Herakles

An extremely informative and useful book. Filled with a multitude of information culled from a wide span of source. All collated with care, scholarly expertise and clearly organized. Highly readable. I found it helpful for my professional work; a complete bibliography and excellent choice of citations. Absolutely essential for anyone working on ancient history, art and philosophy. And also literature.

The author is a good writer (I even enjoyed her PhD thesis) and the material is well organised. The myths are set out clearly and the full range of literary evidence is combined with that from art. The chapter on his cult cannot be comprehensive, but concentrates on particularly interesting evidence. Finally, there is a comprehensive view of how Heracles functions (and still does) outside the cult: tragic hero, moral exemplar, comic character, cinematic hero, and football-club mascot!The reason it doesn't get 5 stars is the format of the series. Firstly a certain amount of space is wasted: every volume has the same series introduction, an introduction telling us what each chapter is going to be about, and a summary at the end of each chapter in case we've forgotten it already. Secondly, the quotations are in very small, faint type, and the illustrations are not much clearer. Thirdly, it attempts to cover too many fields, "from Greek and Roman religion ... to cultural studies". At least this is the best volume to date.

This is a really good book for any one who is studying Herakles, or any one who wants a better insight.