For all his life he was persecuted, plagued, and tormented by a cruel, malicious, and remorseless deity pursuing a vendetta which punished him for a crime for which he could be in no way held responsible—his birth. No labor was more Heraclean than the labor of being Heracles. In his uncomplaining life of pain and persistence, in his compassion and desire to do the right thing, he showed, as the American classicist and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it, “greatness of soul.” Heracles may not have possessed the pert agility and charm of Perseus and Bellerophon, the intellect of Oedipus, the
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