Heracles by Overly Sarcastic Productions | A History Teacher Reacts

[Music] hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher reacts video of mr. Terry alright today we are jumping back into overly sarcastic productions I've just barely scratched the surface on this channel but I see it's very very popular get recommended all the time and kind of looking through their their videos and stuff they got a lot of cool historical things and it's kind of looking through at what you guys have really liked from them or they're more popular videos and I thought want to be interesting for my perspective and hopefully for yours is this one on Heracles or probably better known as Hercules and so the Greek mythology is is fascinating and really seems to be something that even just just regular you know not necessarily like history buffs are into and know at least something about you know it's popular in media and film and movies and all that kind of stuff and I've always been fascinated not with just like what they believed but how did these myths and these legends come to be right you know well one one possibility that people like to talk about with these kind of mists how they develop is these people like you know someone like Heracles was possibly a real person at some point you know maybe some great soldier and then legends grow and through oral traditions you know those stories just get bigger and bigger till those figures become like godlike and very likely possibility for myth myths and especially the hero figures of of history there but don't want to load too much here of my feelings on the front end here let's get into the video okay the original video is down below you guys recommended this to me a lot so make sure that you are supporting their channel the original video link is down below so give it a view like subscribe all that support over there and let's go and get started with some Heracles well what's the point of me doing this one everyone already knows Hercules he's basically ancient Greek Superman with a healthy dose of modern sports stardom right did 12 cool things got the girl call it a day couldn't be simpler well Oh No Hercules is a lot of things but simple is not one of them first of all Hercules is the Roman hero Heracles is the original Greek version named for the glory of Hera and an ineffectual attempt to keep her from trying to murder impossible that's interesting um yeah so what people often get mixed up the Greek or Roman gods and I mean getting a mixed sometimes but sometimes don't realize they're the same person a lot of because the names are quite different if you have Zeus versus Jupiter right or something like that but Hercules Heracles so Hercules is Roman actually didn't know that I heard that sure Pericles I just thought that was more like the the real name you know they are both Greek but okay surprisingly they are pretty distinct second of all remember this word I've talked about how hubris was the most common character flaw for Greek heroes they do think too highly of themselves try to be gods and end up getting smacked down for their sins so far we've only seen one major subversion of this which was because we didn't have any flaws but Heracles is also a subversion because his biggest flaw is wrath how unexpectedly modern right well Heracles begins his life as so many heroes do with Zeus spotting a fine-looking lady this one by the name of augmenting Zeus does it so that's the famous thing right Zeus has lots of children both God and demigod because if he has a child with a human then they're considered to be like parked God but that's it's interesting because when people think of gods in the modern sense more of like the monotheistic gods these gods are benevolent perfect beings but to the Greeks and actually a lot of polytheistic religions they viewed their gods as having a lot of human characteristics in a way but the difference is that they're very powerful so if you anger you know a god that's pretty bad because they will smite you right they they aren't always benevolent actually malevolent so good versus kind of evil and yeah though they're fickle they get jealous and they're often unpredictable and where that might tie in a lot of ways is this you know gods in the ancient you know especially in that more ancient world we're likely kind of invented in a way to explain phenomena natural phenomena right especially disasters you know you got floods and storms and earthquakes and stuff and a lot of people think that these are gods and if they have these kind of unpredictable destructive qualities maybe that's a reflection of their character so that might be a reason why you have that sort of personification and like a character of these gods they represent disastrous random events in nature this thing and shape ships into her husband and petrea and gets her pregnant the very same night her actual husband scoots on by and does the same thing that's right today's first plot twist is that Heracles had a twin so Hera is livid as she pulls this kind of nonsense but this time she's extra miffed and starts trying to take as many petty revenge's on the babies she can possibly think Priority One is screwing Heracles out of his birthright so the night Heracles and his twin are slated to be born Hera convinces Zeus to make the next descendent of Perseus to be born the king now so you'd wonder yeah if Hera would get jealous because Zeus is very obviously sleeping around and doing all that stuff his hair just kind of yeah sounds like she does kind of angsty you know alcaman a is one of Perseus his descendents meaning Heracles is slated to be the next descendant of Perseus so Zeus is totally okay with the idea whereupon Hera zips down and kidnaps ilithyia the goddess of childbirth to keep Heracles and his brother right where they are until the day is done then she causes Heracles his cousin you risk this to be born prematurely so he gets to be the king instead fortunately out mana gets to give birth eventually because one of her servants tricks ilithyia into bailing whereupon Hera turns the servant into a weasel as revenge family still keeps her around though which is nice anyway how many is acutely aware of the fact that the baby is already a problem for her and will probably only cause more problems later on so she kicks him out whereupon Athena scoops him up and ferries over to Hera telling her that someone left this poor baby just lying around whereupon Hera pities little guy and nurses him a bit unfortunately Heracles is a toothy baby and boob noms a little too hard Hera Chuck's him because ow but the damage is done because her magic milk has given him superpowers maybe I'm crazy strong nothing it takes you under you know because it's it's it's generally more likely with these kind of stories that pieces of the story get added as it knows generations going on but you wonder in those cases if somebody literally just sat down right with their their pad and paper here and made the whole story like in one sitting you know what I mean it's like Heracles and his father is this and did this and then he was getting breastfed by his mother and he hurts her and doing all this stuff I think that would be interesting just to see the mind of someone like that but it again it's probably more likely that these stories kind of build now a question I do have is what what is the earliest textual evidence for Heracles now much of the Greek pantheon predates the Greeks as we know them and definitely goes back to de Mycenaean it's a group you know kind of before the Greeks they're kind of the pre Greeks if you want to call them that that basically end up getting you know they kind of go away especially on the Bronze Age collapse and but we know a lot of the the Greek stories came from that right so we're so get like homer and things like that but those were passed down orally and don't get into writing till much later so I'm wondering what some of the evidence is that is the evidence necessarily but first like appearances in the historical record of Heracles if you know let me know notice I know you got we got we got mythology Greek mythology buffs out there little guy back to his parents and they raised him pretty uneventful II except for that one time with the snakes so prior to the twelve tasks thing Heracles this story is a little muddled which is pretty common for culture heroes they tend to accumulate stories over time the main highlight is one time teenage Heracles gets pissy because he's having trouble learning to play the lyre and ends up killing his teacher as a result this is the story sorry if I'm pausing too much here on this what I like to in my class I to teach mythology I want to exercise I like to do the classes play the telephone game guys played that where you tell somebody right you tell somebody a statement or phrase and then they tell it to somebody and it's it's like one at a time right and then if you played that game you probably know that by the time you get to the end of the class or the group the message is a little bit different now whether that's somebody doing it on purpose or just misremembering or you hear something different than was interpreted it's not a perfect analogy because you know if you're actually putting in writing it's a lot easier to put that down but you got to remember that most of these stories I go saying before were oral before they were written and it's obviously more easy to mess a myth that's orally passed right because it's all you know memory even though I might hear a bunch of times but that's an activity I like to do and yeah I would suggest doing that in your classes suggesting it to your teachers or groups or whatever and then you can kind understand a little bit of how these kind of stories grow in a while later he ends up in Thebes where he courts and marries Megara the daughter of King Creon they have two beautiful children whereupon Hera drives her he gets his brain back is immediately stricken with grief and goes to consult the Oracle about what he should do to atone the Oracle guided by Hera tells me needs to atone for his crimes by serving his cousin King nearest this for 10 years and doing whatever he tells them to this is all part of her cunning plan to accidentally make Heracles the most famous and revered Greek hero ever because nobody ever just kills anybody in these stories so this leads to the famous 12 labors or rather 10 plus a couple extra initially Orestes gives them 10 labors but two of them get discounted for shenanigans number one is to kill the nemi in lyon known for being immune to all mortal weapons and having a general disposition of a chainsaw strapped to a ceiling fan Heracles ends up strangling it and skinning it with one of its own claws mission number two is killing the lernaean hydra for which Heracles can script is half nephew and sometimes lover I olace for moral support that happened a lot in ancient Greece don't question it anyway after learning that cutting off the heads just causes more heads to grow back Iola suggests using fire to burn the next steps which works very well before they leave Heracles takes some poisonous Hydra blood and code to zeros with it because why not write with that out of the way Heracles returns home but you risk this is all you got helped for that one do doesn't commit and adds a trial for later so trial number three is to cap actual live this time the serene Ian hind a dear sacred to artemis yours is a cunning plan here is to have Heracles offend Artemis and get her to kill him but as soon as Heracles explains was up with his trials and such Artemis is like EW go for it just to bring her back when you're done so Heracles brings the hind to your wrists this but your wrists this is too slow to actually catch it and it's orps back to Artemis no problem mission accomplished mission four is to capture the earth Manian bore but Heracles gets distracted along the way and parties it up with a scent or friend for a while instead unfortunately so you wonder if this story's - the talk about origination stories because a lot of these under say like battles you know was was this person maybe like a semi mythical hunter that was known for these stories of their you know hunting these giant boars and or any other type of wild animal you see how that could you know possibly like an explanation for an origin there and then it just becomes you know it snowballs over time and over generations centaurs apparently don't know that Greek wine needs to be watered down before it's drinkable so they all get super drunk and start trying to pick fights Heracles drives him off with his poison arrows but his sent to her body accidentally drops him on his foot and dies well that was kind of pointless anyway after that Fiasco Heracles visits the immortal Centaur Chiron for advice who tells him that the boar is impossible to stop while charging so he needs to drive him into the snow to immobilize him and then carry him off what do you think where do you think centaurs come from like where that mythology comes from because again a lot of it comes from somewhere is it someone that was like on their horse so much it felt like they were blended together like they were you know somebody took it like took a metaphor to be realistic we're like man this guy was so good you know on horseback that he was like him and the horse or one and then all of a sudden that someone interpreted that to mean like oh they were like physically one I wonder so Heracles does and brings the boar back to you risk this who immediately freaks out and makes and release it back into the wild mission number five is to clean the stables of King osseous which are filthy so Heracles first gets the guy to promise him ten percent of his prized cattle if he manages to pull it off then diverts two rivers through the stables and runs them out super efficiently surprisingly not demolishing the building in the process but all Jesus is a sore loser in refuses to pay up so Heracles and odd uses son filius take him to court whereupon he sidesteps all that legal nonsense by banishing them both because he is the king and then your vs. refuses to credit the trial because Heracles did it for pay even though he didn't get paid Heracles gets pretty pissed and kicks Audis out of the kingdom and makes his son phileus the king then takes his cows and goes home mission number six is to drive out the Stymphalian birds from the swamp they live in which he does with a little divine help Athena has the Festus make him a special rattle to frighten the birds into the air whereupon Heracles is afraid shoot them down people ask me a lot of like that well my favorite God is I like her faceless the god of like forgery he makes weapons and stuff and I believe the story too maybe I should probably find a video on him to react to exactly want to learn even more it just sounds like such an interesting story because from what I understand he he's born and he was like super ugly so Zeus is like dude you're out of here and throws him and he throws him into a volcano and there he basically lives in the volcano and uses a volcano is like a forge and he makes weapons and stuff from what I stand a basic story but I always thought that was really saying but then doesn't meet like doesn't Zeus or something I feel bad for him and then hooks him up with Aphrodite who's like the most beautiful God but Aphrodite hates it basically cheats on him with Ares God of War so all things I'm trying I'm trying to remember but I always I always liked what I had heard about the Hephaestus story trial seven is to capture the Cretan bull mostly known for being the father of the minded or you so Heracles wanders into Crete and asks my nose if he can take the bull which my nose has Pinewood since that stupid bull has done nothing but a wreck stuff every six days picks him up and brings him back where up on the bull breaks loose and wanders around marathon for a while before dropping out a story completely trial eight involves capturing the mares of Diomedes which is complicated by the fact that the mare is mostly eat people and they're very hard to control Pericles ends up isolating them on an island he dug out for just that purpose then kills Diomedes and feeds into the horses to calm them down this chills them out enough that it's easy for him to bring them back trial number nine is to retrieve the girdle of Hippolyta queen of the Amazons fortunately Heracles being Heracles this isn't too hard as the politic takes one look at him and quite willingly drops her close however Hera decides this was too easy and spreads a rumor among the Amazons that Heracles intends to kidnap their queen they don't pile on him and in the chaos Heracles kills politie for some reason and bails with the girdle mission 10 is to steal the cattle of garyun unfortunately he lives on the other side of a stupid hot desert and Heracles gets so grumpy and overheated that he fires an arrow at the Sun fortunately Helios finds this charming rather than intimidating and loans Heracles his Sun chariot to get him there faster so Heracles touches down on a wreath eeeh whereupon he's attacked it's going fast it's going too fast for you guys I orthis the two-headed dog who he kills then every T on the cattle herd hears the commotion and comes by to help and gets killed too finally Garry comes out in full battle armor and is you guessed it killed so Heracles scoots back with the cattle because your assistance sacrifices the cattle to Hera which does nothing to soothe her nerves trial number 11 is to retrieve apples from the garden of the Hesperides which is complicated somewhat by the fact that the location of the garden is a secret so Heracles wrassles the location out of Marius the old man of the sea and heads off on the way he runs into this dude anteus who's immortal but only so long as he's touching the earth he challenges Heracles to a wrestling match and when Heracles realizes he can't pull my pinning him he just picks him up and crushes him anyway so Heracles reaches the garden of the Hesperides but he can't get the apples because the tree is guarded by this big dragon a thing named glad on fortunately near is the Titan it's like there's so much content to these stories how do you keep like how much time needs to how many generations I'm at the time needs to pass to keep edited getting these because they're so specific to it's it's so interesting about mythology how like detail they can get busily holding up the sky so Heracles is like hey buddy hey ya want to do me a solid and grab me some apples and Atlas is like sure dude but you'll need to carry this sky and go to hold itself up you know so Heracles tags in and holds up the sky while Atlas scoots over to the tree and pick some apples so Heracles is like yo thanks man hey can you tag back in and not this is like you know actually how do you just tell me where to take these and I deliver your apples for you so Heracles is like oh man that just sounds great but you know my keeps getting really uncomfortable kind of heavy to take in for a second so I can adjust it and then we'll swap back out and not listen like what could go wrong and takes back the sky at which point Heracles obviously bails for his 12th and final labor your as this straight-up tells Heracles to go to hell and kidnap Kerberos so Heracles traipse is down to Hades whereupon he bumps into theses and parathas still fused to their chairs they ask him for help so Erik Lee's frees Theseus bony tries for peer ah--this there's a huge earthquake which he takes as a sign that he should probably leave him there so Heracles heads deeper into the underworld and encounters Kurvers along with Hades who asks him what exactly he thinks he's doing so Heracles tells him he's here to kidnap his dog and Hades tells him okay but he can't use any weapons to do it which Heracles is fine with because again wrassling so we bear-hugs one of Kerberos as heads until he gives in and I guess Hades objects' or something because most telling is this story in Valhalla Cleese shooting him for some reason so Heracles drags Kerberos out to your wrist this who was unsurprisingly so terrified that he demands Heracles return him immediately so Heracles carries Kerberos back to Hades and goes on his merry way finally free of his service reward tops the story doesn't end with his Labour's he has all kind of hijinks frankly too many to list here a lot of those hijinks were romantic he was married four times his third wife being the one to kill him and one noteworthy thing is that Heracles as a symbol of pure masculinity for Greece had a lot of dude lovers too because what's manlier then two men apparently in Plutarch's time owner if they're just saying that he was like hard to live with hey nobody actually wanted to be married to him for very long and it was customary for male couples to worship at the tomb of a oldest who was widely considered to be Heracles his primary boyfriend which is kind of sweet but anyway I kind of glossed over the fact that he dies somewhere along the line so let's talk about that Heracles is on marriage number three and his wife is this lady de Inara for those of you who know Greek her name is a spoiler as it translates to husband destroyer so one day the central nessus decides the kidnapper which Heracles obviously ejects - he shoots the center with one of his old Hydra blood arrows and the poison center tells day NR that his blood can totally make a potion to keep her husband faithful should she ever need such a thing he persuades her to bottle some of his blood and then dies this becomes relevant several years later when Heracles falls in love with this other lady I Olli day now remembers the love potion thing takes some of the blood and spheres it on the inside of one of Heracles is - an explorer pond because it's full of Hydra venom and very very poisonous the blood melts into Heracles his body and seriously Aqsa he's too tough for it to kill but it really hurts so he kind of decides to die anyway Heracles throws himself into a funeral pyre and ignores the way his mortal hath becoming a pure god and ascending to Olympus in the process whereupon he marries he be the goddess of youth velocity is the guy who lit the pyre gets gifted Heracles as poison arrows and later uses them to kill Paris in the Trojan Wars so if you're if you're a demigod which sir you know they're supposed to be a bunch of them you can upon your physical death you can actually become a god but are you still just like half God do you get some other half these are the questions that are like totally not important but very interesting so I guess some big game oh gosh is this is this like all that I couldn't fit it in the video stuff one of Heracles adventures I didn't discuss here is Giganta Maki a battle between the Olympians and the Giants apparently there was a prophecy that the Giants couldn't be killed by gods alone they needed the help of immortal Heracles technically qualified why would they need humans though ok the descriptions of the Gods fighting is pretty crazy to you Poseidon throws an island a whole island here throwing yeah Sara at you boom or something Athena tears off this one guy's skin Dionysus Maxo dude with his IV staff dude it's like the whole the all the gods are teaming up here it's like The Avengers Hermes borrows Hades helm of invincibility even the fates playing mint or get in on the action and club a couple giants nice and then the patrons the real gods thank you to my patrons you guys are awesome he's mine with the strength of 10 ordinary men Hercules people are safe when near him Hercules may be evil fear him softness in his eyes iron in his thighs virtue in his heart fire and every part of the mighty Hercules well what's the point of me doing this one everyone already knows Hercules yeah alright awesome ok now it was fun I mean that was way more detail that I would be able to consume in one sitting but that's cool to seeing the the tasks I didn't know a lot about what some of those individual tasks were and again I can't kind of give my thoughts a bit about how you know a lot of them seemed like you had to take out some you know large animal or something like that didn't bring any other gods with Atlas I didn't know that one because I know you like how holds things up or ever and I know he like traded places with him and looks like Atlas wanted a break I thought that was kind of funny and then he's wrestling Cerberus the you know the multi headed dog down there and all that stuff and then kind of a she said that he kind of liked Heracles kind of decides to die and then it becomes you know more I don't know he had all the different wives and husbands I'm so holy crap I learned a ton about Erik Lee's right there and again like I've said every PD Lena in the other times more than a lot of the details of the story I'm I'm very much interested in how how myths develop I love the what he call historiography which is you study how the history of something has changed in a way like how something has been taught as history so you know would the story that we're hearing about Heracles right now have been the same one we would have heard a thousand years ago two thousand years ago right for one to mycenaean oh we pushed in three thousand is it predated that which again a lot of I know the the mythology and religion of the Greeks does that predates them even so came down before them anyway great stuff thank you for recommending again this channel it looks like we got some good stuff there I like what she's doing there I think I saw in other videos theirs might be like a male host - maybe they trade back and forth of a different specialties looked like some of the videos they do were like literature and stuff like that so I'll to see what kind of a little bit more about what this channel is about but they have like one and a quarter million subs so they're doing something right and if there's history to be had then then I won't be far behind yeah all right and with that few announcements on the way if you're really into Greece and want to join me and some of my some other Greece related contact might want to join our gaming channel we're currently right now I'm here in June of 2020 I'm doing a playthrough on the gaming channel mr.chair gaming channel of Assassin's Creed Odyssey which does a lot of the mythological stuff so it's very cool link down I was down below if you'd like to get involved in that thanked of are the patrons that are patronizing sort of are our patron levels if you if you're watching this currently we just launched some new tiers some more availability to get stuff and more stuff you can get back to now certain tiers can get you merch cool history merch that that we got designed for us by the way join our discord community all right with that we'll see you guys later bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 110,886

Keywords: react, history, greece, mythology

Id: r2d1Owa0b2I

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020