulysses singled out for the sake of illustrating the ideal of the wise man.100 But here, too, various modes of interpretation meet and cross. According to Cornutus,101 the God Hercules must be distinguished from the hero of the same name—the God being nothing less than Reason, ruling in the world without a superior;102 and the grammarian makes every effort to unlock with this key his history and attributes. Nevertheless, with all his respect for Cleanthes,103 he could not accept that Stoic’s explanation of the twelve labours of Hercules. Heraclitus has probably preserved the chief points in this explanation. Hercules is a teacher of mankind, initiated into the heavenly wisdom. He overcomes the wild boar, the lion, and the bull, i.e. the lusts and passions of men; he drives away the deer, i.e. cowardice; he purifies the stall of Augeas from filth, i.e. he purifies the life of men from extravagances; he frightens away the birds, i.e. empty hopes; and burns to ashes the many-headed hydra of pleasure. He brings the keeper of the nether world to light, with his three heads—these heads representing the three chief divisions of philosophy. In the same way, the wounding of Here and Hades by Hercules is explained. Here, the Goddess of the air, represents the fog of ignorance, the three-barbed arrow undeniably (so thought the Stoics) pointing to philosophy, with its threefold division, in its heavenly flight. The laying prostrate of Hades by that arrow implies that philosophy has access even to things most secret.104 The Odyssey is explained by Heraclitus in the same strain, nor was he apparently the first so to do.105 In Ulysses you behold a pattern of all virtues, and an enemy of all vices.106 He flees from the country of the Lotophagi, i.e. from wicked pleasures; he stays the wild rage of the Cyclopes; he calms the winds, having first secured a prosperous passage by his knowledge of the stars; the attractions of pleasure in the house of Circe he overcomes, penetrates into the secrets of Hades, learns from the Sirens the history of all times, saves himself from the Charybdis of profligacy and the Scylla of shamelessness, and, in abstaining from the oxen of the sun, overcomes sensuous desires. Such explanations may suffice to show how the whole burden of the myths was resolved into allegory by the Stoics, how little they were conscious of foisting in foreign elements, and how they degraded to mere symbols of philosophical ideas those very heroes on whose real existence they continually insisted.