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Herakles Inside and Outside the Church

Herakles Inside and Outside the Church: from the first Apologists to the end of the QuattrocentoBook cover

This is the first of four volumes associated with the Hercules Project, all arising from the 2013 and 2017 conferences, with some additional commissioned chapters. These volumes are to appear in the Brill series Metaforms: Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity over 2020, Herakles Inside and Outside the Church being published on 6th February 2020.  It can be ordered via Brill's website.  See the BMCR review.  The fourth volume, Hercules Performed, is due to appear in the same series in early 2024.

Cover image: statue of Hercules, detail of pulpit by Giovanni Pisano (c.1310) in Pisa Cathedral.

Editors: Arlene Allan (Otago), Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (Macquarie), Emma Stafford (Leeds)

Overview of contents with links to abstracts

Emma Stafford, Foreword

Arlene Allan, Introduction and Conclusion

i. Making Connections: The Early Years

Arlene Allan, Herakles, ‘Christ-curious’ Greeks and Revelation 5

Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, The Tides of Virtue …and Vice: Herakles among the Christians

ii. Appropriation: Verbal

Alexandra Eppinger, Herakles/Hercules: exemplum virtutis for Christian emperors

Brian Sowers, Herculean Centos: myth, polemics, and the crucified hero in late antiquity

Andrew Mellas, Herakleios or Herakles? Panegyric and pathopoeia in George of Pisidia’s Heraklias

Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Herakles in Byzantiumː a (Neo)Platonic perspective

Giampiero Scafoglio, Dante’s Hercules

iii. Appropriation: Visual

Ivana Čapeta Rakić, The Constellation of Hercules and his Struggle with the Nemean Lion on two Romanesque Reliefs from Split Cathedral

Lenia Kouneni, From Antiquity to Byzantium to Late Medieval Italy: Hercules on the façade of San Marco

Tom Sienkewicz, Herculean Transformations of Herculean Fortitude in Florence additional images for this paper are linked from this page

Giuseppe Capriotti, Ovid’s Hercules in 1497: a Greek hero in the Metamorphoses translation by Giovanni de’ Bonsignori and in his woodcuts

Gail Tatham, Hercules in the Hypogeum of Via Dino Compagni, Rome additional images for this paper are linked from this page

iv. Beyond the Church

Cary MacMahon, Wearing the hero on your sleeve: piecing together the materials of the Heraklean myth in late Roman Egypt

Karl Galinsky, Herakles Vajrapani, the Companion of Buddha