Hercules

Hēraklewês was the great hero of the Dorians as they entered the Peloponnese.

We can roughly trace the path Heraclewes made into Latin. In Linear B, we have -ke-le-we (and not -wa) ending several names: e-te-wo-ke-le-we (most famously), ni-ko-ke-le-we, ke-ro-ke-le-we, a-ri-si-to-ke-le-we. Hēra was already a goddess but we have yet no Hēra-klewês in Linear B.

Hera was, of course, no Italian diety. The cult of Heraklewes entered southern Italy by way of Tarentum, which associated itself with Sparta; in their Doric dialect the "digamma" w fell out, leaving a long "e" at the end. HGG Payne, "A Bronze Herakles in the Benaki Museum at Athens", The Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934), 163f; 170 verifies that even in (authentic) Doric we never see "Heraklas"; although, certain Dorian patriots occasionally hypercorrected that name.

Further up the peninsula the Etruscan language accented the first syllable and contracted the vowels on the rest. Hera-cles, there, became HER-cle (more rarely "Hercla"). It happens "l" is a voiced liquid consonant, almost a vowel. So when the Latins came along to stick that masculine -s back onto those nouns: "Hercules", it was.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, by then likewise at least a pro-Doric city, associated him with Eudoxos' Kneeling constellation adjacent to Alpha Lyrae, Arabic Vega (Eudoxos as versified Aratos ll. 63-70). The Odyssey, composed by Ionians, meanwhile was pleased to lock Hēraklewês in Hell.

But the celestial letter H was already in the man's name, in all the alphabets. And the cult of "Hercules" proved too popular outside the Greek cities; the Romans and very probably the Etruscans considered the hero a demigod. Eventually Ptolemy the astronomer canonised this name for the constellation, where it remains to our days; and our Odyssey was altered to mute Heracles' presence. Here we are directed to Friedrich Solmsen, "The Sacrifice of Agamemnon's Daughter in Hesiod's' Ehoeae", The American Journal of Philology 102.4 (1981), 353-8; 355.

BACKDATING 11/17 Noon MST. Raised from a long aside in September's "Proserpina" post, inserted here in a gap in this week's output to lead up to the celestial "H" post I'm planning. VECTOR 11/3/23: Just found out that the solar apex is in here.