Legends in Stone

Order of Being

The Hero

Mortals raised to cult — the bridge between gods and the Roman state.

Graecia
Roma
Plate IHero

Heracles/Hercules

Strength, Labours, & Apotheosis

Greek Heracles is a tragic brute whose glory comes at the cost of everyone around him; Roman Hercules is a stoic role model and a patron of merchants. Rome sanded off the tragedy and sold the moral.

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Graecia
Roma
Plate IIHero

Achilles/Achilles

Wrath, Honour, & a Glorious Death

Greece experienced Achilles as a dangerous, grief-mad hero deserving of cult; Rome received him as a rhetorical set-piece and invented the invulnerability that Greek myth never mentions. Rome made the tragedy safer.

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Graecia
Roma
Plate IIIHero

Odysseus/Ulysses

Cunning, Endurance, & the Long Return

Greece admired Odysseus' cunning as the mark of a survivor; Rome cast the same man as a scheming villain in the Aeneid. The identical set of tricks reads as virtue in Athens and as fraud in Rome.

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Graecia
Roma
Plate IVHero

Aeneas/Aeneas

Duty, Exile, & the Founding of Rome

The same Trojan prince is a footnote in Greek epic and the protagonist of Rome's national poem. Rome took a minor Greek character and built an entire imperial genealogy on his shoulders.

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Other Orders

All Hero plates