Hercules with the golden apples, right? No way! How could he possibly be so youthful and young after

Hercules with the golden apples, right? No way! How could he possibly be so youthful and young after eleven of those exhausting labors? I find it extremely incredible that the artist could possibly have misinterpreted hundreds of years of tradition and depicted Hercules as a beardless youth after all those labors. I mean, there are the golden apples in his hand, and yet he is impossibly young. Holding apart the heavens and the earth takes a lot of energy, and with all that stress I wouldn’t be surprised if Hercules had gray hairs or was going bald by the end of the eleventh labor. And just think, he still trudged off to wrangle Cerberus from the underworld afterward! What a guy! For further evidence of the canonical appearance of Hercules at the end of his labors, see the Farnese Hercules, heavyset and bearded, who holds the golden apples behind his back. Clearly the only possible interpretation of this statue is that it depicts not Hercules, but a forgotten copycat hero. Theseus had a lot of copycat labors once the Athenians decided they needed a national hero in the fifth century, so there is one possibility, although this statue dates from the mid-first century C.E. and the Romans didn’t go in for minor heroes; when a Roman wanted to show off, it was Hercules all the way. Hercules-Augustus, Hercules-Commodus (questionable badassery), you get the idea. So I hope it has become obvious that there is no way this could possibly represent Hercules, even by way of artistic license, and it’s gotta be either Theseus or maybe just some overblown Roman. Or…maybe somebody got creative with their Hercules chronology. It’s been known to happen. -- source link

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