utes and those of the
Deity, with whom the Egyptian priests were pleased to identify him,
may have given occasion to this notion; and he also bore some
similitude to the God whom the Phoenicians chiefly worshipped, and
who, it is probable, was the Sun. But we must steadily bear in mind,
that Hercules was a hero in the popular legend long before any
intercourse was opened between Greece and Egypt; and that, however
(which is certainly not very likely) a God might be introduced from
Phoenicia, the same could hardly be the case with a popular
hero.--A very ingenious theory on the mythus of Hercules is given by
Buttmann (Mythologus, vol. i., p. 246). Though acknowledging that
Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules may have been real persons, he is
disposed, from an attentive consideration of all the circumstances
in the mythus of the last, to regard him as one of those poetical
persons or personifications, who, as he says, have obtained such
firm footing in the dark periods of antiquity, as to have acquired
the complete air of historic personages.

"In his view of the life of Hercules, it is a mythus of extreme
antiquity and great beauty, setting forth the ideal of human
perfection, consecrated to the weal of mankind, or rather, in its
original form, to that of his own nation. This perfection, according
to the ideas of the heroic age, consists in the greatest bodily
strength, united with the advantages of mind and soul recognised by
that age. Such a hero is, he says, a man; but these noble qualities
in him are of divine origin. He is, therefore, the son of the king
of the Gods by a mortal mother. To render his perfection the more
manifest, the Poet makes him to have a twin brother, the child of a
mortal sire. As virtue is not to be learned, Hercules exhibits his
strength and courage in infancy; he strangles the snakes, which
fills his brother with terror. The character of the hero throughout
life, as that of the avenger of injustice and punisher of evil, must
exhibit itself in the boy as the wild instinct of nature; and the
mythus makes him kill his tutor Linus with a blow of the lyre. When
sent away by Amphitryon, he prepares himself, in the stillness and
solitude of the shepherd's life, by feats of strength and courage,
for his future task of purifying the earth of violence.

"--The number of tasks may not originally have been twelve, though
most accounts