April 18, 2023 • 49 mins
In the first-ever episode of the Badass of the Week podcast, Badass of the Week website founder Ben Thompson and professor of history Dr. Pat Larash discuss the mythical Greek strongman Hercules, who had brains to go with his brawn, as well as Revolutionary War hero Peter Francisco, the "Virginia Hercules", a one-man army who backed his brawn up with even more brawn.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. It is almost midnight as two large
constrictor snakes slowly slither down the walls of a quiet
nursery towards the two twin boys who lie sleeping in
a crib at the center of the room. These are
not just any ordinary serpents.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
They are dark emissaries sent by a vengeful goddess on
a cruel mission to choke the life.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
From these children in the name of the Queen of Olympus.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Slowly, silently, deliberately, they make their way over the edge
of the crib and drop quietly down next to the
sleeping children. But these snakes have no idea what's about
to hit them.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of the
Badass of the Week podcast. My name is Ben Tom
I'm the author of the Badass epic Fails and Gut
Some Glory book series is and today we want to
kind of bring the show to a new format, bring
the idea into a new format. I've been writing about
badasses for nineteen years now, but it's time to start
(01:16):
something different, and to help me do that, I'm going
to be bringing on a co host. So let me
introduce you to doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Hey, what's up?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Pat is an academic. She's here to bring the show
some degree of.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Respectability and gravitas.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Pat is a PhD classicist. She teaches Latin and Ancient Greek,
has taught it at the college level, and she came
to one of my book readings once.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, and yes, I am an academic, and I like
definitions of terms, and the term badass to the newer
people might be a bit nebulous. Should we define badass?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah? We should probably define our terms before we proceed.
We're going to be talking a lot about badasses in
the weeks and hopefully months and years to come, so
we should kind of establish what that means. I think
about when the first Badass book came out, I had
already written the entire book. I'd been writing about badasses
every week for something like five or six years at
(02:11):
this point. But my editor was like, yeah, you have
to put in an introduction where you define what a
badass is, like what unites all of these people? And
to me, it was always something that was kind of
inherently there. Right, they are badasses, and I shouldn't even
have to explain it after I tell you their stories.
But to sit down and think about it was an
interesting exercise. You know, what do Leonidas and Genghis Khan
(02:34):
have in common? Right? What about Vlade Impaler and Joan
of Arc. They're very different people, They're from different time periods,
they were interested in accomplishing different things. So what unites
them as badasses? Well, it took me a long time
to think about this, but what I eventually came up
with was perseverance. The idea that they never stopped, they
never backed down, they never gave up. Whatever it was
(02:55):
they were trying to accomplish was almost irrelevant as long
as they went all out for it, balls to the
wall all the time, never gave up. Every time they
hit a wall, they broke through it. Every time they
got knocked down, they got back up again. Some of
them wanted to defend their homeland, some of them wanted
to conquer empires. Some of them were just criminally insane.
But it doesn't matter as long as they just kept
(03:16):
pushing forward and never gave up. For me, that was
the one thing that all of these badasses had in common.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So, yeah, and these people who in our gut we
think of as badass. Whom we respond to as badass
are ones who, with all of their determination and perseverance,
to an outside observer, inspire respect whatever their motives may be,
whatever their values may be. And you know, I may
(03:44):
not agree with the motives of all of them, My
values might not be in alignment with their values, but
there's still something about them that compels me or other
observers to say, oh huh, it's something that I don't
know sends ideology. And you know, some philosophers would argue
that everything is ideology. There is nothing outside ideology.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Sure, but forget those guys. Ultimately, this is why we
care about these badasses. They persevered, and we can respect
that determination and drive. It inspires us to push harder
on our own lives, even if we're not doing something
quite as extreme as chucking grenades at our enemies while
crawling through a ditch full of barbed wire under machine
gun fire. You know, we can kind of look at
these stories and think, Okay, you know, if this person
(04:30):
did that, maybe I can get my inbox cleared before
I go home from work today.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Right, we would say that badass is going to be
all kinds of things they can be smart, they can
be brave, they can be clever, noble, heroic. They could
be willing to sacrifice for their friends. They could come
up with new ideas and new concepts. They could be
outsmarting their foes, coming up with clever strategies, coming up
with totally boneheaded strategies that nevertheless work out, et cetera,
(04:58):
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, and we're going to be talk talking about all
of that. We'll have explorers, athletes, artists, scientists, folks from
all corners of the world and all time periods of history.
Even a few mythological and fictional characters thrown in as well.
Some of them are smart, some are clever, and some
just I don't know. There's something weirdly satisfying about these
stories where the hero just solves all their problems by
(05:19):
punching them repeatedly until they're unconscious and then drowning them
in a river.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah. Determined whether you're punching your way through your problems
metaphorically or literally physically punching your way through people and things.
Speaking of which, today we're going to start with a
hero who is famous for being big and strong, but
also a little bit cleverer than we often give him
credit for. I'm talking about the legendary mythological Greek hero Hercules.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Was Hercules smart?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Well, he was kind of a hot mess by our standards,
But honestly, that's par for the course when you're talking
about Greek myths.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, that's the weird thing with Greek myths. They're like
way more bizarre than the ones you read when you
were a kid.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So let's get into it. Here's the story of Hercules. Okay,
so this is maybe the og badass. This is Hercules,
you know, since we're talking about hitting the gym, drowning
(06:22):
people in the river, and you know, yes, he punches
his way out of situations, but he also sometimes thinks
his way out of situations. But to be fair, his
thinking kind of always includes the fact that he has
the braun in addition to the brains. Like he's not
going to sit down in front of computer and like
hack his way into the CIA mainframe or something like that.
(06:44):
He's going to come up with creative ways to use
his muscle. And he, you know, with this combination of
braun and brain, he manages to think and punch his
way out of some pretty unwinnable situations.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I'm excited to hear about it.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm excited to tell it. So Hercules, you know, we
know from Greak and Roman mythology his Greek name is Heracles,
and I mentioned this. He's better known these days as Hercules.
But the Greek name Heracles actually tells you a little
bit about his origin story. The name means glory of Harah,
Gloria of Hera, the queen of the gods, and so Hercules,
(07:19):
his quote unquote biological father is actually Zeus, the king
of the gods. But Zeus fell in love with a
mortal woman like he does, and disguised himself as the
woman's husband, King Emphytrion, and slept with her that way.
So ALCHEMENI, the woman didn't know she was cheating on
her husband, and anyway said she gives birth to two boys,
(07:41):
one of whom is totally mortal and one of whom
is Hercules. And when Hercules was born, Hara was Harra
was jealous because Harrah's husband Zeus keeps cheating on her
and she's powerless, powerless or something's preventing her from just
totally having it out with Zeus. So she takes it
out on everyone else, and she sends snakes to strangle
(08:04):
baby Hercules, and what do you think baby Hercules does?
He strangles them right back. So he saves himself and
his little brother Effelties. And this is just totally iconic
for everything that's going on. A. He's totally strong even
as an infant, and B he's got this wrath of
Hara following him. This will become relevant many many times later.
(08:25):
So he grows up, he gets married. He gets married
to a woman named Megara, which is where the inspiration
for the Disney character comes from. And this madness from Hara.
She sends this madness on him, and while he does that,
he kills his own kids, and that's just completely and
utterly awful. When he comes out of this divinely induced
(08:47):
rage and he's now kind of more in touch with reality,
he's like, oh, shoot, I killed my kids. He feels
awful about it. And when you murder someone in ancient Greece,
you're supposed to atone for it some okay, not killing
someone in battle, but murdering someone. So you go to
the oracle at Delphi, which Hercules does, and the oracle
(09:09):
says Okay, you've got to perform ten labors for King Eurystheus.
So Hercules says, okay, I'll go for perform ten labors
for King Eurystheus.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So my understanding of the labors is kind of that
Eurystheus and Harah are kind of working together to make
these labors impossible for Hercules, like give him impossible things
to do so that he will either die or fail
and face I mean, he did fly into a psychotic
killing rage and murder his own children, so like maybe
(09:36):
he does deserve a little bit of justice, but at
the same time, like they're giving him impossible tasks, which
makes it cooler when he does them exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah, yeah, because standard operating procedure, if you're just like
a mere mortal and you kill someone and you go
to the oracle at Delphi, if you do the thing
that the oracle says to expiate your crime, then generally,
like if you do that, then like you're okay in
the eyes of the gods. But this no Haarrah had
it in for him?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Was that actually for you? Like if you killed if
you like went into a rage and like murdered your wife,
you had to go like dependance at the Workle of Delphi.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
That was one way to deal with it. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
he has ten labors that he's supposed to do. But wait,
I hear you cry, don't we hear about the famous
twelve flavors of Hercules? Where did that come from? Did
we not know how to count? Is this like a
base ten base twelve thing? So the original contract, the
original deal was for ten labors, but as Hercules does
(10:27):
a few of them, some of them wind up not counting.
So King Eurystheus gets the final say on these labors.
I won't go into all of them in detail, just
rest assured they're all cool in their own way. Most
of them have him go up against fearsome beasts of
some sort of or another, which you know, you can
totally get all Ray Harry howsing on when you imagine
them in your heads. But I'll just go through a
few of them. The first one is the Nemean lion,
(10:48):
So some of the labors actually were because there was
a specific beast that was terrorizing a specific village. The
Nemean lion actually was terrorizing the area of Nemea. Why
was the lion terrorizing the area of Nemea a a
lion b It was a ferocious lion specifically raised by
Hero or made more ferocious by hera to cause problems
(11:09):
on purpose. And it's got an impenetrable skin, so he
can't kill it with an arrow or an axe or anything.
He strangles it and then he takes its own claw,
skins it and makes a lion skin that he wears.
And so sometimes in art you'll see a figure with
a beard and you'll note heracles because he's got a
club and he's got this lion skin draped over his shoulders.
(11:33):
So this Nummian lion, that's how he gets that iconic
lion skin, and to everyone's surprise, he survives. He also
has to kill the hydro, which is the snake where
when he chop off one head, several grow back. He
has to capture the Sirenian hind, which is big fancy deer.
He has to do that and bring it in alive.
He has to capture the Arimanthean bore, which was just
playing terrorizing the countryside. He has to clean the Augean stables.
(11:58):
And it may seem like what isn't punching his way
through fearsome beasts. What he's all about. So the Augean stables,
there's this King Augius, and he had stables with lots
of cattle, and cattle, being cattle, they're living organisms. They
poop and there was a lot of poop. These cattle
were immortal, and when you were immortal, you have a
(12:19):
lot of time on your hands to eat and poop.
So Hercules looks at these stables. Now here's the deal.
King Augius, the guy who owned the stables, said, if
you do it in a day, I will pay you.
I will give you ten percent. I will give you
one tenth of the cattle. And Hercules is like, okay, cool.
So he's looking at the stables, maybe holding his nose.
(12:40):
Now this is something that would occur to Hercules, not
to me, because I am not strong. He uses his brain.
There are two rivers that flow by the stables, so
being Hercules, he digs, ditches and redirects the rivers so
they flow through the stables and flush them out, and
(13:04):
you know, all the poops gone out. I assume the
cattle are okay. In the torrent of water that you know,
they're immortal cattle, they're fine. So Hercules has indeed fulfilled
the contract with King Augius, and then he goes back
to King Eurystheus, the guy who's in charge of the labors,
and he says, hey, I did it, and Euryci says, no,
I'm not going to count this. I don't care that
you cleaned the stables. You had help. You didn't clean
(13:25):
the stables. The rivers cleaned the stables, and also you
got paid for it, so you didn't suffer enough.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
So we had this great clever idea to manually redirect
a river, but then it wasn't that clever because it
didn't work out for it.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, I mean, okay, the stables probably smelled a whole
lot better, so I'm sure it was a net positive
for society.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, it's true. He was just too clever for his
own good.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Yeah, I got a hand. He gets a good story
out of it, and I swear I'm not making this up.
I saw, like, oh, I don't know, a little while ago,
I saw a van here in Boston for Augean Plumbing services.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And I was like, oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah it was fun. Yeah, so he has to keep
on doing his labor, is fine. He does not let
that daunt him, So don't be daunted even when people
give you bs about your contract. He has to rid
the Stemphalian marsh of these metallic birds. He has to
bring in the Cretan bull. He has to capture the
mares of Diamedes. These are horses that not only talk,
(14:24):
but they're flesh eating, like they're man eating horses. Labor
number nine Eurystheus sends Hercules to get the belt of Hippolyta.
You'll sometimes hear it referred to as the girdle of Hippolyta,
which is just a fancy word for belt and girdle
I guess has connotations of being like fancy ladyware, support
undergarments or something shapeware. But really, in this context, it's
(14:48):
the Greek word is zona. It means belt, and it's
not even necessarily just a fashion belt. It could also
we could also imagine it as being like a batman
type belt, you know, like she could gird her sword there.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
From what we know of the Amazon's like definitely like
carry a quiver of arrows off it something like that, right, something, Yeah,
it was to probably a pretty awesome belt if like
one of the labors is to go get it. Yeah,
probably pretty sweet.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I think it's a sweet belt. And also it belongs
to Hippolata, the queen of the Amazons, who most certainly
will kill you if she decides to. So Hercules goes
to Themyscira, which is indeed where the Amazons are supposed
to live in mythology. Wonder Woman fans might recognize that name,
and yes, this is supposed to be a fearsome belt
and a fearsome labor, but initially it's pretty chill. Hercules
(15:33):
goes up to Hippolyta and he says, hey, your majesty, Basically,
I lost a bet. Would you mind lending me your
belt for a bit so I can show it to
my quote unquote buddy Eurystheus. And initially she says okay,
and it's going to be this peaceful sort of thing.
But remember Hara has it in for Hercules. She wants
to mess things up, so she disguises herself as one
of the other Amazons and that Amazon like whispers and
(15:55):
hippolytasy or hey, your majesty, I think this guy is
up to something shady, trust him. So violence happens. That
did not need to happen. It did not need to
happen if everyone was above born and Harris state out
of it. But that's not the point of the story.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yes, they wouldn't be Hercules if he didn't have to
punch his way out of a problem exactly.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
So he does punch his way out of this problem too,
hypologist detriment, and he takes the belt and he schleps
it all the way to Eurystheus. Then okay, so he's
got three more labors left. One of them is he
has to get the cattle of this fearsome, many bodied
monster named Garyon. He has to go all the way
to the far west of the world to get the
golden apples of the Hesperides. So getting the golden apples
(16:36):
of the Hesperides also involves Atlas. When we think of Atlas,
we think of a big book of maps. But it
was called that because at one point, I don't know,
sixteenth century, a famous such Atlas was published with a
picture of the mythological character Atlas on the cover. He's
this big burly dude. He was one of the Titans,
so one of the generation of gods before Zeus and Hera.
(16:58):
He was on the wrong side in the war between
the Titans and the Olympians, between Atlas and his generation
and Zusanharra and their generation. So his punishment was to
hold up the sky on his shoulders. And yes, the
sky is made up of air, and it is very
very heavy. Now why is Atlas relevant A because geographically
he's near where the hesperities and these golden apples are,
(17:20):
but also be because he is the father of the hesperities,
the nymphs, the young women who guard these apples. So
Hercules is thinking, see there again, See he uses his brain.
He thinks, how can I how can I do this
in a way that is most effective and easiest. So
Hercules goes to Atlas and says, hey, Atlas, hey, you know,
(17:42):
could he do me a solid? Could you just have
a word with your daughters. I'll hold up the sky
while you go do that. I just, you know, I
just I need the apples. Okay, I lost a bet.
So Atlas is okay, and Hercules puts the sky on
his shoulders. Atlas goes and gets the apples. Okay, so
we've got the apples in a way that Hercules can
get to the But Hercules remember Hercules is holding up
(18:04):
the sky. So Hercules says to Atlas, hey, the sky.
It's heavier than I thought, Like, I can totally do this.
I can totally do this, you know, but could you
just kind of could you just hold it for me
for a sec while I adjust my lion skin for patting,
And Atlas says ok. Hercules goes off to adjust his
(18:27):
lion skin and never comes back. So Atlas, poor Atlas
is still there holding up the sky. But Hercules has
his apples and yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Fantastic. Yeah there's a brains woman. It also included being strong.
A lot of his great ideas involve being exceptionally strong.
But you know I worked out for him.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah. Yeah, many of these schemes they would not occur
to me. I am not of Herculean strength, so I
would not have it would not even have occurred to me. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
A lot of the schemes are like, well, actually, what
if I just lifted the sky a little bit, that'd
be cool, Like I could totally solve my problem with that.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Hand, because that's the thing that he can do.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But I can't drown these people. I'll just lift the sky.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And he's also someone who can go down to the underworld.
The twelfth labor is to get Cerberus, the three headed
guard dog of the underworld. And you know, Ben, you
were saying earlier that King Eurystheus and Hero were kind
of conspiring to make these labors as impossible as possible.
So going down to the underworld. Hmm, yeah, so he Heracules,
he is he is mortal even though his father is Zeus.
(19:31):
He is able to die, and well, this will become
relevant later.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Spoilers, So spoilers for a story that was written five
thousand years ago.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Woo yeah, okay, but the thing is these are myths.
So yeah, so Hercules he has to go down and
get Cerberus from the underworld. He brings Cerberus back, and
King Eurystheus is so scared when he sees this three
headed dog that he goes and hides and basically a
large piece of pottery, and.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
He captures it by just clubbing it, right, He just
hits it with his club, knocks it out, and drags
it basically.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I would have preferred a
story involving like bacon or something, but you know, no,
brute force. Brute force, that's what.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah, clubbing it didn't work. He could probably divert some
river to drown on maybe, Okay, So.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Okay, So finally, even though he's done what twenty percent
more labors than he thought he needed to, finally he's good. Okay, fine,
he's expiated his murder of his children, and he goes
and he has all sorts of random adventures, like kind
of like one off adventures. He wrestles with the son
of Gaya and Poseidon. He competes in an archery contest.
I haven't said much about archery. He's not surprisingly good
(20:38):
at archery. There's a princess's hand in marriage at stake.
The king who is in charge of deciding whose daughter
gets to marry flakes on that promise. Hercules is like, what,
you broke your promise. I'm entitled to something. So he
steals some cattle. All sorts of things happen in the process.
It's a it's all honestly, there's so much cattle theft
(20:59):
going on in the pology. There's a there's a brue
ha ha. He winds up killing the princess's brother. I
think he throws him from the walls of the city.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
As you do. He's seized by madness and just goes
on these massive killing rampages. Really does the labors once,
but he'll go in a few more killing rampages. I think.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
But he's just like, hey, Hercules, can you help me
with this? And he's just like, ahh yeah exactly. She
throws twenty people off the walls of the city, strangles
a couple of guys runs away.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, And what happens when you murder someone You have
to expiate it. You have to atone for it. So
to atone for this, he has to be a slave
to Queen Omphale of Lydia, and for a year, somehow
one thing leads to another. He sires a child with her,
(21:48):
and then you know, moves on as you do. People
like to have sex with Hercules, or people want Hercules'
you know, amazing Herculean. We would say, good gene, but
his they want his curtetude to be passed on to
their office.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
But they just want to see what it's all about, right,
I could imagine that also, just curiosity. That's a thing
that comes up a lot with these that are like
I love because I mean, when I grew up, I
was learning the Greek myths from elementary school, you learn, like,
you know, not just like the Disney version because that's
a little later than my time, but you know, just
the old the old school like Greek myths books where
(22:26):
everything is a little bit more like staid and proper
and everybody's wearing the togas and you know, oh, this
great god did this and this great hero did this.
But there's a lot of weird sex stuff in Greek mythology,
and the Hercules had that one thing where I think
he had to like he had like had sex with
fifty women in the same night, like some he killed
(22:46):
some monster, and the king was like, for a reward,
you can, like you know, have sex with all my daughters.
So he did it. There's a lot of like extreme
violence and like weird sex stuff, which caught me like
kind of off guard when I started learning about the
Greek myths later on. It's kind of like thinking about
like Disney characters heading sex, which I mean, you know,
like even with Hercules as an example, like a lot
(23:10):
of those Disney things are based off fairy tales of
myths and things, so when you do learn the real
myth it's like, oh and then the little mermaid dies
at the end or whatever, you know, letting all this
crazy stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, so Hercules has all sorts of adventures, some of
which are driven by madness, some of which are driven
by him being upset that he wasn't given his due
or his reward for punching his way through some monster
or other. So he is okay, he has shown that
he has been able to punch his way one way
(23:41):
or another through you know, not only the twelve labors
that Hara and Eurystheus came up with, but you know
this thing, that thing and the other thing sea monster.
But he, I said, I mentioned earlier that he was mortal.
So how does he die? How does this seemingly invincible
guy die? What finally gets to him? Well, he's married
to a named Dean Neira Now and Danira, you know,
(24:04):
they've had a little talk about their you know, their
respective relationship histories, and Dania's thinking, okay, she's totally into Hercules,
but she also wants him to be faithful to her.
And this is maybe a little bit out of character
or maybe shall we say, maybe Hercules needs a little
bit of help staying faithful. Yeah, so she talks to
centaur because centaurs. Centaur's new like herb lore and potions
(24:26):
and stuff like that, and she talks to the centaur
named Nessus, and basically Nessus says, hey, my bodily fluids,
and I'll leave it to your imagination to guess which
bodily fluid we're talking about. Mm hmm. Anyway, Nessus provides
Dianira with I think it's some sort of cloth with
(24:46):
its bodily fluids, and Nessus says, hey, you know, make
sure he comes into contact with this, and he'll stay
faithful to you. You won't cheat on you. So of
course Danira believes the centaur and get Nessus's semen on
Hercules and will okay, it is true that Hercules did
(25:06):
not cheat on Dianea after that. Instead, it turns out
that Nessus's semen is incredibly poisonous. Hercules, and he feels
like his body is burning up, and I think he
actually he may literally burst into flames. Now he's Hercules.
He tries to punch his way through things. He tries
to solve problems. What is the problem? What is the
fearsome beast hates this raging, consuming fire, so he kills
(25:30):
himself to get away from the pain, and he dies,
but he is the son of a god, and eventually
he gets taken up to Mount Olympus. This doesn't happen
to everyone, and he becomes a basically a god or
he gets to hang out on Olympus forever after, and
he marries Heibi, the goddess of youth, and presumably that
(25:53):
works out and they have a copacetic marriage. So that's Hercules,
and he is so badass that you know, not only
were these stories told about him, like it's come on,
I don't know that, Chuck Norris of Greek antiquities.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and solve all of your problems with punching or violence,
just violence of all different manners.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, yep. So how can we justify how can we
get a moral lesson out of Hercules going around punching people? Okay,
so it is true that sometimes he actually helps people,
like when he punches his way through a beast that is,
you know, devastating the countryside. Or if you're medieval or
Renaissance Christians, you can take inspiration from a very small,
(26:34):
less punchy story of Hercules called Hercules at the Crossroads,
where Hercules is at a crossroads, and then there is
the personification of virtue on one one of the roads,
and then on the other fork in the road there
is the personification of vice. And we should imagine these
as sexy ladies, because that's how these things work. And Hercules,
or at least the personification of vice should be a
(26:55):
sexy lady. And Hercules has to choose, should he choose
virtue or vice. Of course he chooses virtue, and this
is enough to make him like okay. For medieval Christian
writers and artists, and also the Renaissance and in the
Middle Ages, there is this trend of a trend or
like this practice of finding Christian allegories in stories that
(27:18):
had nothing to do with Christianity. And so Hercules punching
his way through all of these fearsome beasts got turned
into a Christian allegory for you know, prevailing over moral obstacles.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Instead of punching a three headed dog, you're like punching
your desire to not go to church.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Today, exactly, exactly exactly, So that's all you need to do.
You take a story that you think is cool just
because it's cool, and then you say it's allegorical.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, yeah, we like these Hercules ones. We don't want
to throw these stories in the garbage because they don't
have they're not biblical. But maybe we can find some
way to like kind of rationalize why it's cool and
he was popular like basically for all of history, right,
I mean they're still doing they're still doing Hercules. I
think the rock was Hercules like a couple of years ago.
(28:10):
But like, yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you
about with with Hercules was you see a lot of
like Roman emperors wearing the lion's skin because they think
their Hercules are there. They believe to be equivalent to
Hercules or something like that. And the Roman emperors that
do this are never the sane ones. It's always the
crazy Roman emperors who are doing this, the ones who
are like completely have lost it and gone off the rails.
(28:33):
You can usually tell because they're depicted looking like Hercules.
He's kind of like, like you know how, like it's
kind of like the Napoleon of antiquity because like all
the crazy people kind of think that they're him.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, I mean I don't want to go like armchair
sycle analyzing people who have been dead. For two millennia.
But yeah, he's no, there's there's definitely cosplay going on,
and I think I think you're free to hypothesize whatever
you want. And let's put a pin in that and
go to a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Okay, you were talking about Hercules. I have a story
prepared for today as well. I'm going to talk about
a guy from the American Revolution who was known as
the Virginia Hercules, and kind of like what you were saying,
Hercules became a very popular figure at the time, but
that story has like been timeless and people have kind
of been reading it. Even in like colonial America, people
(29:31):
knew the Hercules story and he's basically been like the
original like graphic novel hero and continues to be. And
so around the time of the American Revolution, we had
another big, strong guy who punched his way through most
of his problems. Most of his problems, of course were
British people, but they called him the Virginia Hercules. And
his name is Peter Francisco and he's one of my
favorite stories from the American Revolution. Because you were kind
(29:54):
of talking about, you know, how we can view Hercules
in a historical context and Peter Francisco one of these
guys that I love, like the stories that I love
for the guy really doesn't contribute much to the history
of the American Revolution except that he just like took
out a lot of the enemy, right, He just kind
(30:14):
of fought his way through the war, was very successful,
and then that was it. He doesn't like get into
politics afterwards. He doesn't do anything else except solve his
problems with violence and move forward. So let's talk about
Peter Francisco for a second.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So this is cool. So he's a real guy.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, yeah, he's a real guy. And it's you know,
I think with a lot of things, you get a
little bit of you know, history being exaggerated over time,
and so that happens. But we know this guy existed.
We've seen his handwriting, you know, we have letters that
people have sent to him before. So he was a
real guy and his story is really weird.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
So he first appears on a foggy night in seventeen
sixty five on this little wharf in Virginia right on
the coast. There's just like a five year old boy
who speaks no English, standing on the edge of the dock.
The kid's like gigantic, and nobody knows who he is
or where he came from. We think maybe Portugal, just
because of like the descriptions of like he had, you know,
(31:11):
darker hair, darker eyes. There was some Portuguese trading going
on in this area around this time. I don't know
really how they come up with these things, but one
of the best guesses is that he is in Portuguese
or Spanish or something like that.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, and the name Francisco that doesn't sound like one
of your Anglo names like Smith or Adams or Arnold.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
For sure, you know. Basically, yeah, names Francisco. And he
probably wasn't like, didn't speak Spanish, so maybe I don't know,
I don't know, but he didn't speak English. And so
they find him and he gets adopted by a rich
Virginia family. He ends up being kind of tangentially related
to Patrick Henry, who was a member of the Virginia
government and is very famous for doing the speech of like,
(31:51):
you know, give me liberty or give me death, the
speech that my mom used to recite perfectly word for
word every time me and my brother were driving her crazy.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Oh that's one parent.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And so so Peter gets taken in by this family,
and within a few years he's gigantic. Right. He grows
to be six six two eighty is kind of where
we place him height and weight wise. And remember that,
like the average American at this time is like five
six five seven, So he's a foot taller and everybody
else probably one hundred pounds heavier than them. He's a big,
strong dude. And so he of course becomes a blacksmith
(32:23):
because that's a job that you can just be successful
by being big and strong. And then you know, when
he's not blacksmithing, he's performing feats of strength in his village.
He's lifting wagons, he's doing stuff like that. He's just
trying to impress girls. And when the war starts, as
it does in the American Revolution, he's obviously a pretty
prime candidate to become a soldier, and he's super in.
(32:44):
So I talked about that Patrick Henry, give me liberty
or give me death. He was there, Peter Francisco was
there to watch that speech happen. He's so pumped he leaves.
He's just like, I'm joining the army. And he joins
the army and he goes off to war.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
So that's yeah, that's cool that we have an eyewitness,
we have an actual original audience member, and we know
exactly what effect that speech had.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Oh that's a really good point, right, Like, yeah, he
was just so excited about hearing about it that he
was just like, I'm in, I'm signing up right now.
And so he goes off and he enlists in the
Virginia Militia and he starts fighting. He's serving up north.
He's serving with George Washington's army. He gets shot twice,
he gets stabbed a bunch of times, he fights through
(33:24):
several battles. He's the biggest, strongest guy in the army,
and he's pretty successful warrior in the early days of
the revolution. And George Washington at one point awards him
a medal and a sword, a five long broadsword, so
not a two handed sword, but like a Scottish style
broadsword with the basket on it, kind of like a
highlight during kind of thing. And he says as part
(33:47):
of the citation, General George Washington says, without him, we
would have lost two crucial battles, perhaps the war and
with it our freedom. He was truly a one man army.
That's what George Washington writes about him, writes about him
after the war, but kind of in relation to this
a war that he gave him Valley Forge, which was
not a fun time.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah, Valley Forge. I feel like anyone who was at
Valley Forge for any length of time he was there.
I assume he was there in the winter.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, Yeah, like the big winter at Valley Forge where
they all went there and basically like they've been fighting
and they thought maybe this wasn't going to work out,
maybe we're all maybe we're all going to lose. Like,
you know, the winter sucks. Everybody's kind of deserting. Just brutal, brutal,
very low point for the American Army.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Yeah, supplies and morale were really low. It's like winter
of seventy seven, about twenty five percent of the troops
were deemed unfit for duty for one reason or another.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, everybody's sick, everybody's starving, everybody's just going home because
they're like, I don't have to do this anymore. I'm
just leaving. I'm not getting they were getting paid h Yeah. Yeah.
So he survives that war and he gets the sword,
and he's already a veteran of several battles. He's been
fighting since made day one of the war. He's got
a couple of like high notes to his career, and
(35:05):
the first one comes at the Battle of Stony Point,
New York in seventeen seventy nine. So the idea was
this little group under a guy named Matt Anthony Wayne.
And we'll see why he's called Matt Anthony Wayne in
a minute. They were going to try to take this
fort at this place called Stony Point. It was a
coastal fort on a river. It's in New York, and
(35:25):
the British were holding it. They had more guys than
the Americans, and they had a couple of ships in
the harbor. But the Americans decide they're going to go
in at night and try this like night attack. They're
going to try to try to faint, try to draw
the British garrison out, and then they're going to try
to send a little group of guys called a forlorn hope.
Twenty guys were just going to run in through the gates,
try to get the gates open, try to cause chaos,
(35:48):
and like kind of carve the way for the rest
of the American attack to come. Through. So Americans have
about two hundred guys, there's like two or three hundred
British defending it. But the success of this operation is
dependent on this twenty man Special Forces Forlorn Hope. Matt
Anthony is called Matt Anthony because he is going to
lead this personally, and his second in command is a
(36:09):
guy named Francois Luis de Fleury. He's a French American.
And then the guy that is at the front of
the charge is Peter Francisco. So they do this little plan.
It works. The Forlorn Hope attacks the first volley. Basically
that the British fire Matt Anthony Wayne gets hit and
goes down, is down and bleeding and he's just like
(36:30):
trying to like scream and yell for his guys to
keep going. So Fleury, Colonel Fleury, has to lead the
attack and him and Francisco are the first two guys
in of course, right and they get in there and
they get up on the walls and it's just these
two dudes fighting a bunch of British and the British
had been tipped off that the Americans were coming, so
they were ready. The British commander had all of the
(36:53):
British soldiers sleep in their uniforms with their weapons loaded
and ready. They knew the attack was coming, they didn't
quite know what form it was gonna take. They were
a little surprised to see this, you know, seven foot
tall monster charging at them with a broadsword.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
I would be surprised too, yes, but they.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Were armed and ready, and so Peter Francisco just kind of,
you know, just kind of pretty much single handedly slices
his way through the defenders. He kills three guys in
the courtyard. He gets up on the walls. He's throwing
guys off the wall like Hercules style. He has one
of his like you know, possessed by rage or possessed
by madness, or however Hercules phrased it. He's just throwing
(37:32):
guys off, cutting guys down. They get to the small
group of Americans, these twenty guys, they and they're down.
They're losing people all over the place. But Francisco and
Flurry get to the flag that's on the top of
the British fort. The rest of the American attack starting
to come. It's complete chaos. It's night. Nobody can see anything.
It's not like they have flashlights. Everybody's using torch light
and maybe you can see flashes from gunfire. Right there's
(37:54):
no there's no spotlights or anything like that. Is dark
and nobody knows what the heck's going on. Cisco and
Flurry are like way behind enemy lines, like in their base,
like killing their dudes, and they get up to the flagpole.
Peter Francisco is like he's cut, he's shot twice. A
British officer like slashes him across the chest with a saber.
(38:16):
He kills that guy, kills a couple other guys and
kind of holds the line while Flury pulls down the
British flag and puts up the American flag.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
So it's like literally literally capture the flag.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Literally capture the flag. Yeah, and you know it doesn't
seem like much, right, you know, in a video game,
it ends there.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
It's like, oh, it's just a symbolic gesture.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Sure, exactly, except that with all this chaos and everything
going on around them. You know, some of these British
troops that were ready, they run outside, they see all
this chaos and gunfire and all the cannons are going off, well,
the muskets are going off, the splashing, explosions and screaming,
and they look up at the tower and there's an
American flag over at the tower and they're just like, ah, crap,
we lost, Like, let's get out of here before we die.
(38:55):
So they all surrender or retreat. The two British warships
in the harbor, each of them had enough firepower to
level that fort. Probably oh totally yeah. They don't see
the flag go up. They hear the cheering of the
Americans having captured the fort. The British think that it's fine.
They're like, oh, we did it, we took a we won,
no problem.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
They thought it was the British chair.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
They thought it was the British cheering yes, and they're like, okay, cool,
don't worry about it. And then the next morning when
the sun came up, they were like, oh wait, actually
that's an American flag. And actually the Americans took every
cannon on that fort, and they're all pointed at us
right now, so they had to turn and run away. No, yeah,
(39:35):
so they captured it. And it's basically single handedly Peter
Francisco and Colonel Francois Fleury and that's it, right, like
kind of a crazy story. It's this little ford in
upstate New York. But it's a pretty herculean feet that
he undertook there.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Yeah yeah, and like a lot of the herculean feats.
I don't know if this was their intent or if
it's just sort of a moment of like, yeah, go us,
go us when they replaced the flag, But it seemed
like it took a lot of strength to do it.
But it's like this one little thing that turned things
so decisively that even if they didn't plan it out,
even it was just a spontaneous thing, they should take
(40:12):
credit for it. For the tactic.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah yeah, it's that thing you were talking about with
Hercules being clever, right, it was. It was his clever
plan to kill every British person between him and the flag.
Yeah yeah, in the hand to hand combat and then
replace the flag. But it worked, right, I mean, there
is a certain cleverness of beating your way through the enemy.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And then got way more bang for his book. So
was that the end of Francisco's career or did he
go on to do more daring.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Do So that's not the end of his career. There
is more to be had. So after the fighting goes
on in the north, the action kind of moves to
the south. The British aren't having a lot of success
up north. They have some loyalist support in the South,
so they're going to move down there and try to
turn the war into more like combat in the southern colonies.
Towards the end of the war, George Washington by sending
(41:00):
Peter Francisco down there to deal with them. Well, let's
talk about the Battle of Camden in seventeen eighty. Camden
is in the Carolinas. Peter Francisco is fighting, They're losing.
The Horatio Gates is in command of the American forces.
They're getting defeated. Francisco's out there by himself. He's surrounded
by dead countrymen and the Brits are charging him. Cavalry
(41:20):
charge comes at him. He gets cut with a cavalry saber.
He kills the cavalry guy with the bayonet, pulls the
guy off his horse, jumps on the horse and rides
off to safety. He's like the last surviving member of
his unit, and he escapes by killing a British cavalry
officer and riding away to escape.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
Steals his horse.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Okay links up with his former unit, who has already retreated.
He was probably covering their retreat, which is a thing
that he's very famous for doing over and over and
over again. Gets back there, finds that his commanding officer
has been shot and is wounded, gets off the horse,
gives the horse to his commanding officer, says, you need this,
you need to ride to a hospital and gets safe.
(41:59):
I'll be right back. So then after the commanding officer
rides off, Francisco's like, you know what, Like I rode
past a bunch of unmanned cannons back there, I bet
like I could probably drag a couple of those off
the battlefield before the British steal them.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
I bet he could too.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, it's very clever thinking, right, It's herculean levels of
clever thinking, which is like, you know what, the British
won't capture all of these cannons if I just run
over there and drag them back with my bare hands.
And so that's what he does. He runs back, he
saves a couple of cannons from the battlefield. One of
them is eleven hundred pounds and it's on wheels, and
he drags it by himself. It's generally designed to be
(42:36):
dragged by one to two horses. But Peter Francisco, big
strong guy, no problem, quick thinking on his.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Part, and big musculature.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yes, this guy was definitely pretty ripped. Yeah, or he
could have been like one of those I don't know
if you ever watch like the ESPN, like strongman competitions,
and they never like huge muscles or just giant dudes,
and it's just like they lift these unbelieve peably heavy things,
but they're not exactly like they're not shredded, they're just
monstrously huge guys. It's kind of how I picture Peter Francisco,
(43:10):
so capdence a defeat. A couple months later, there's a
Battle of Guildford Courthouse, which is an American victory. It's
a turning point in the South, like the Americans are
losing and they have a pretty successful fight at Guildford Courthouse.
After kind of being in trouble for a while, they
have a pretty successful attack there. Virginia Hercules is out there,
(43:31):
Peter Francisco. He's credited with killing thirteen British soldiers with
a broadsword during this battle, and including one guy who
they said got his head chopped off long ways, which
you can try to imagine what that might look like.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Oh, that's got hurt.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
I mean maybe it didn't. It dis pierce the brain immediately.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Oh that's true. Yeah, just it might be.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
A very pleasurable way to die. If you had to
choose how to be killed by Peter Francisco on the battlefield,
that might be top five.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I don't ever want to be in a position to
find out, but I can easily imagine this guy doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yes, he was definitely strong enough to make that happen.
But this battle doesn't work out that well for Francisco.
He kills thirteen British soldiers, but he's completely surrounded. The
rest of his unit's kind of falling back. He's wading
into the enemy. He's killing them left and right. He's
getting stabbed over and over again. He gets stabbed somewhere,
depending on who you ask, somewhere between six and twelve times.
(44:22):
He gets shot a couple times, passes out, bleeding all
over the battlefield. The battle continues on without him. He
is laying there, presumed dead on the battlefield, except he
doesn't die. He gets back up and he just kind
of drags himself to a nearby farmhouse to try to
get help, and luckily he finds a friendly farmhouse that
(44:45):
are sympathetic to the Patriot cause, and the family there
takes care of him. They put him in one of
their guest rooms. They give him some food and water,
they bandage his wounds, They get a doctor for him,
and he recovers a little bit. He's still pretty messed up.
He's still got like bleedingages and things. When British cavalry
rides through because they've heard that he's here and they
(45:06):
heard that he's alive and they have come to get him. Oh,
you can't leave a guy like Peter Francisco alive if
you hear that he's around, if you hear news that
like the doctor's been off treating some six foot seven
dude with twenty seven saber cuts and six bullets in him, like,
you know, maybe go investigate that.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah, the guy.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
They said to investigate is a guy named Banister Tarleton,
who will I would like to talk about on this
show at some point in the future. Tarleton is, I mean,
the best way to describe him is that the bad
guy and the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot is pretty
much based off him. He was a real bad dude.
Tarleton was kind of the like. He was of the
school of like the Americans aren't going to submit, let's
(45:46):
just burn the whole place of the ground until they
change their minds. Really rough kind of guy. And his
troops were mostly loyalists colonists, so very which was some
of the most brutal fighting of the war, was not
between the British and Americans, but between and the Americans
and the other Americans and so and so. Tartletan's legion
shows up. It's about twelve guys. It's a squadron of
(46:07):
British cavalry. They ride up to the farmhouse. They're gonna
talk to the Virginia Hercules. They're gonna give him a
hard time.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Talk to him.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yes, they're they're going to arrest him. And before they
put him in chains, they get him out. They drag
him out of the house. The commander of the squadron
demands Peter Francisco's belt buckle and the silver buckles on
his shoes, and Peter Francisco he doesn't want to give those.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Up, nor should he.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
No, even though he's half dead. He draws the enemy
officer's sword from its scabbard off, the guy kills him
with it, kills two other guys with it. They all
kind of scattered, and then he steals six of their
horses and rides away.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
He steals six of their horses.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yes, he kills three of these guys. He steals six horses,
rides off unscathed while half dead, and rejoins his yet
not dead. Not done with the war, he continued and
he serves under Lafayette during the Yorktown Campaign, which, as
you know, is the end of the war.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
And Peter Francisco was there.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Peter Francisco was there, and that's it, right, that's the
end of the war, Like the British surrender of Yorktown,
that's the end of the war. Peter Francisco is this
big time Virginia war hero. He goes home.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
I bet yeah, probably never had to pay for a
drink the rest of his.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Life, certainly not. He goes back, he becomes a blacksmith,
He learns how to read, which he didn't know how
to do before this. Oh good for him, Yes, and
he marries three different women, I think, the same as
Hercules had three different wives.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
Right, yeah, well, it depends on how you define married.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
But yeah, okay, all right, so yeah, so he had
three different wives, presumably not at the same time, and
did not die from centaur seamen. He died of old
age at the age of seventy one, despite all of
the battle injuries and wounds he had sustained during the
course of his life. He dies in eighteen thirty one.
As just like a great unsung hero of the American Revolution,
(47:55):
who was just this great war hero that nobody really
talks about when we talk about the American Revolution. Yeah,
he had a slightly better end than the mythological Hercules.
You didn't get to be a constellation, but he wasn't
set on fire by centaur Jiz.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
I'd say Francisco had the better end, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Yeah, I'm going to go with you on that one. Yeah,
I mean, I guess that's kind of all we have
to talk about today. The Hercules and Virginia, Hercules, Peter Francisco,
two big, strong guys who never met a problem that
couldn't be solved by punching it in the face and
strangling it.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Well as lessons go, I guess it's useful for a
very very very small proportion of the population and for us, myrtles,
we have to figure out something else.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
But yeah, we have to be differently clever. Yes, well,
that's all we have today, and thank you guys so
much as always for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs,
and Allie Lamer. Mixing and music in sound design is
(49:07):
by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to
Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week is based
on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where you
can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If
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(49:32):
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your podcasts,
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. It is almost midnight as two large
constrictor snakes slowly slither down the walls of a quiet
nursery towards the two twin boys who lie sleeping in
a crib at the center of the room. These are
not just any ordinary serpents.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
They are dark emissaries sent by a vengeful goddess on
a cruel mission to choke the life.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
From these children in the name of the Queen of Olympus.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Slowly, silently, deliberately, they make their way over the edge
of the crib and drop quietly down next to the
sleeping children. But these snakes have no idea what's about
to hit them.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of the
Badass of the Week podcast. My name is Ben Tom
I'm the author of the Badass epic Fails and Gut
Some Glory book series is and today we want to
kind of bring the show to a new format, bring
the idea into a new format. I've been writing about
badasses for nineteen years now, but it's time to start
(01:16):
something different, and to help me do that, I'm going
to be bringing on a co host. So let me
introduce you to doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Hey, what's up?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Pat is an academic. She's here to bring the show
some degree of.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Respectability and gravitas.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Pat is a PhD classicist. She teaches Latin and Ancient Greek,
has taught it at the college level, and she came
to one of my book readings once.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, and yes, I am an academic, and I like
definitions of terms, and the term badass to the newer
people might be a bit nebulous. Should we define badass?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah? We should probably define our terms before we proceed.
We're going to be talking a lot about badasses in
the weeks and hopefully months and years to come, so
we should kind of establish what that means. I think
about when the first Badass book came out, I had
already written the entire book. I'd been writing about badasses
every week for something like five or six years at
(02:11):
this point. But my editor was like, yeah, you have
to put in an introduction where you define what a
badass is, like what unites all of these people? And
to me, it was always something that was kind of
inherently there. Right, they are badasses, and I shouldn't even
have to explain it after I tell you their stories.
But to sit down and think about it was an
interesting exercise. You know, what do Leonidas and Genghis Khan
(02:34):
have in common? Right? What about Vlade Impaler and Joan
of Arc. They're very different people, They're from different time periods,
they were interested in accomplishing different things. So what unites
them as badasses? Well, it took me a long time
to think about this, but what I eventually came up
with was perseverance. The idea that they never stopped, they
never backed down, they never gave up. Whatever it was
(02:55):
they were trying to accomplish was almost irrelevant as long
as they went all out for it, balls to the
wall all the time, never gave up. Every time they
hit a wall, they broke through it. Every time they
got knocked down, they got back up again. Some of
them wanted to defend their homeland, some of them wanted
to conquer empires. Some of them were just criminally insane.
But it doesn't matter as long as they just kept
(03:16):
pushing forward and never gave up. For me, that was
the one thing that all of these badasses had in common.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So, yeah, and these people who in our gut we
think of as badass. Whom we respond to as badass
are ones who, with all of their determination and perseverance,
to an outside observer, inspire respect whatever their motives may be,
whatever their values may be. And you know, I may
(03:44):
not agree with the motives of all of them, My
values might not be in alignment with their values, but
there's still something about them that compels me or other
observers to say, oh huh, it's something that I don't
know sends ideology. And you know, some philosophers would argue
that everything is ideology. There is nothing outside ideology.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Sure, but forget those guys. Ultimately, this is why we
care about these badasses. They persevered, and we can respect
that determination and drive. It inspires us to push harder
on our own lives, even if we're not doing something
quite as extreme as chucking grenades at our enemies while
crawling through a ditch full of barbed wire under machine
gun fire. You know, we can kind of look at
these stories and think, Okay, you know, if this person
(04:30):
did that, maybe I can get my inbox cleared before
I go home from work today.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Right, we would say that badass is going to be
all kinds of things they can be smart, they can
be brave, they can be clever, noble, heroic. They could
be willing to sacrifice for their friends. They could come
up with new ideas and new concepts. They could be
outsmarting their foes, coming up with clever strategies, coming up
with totally boneheaded strategies that nevertheless work out, et cetera,
(04:58):
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, and we're going to be talk talking about all
of that. We'll have explorers, athletes, artists, scientists, folks from
all corners of the world and all time periods of history.
Even a few mythological and fictional characters thrown in as well.
Some of them are smart, some are clever, and some
just I don't know. There's something weirdly satisfying about these
stories where the hero just solves all their problems by
(05:19):
punching them repeatedly until they're unconscious and then drowning them
in a river.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah. Determined whether you're punching your way through your problems
metaphorically or literally physically punching your way through people and things.
Speaking of which, today we're going to start with a
hero who is famous for being big and strong, but
also a little bit cleverer than we often give him
credit for. I'm talking about the legendary mythological Greek hero Hercules.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Was Hercules smart?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Well, he was kind of a hot mess by our standards,
But honestly, that's par for the course when you're talking
about Greek myths.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, that's the weird thing with Greek myths. They're like
way more bizarre than the ones you read when you
were a kid.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So let's get into it. Here's the story of Hercules. Okay,
so this is maybe the og badass. This is Hercules,
you know, since we're talking about hitting the gym, drowning
(06:22):
people in the river, and you know, yes, he punches
his way out of situations, but he also sometimes thinks
his way out of situations. But to be fair, his
thinking kind of always includes the fact that he has
the braun in addition to the brains. Like he's not
going to sit down in front of computer and like
hack his way into the CIA mainframe or something like that.
(06:44):
He's going to come up with creative ways to use
his muscle. And he, you know, with this combination of
braun and brain, he manages to think and punch his
way out of some pretty unwinnable situations.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I'm excited to hear about it.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm excited to tell it. So Hercules, you know, we
know from Greak and Roman mythology his Greek name is Heracles,
and I mentioned this. He's better known these days as Hercules.
But the Greek name Heracles actually tells you a little
bit about his origin story. The name means glory of Harah,
Gloria of Hera, the queen of the gods, and so Hercules,
(07:19):
his quote unquote biological father is actually Zeus, the king
of the gods. But Zeus fell in love with a
mortal woman like he does, and disguised himself as the
woman's husband, King Emphytrion, and slept with her that way.
So ALCHEMENI, the woman didn't know she was cheating on
her husband, and anyway said she gives birth to two boys,
(07:41):
one of whom is totally mortal and one of whom
is Hercules. And when Hercules was born, Hara was Harra
was jealous because Harrah's husband Zeus keeps cheating on her
and she's powerless, powerless or something's preventing her from just
totally having it out with Zeus. So she takes it
out on everyone else, and she sends snakes to strangle
(08:04):
baby Hercules, and what do you think baby Hercules does?
He strangles them right back. So he saves himself and
his little brother Effelties. And this is just totally iconic
for everything that's going on. A. He's totally strong even
as an infant, and B he's got this wrath of
Hara following him. This will become relevant many many times later.
(08:25):
So he grows up, he gets married. He gets married
to a woman named Megara, which is where the inspiration
for the Disney character comes from. And this madness from Hara.
She sends this madness on him, and while he does that,
he kills his own kids, and that's just completely and
utterly awful. When he comes out of this divinely induced
(08:47):
rage and he's now kind of more in touch with reality,
he's like, oh, shoot, I killed my kids. He feels
awful about it. And when you murder someone in ancient Greece,
you're supposed to atone for it some okay, not killing
someone in battle, but murdering someone. So you go to
the oracle at Delphi, which Hercules does, and the oracle
(09:09):
says Okay, you've got to perform ten labors for King Eurystheus.
So Hercules says, okay, I'll go for perform ten labors
for King Eurystheus.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
So my understanding of the labors is kind of that
Eurystheus and Harah are kind of working together to make
these labors impossible for Hercules, like give him impossible things
to do so that he will either die or fail
and face I mean, he did fly into a psychotic
killing rage and murder his own children, so like maybe
(09:36):
he does deserve a little bit of justice, but at
the same time, like they're giving him impossible tasks, which
makes it cooler when he does them exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah, yeah, because standard operating procedure, if you're just like
a mere mortal and you kill someone and you go
to the oracle at Delphi, if you do the thing
that the oracle says to expiate your crime, then generally,
like if you do that, then like you're okay in
the eyes of the gods. But this no Haarrah had
it in for him?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Was that actually for you? Like if you killed if
you like went into a rage and like murdered your wife,
you had to go like dependance at the Workle of Delphi.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
That was one way to deal with it. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
he has ten labors that he's supposed to do. But wait,
I hear you cry, don't we hear about the famous
twelve flavors of Hercules? Where did that come from? Did
we not know how to count? Is this like a
base ten base twelve thing? So the original contract, the
original deal was for ten labors, but as Hercules does
(10:27):
a few of them, some of them wind up not counting.
So King Eurystheus gets the final say on these labors.
I won't go into all of them in detail, just
rest assured they're all cool in their own way. Most
of them have him go up against fearsome beasts of
some sort of or another, which you know, you can
totally get all Ray Harry howsing on when you imagine
them in your heads. But I'll just go through a
few of them. The first one is the Nemean lion,
(10:48):
So some of the labors actually were because there was
a specific beast that was terrorizing a specific village. The
Nemean lion actually was terrorizing the area of Nemea. Why
was the lion terrorizing the area of Nemea a a
lion b It was a ferocious lion specifically raised by
Hero or made more ferocious by hera to cause problems
(11:09):
on purpose. And it's got an impenetrable skin, so he
can't kill it with an arrow or an axe or anything.
He strangles it and then he takes its own claw,
skins it and makes a lion skin that he wears.
And so sometimes in art you'll see a figure with
a beard and you'll note heracles because he's got a
club and he's got this lion skin draped over his shoulders.
(11:33):
So this Nummian lion, that's how he gets that iconic
lion skin, and to everyone's surprise, he survives. He also
has to kill the hydro, which is the snake where
when he chop off one head, several grow back. He
has to capture the Sirenian hind, which is big fancy deer.
He has to do that and bring it in alive.
He has to capture the Arimanthean bore, which was just
playing terrorizing the countryside. He has to clean the Augean stables.
(11:58):
And it may seem like what isn't punching his way
through fearsome beasts. What he's all about. So the Augean stables,
there's this King Augius, and he had stables with lots
of cattle, and cattle, being cattle, they're living organisms. They
poop and there was a lot of poop. These cattle
were immortal, and when you were immortal, you have a
(12:19):
lot of time on your hands to eat and poop.
So Hercules looks at these stables. Now here's the deal.
King Augius, the guy who owned the stables, said, if
you do it in a day, I will pay you.
I will give you ten percent. I will give you
one tenth of the cattle. And Hercules is like, okay, cool.
So he's looking at the stables, maybe holding his nose.
(12:40):
Now this is something that would occur to Hercules, not
to me, because I am not strong. He uses his brain.
There are two rivers that flow by the stables, so
being Hercules, he digs, ditches and redirects the rivers so
they flow through the stables and flush them out, and
(13:04):
you know, all the poops gone out. I assume the
cattle are okay. In the torrent of water that you know,
they're immortal cattle, they're fine. So Hercules has indeed fulfilled
the contract with King Augius, and then he goes back
to King Eurystheus, the guy who's in charge of the labors,
and he says, hey, I did it, and Euryci says, no,
I'm not going to count this. I don't care that
you cleaned the stables. You had help. You didn't clean
(13:25):
the stables. The rivers cleaned the stables, and also you
got paid for it, so you didn't suffer enough.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
So we had this great clever idea to manually redirect
a river, but then it wasn't that clever because it
didn't work out for it.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, I mean, okay, the stables probably smelled a whole
lot better, so I'm sure it was a net positive
for society.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, it's true. He was just too clever for his
own good.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Yeah, I got a hand. He gets a good story
out of it, and I swear I'm not making this up.
I saw, like, oh, I don't know, a little while ago,
I saw a van here in Boston for Augean Plumbing services.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And I was like, oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah it was fun. Yeah, so he has to keep
on doing his labor, is fine. He does not let
that daunt him, So don't be daunted even when people
give you bs about your contract. He has to rid
the Stemphalian marsh of these metallic birds. He has to
bring in the Cretan bull. He has to capture the
mares of Diamedes. These are horses that not only talk,
(14:24):
but they're flesh eating, like they're man eating horses. Labor
number nine Eurystheus sends Hercules to get the belt of Hippolyta.
You'll sometimes hear it referred to as the girdle of Hippolyta,
which is just a fancy word for belt and girdle
I guess has connotations of being like fancy ladyware, support
undergarments or something shapeware. But really, in this context, it's
(14:48):
the Greek word is zona. It means belt, and it's
not even necessarily just a fashion belt. It could also
we could also imagine it as being like a batman
type belt, you know, like she could gird her sword there.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
From what we know of the Amazon's like definitely like
carry a quiver of arrows off it something like that, right, something, Yeah,
it was to probably a pretty awesome belt if like
one of the labors is to go get it. Yeah,
probably pretty sweet.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I think it's a sweet belt. And also it belongs
to Hippolata, the queen of the Amazons, who most certainly
will kill you if she decides to. So Hercules goes
to Themyscira, which is indeed where the Amazons are supposed
to live in mythology. Wonder Woman fans might recognize that name,
and yes, this is supposed to be a fearsome belt
and a fearsome labor, but initially it's pretty chill. Hercules
(15:33):
goes up to Hippolyta and he says, hey, your majesty, Basically,
I lost a bet. Would you mind lending me your
belt for a bit so I can show it to
my quote unquote buddy Eurystheus. And initially she says okay,
and it's going to be this peaceful sort of thing.
But remember Hara has it in for Hercules. She wants
to mess things up, so she disguises herself as one
of the other Amazons and that Amazon like whispers and
(15:55):
hippolytasy or hey, your majesty, I think this guy is
up to something shady, trust him. So violence happens. That
did not need to happen. It did not need to
happen if everyone was above born and Harris state out
of it. But that's not the point of the story.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yes, they wouldn't be Hercules if he didn't have to
punch his way out of a problem exactly.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
So he does punch his way out of this problem too,
hypologist detriment, and he takes the belt and he schleps
it all the way to Eurystheus. Then okay, so he's
got three more labors left. One of them is he
has to get the cattle of this fearsome, many bodied
monster named Garyon. He has to go all the way
to the far west of the world to get the
golden apples of the Hesperides. So getting the golden apples
(16:36):
of the Hesperides also involves Atlas. When we think of Atlas,
we think of a big book of maps. But it
was called that because at one point, I don't know,
sixteenth century, a famous such Atlas was published with a
picture of the mythological character Atlas on the cover. He's
this big burly dude. He was one of the Titans,
so one of the generation of gods before Zeus and Hera.
(16:58):
He was on the wrong side in the war between
the Titans and the Olympians, between Atlas and his generation
and Zusanharra and their generation. So his punishment was to
hold up the sky on his shoulders. And yes, the
sky is made up of air, and it is very
very heavy. Now why is Atlas relevant A because geographically
he's near where the hesperities and these golden apples are,
(17:20):
but also be because he is the father of the hesperities,
the nymphs, the young women who guard these apples. So
Hercules is thinking, see there again, See he uses his brain.
He thinks, how can I how can I do this
in a way that is most effective and easiest. So
Hercules goes to Atlas and says, hey, Atlas, hey, you know,
(17:42):
could he do me a solid? Could you just have
a word with your daughters. I'll hold up the sky
while you go do that. I just, you know, I
just I need the apples. Okay, I lost a bet.
So Atlas is okay, and Hercules puts the sky on
his shoulders. Atlas goes and gets the apples. Okay, so
we've got the apples in a way that Hercules can
get to the But Hercules remember Hercules is holding up
(18:04):
the sky. So Hercules says to Atlas, hey, the sky.
It's heavier than I thought, Like, I can totally do this.
I can totally do this, you know, but could you
just kind of could you just hold it for me
for a sec while I adjust my lion skin for patting,
And Atlas says ok. Hercules goes off to adjust his
(18:27):
lion skin and never comes back. So Atlas, poor Atlas
is still there holding up the sky. But Hercules has
his apples and yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Fantastic. Yeah there's a brains woman. It also included being strong.
A lot of his great ideas involve being exceptionally strong.
But you know I worked out for him.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah. Yeah, many of these schemes they would not occur
to me. I am not of Herculean strength, so I
would not have it would not even have occurred to me. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
A lot of the schemes are like, well, actually, what
if I just lifted the sky a little bit, that'd
be cool, Like I could totally solve my problem with that.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Hand, because that's the thing that he can do.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But I can't drown these people. I'll just lift the sky.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And he's also someone who can go down to the underworld.
The twelfth labor is to get Cerberus, the three headed
guard dog of the underworld. And you know, Ben, you
were saying earlier that King Eurystheus and Hero were kind
of conspiring to make these labors as impossible as possible.
So going down to the underworld. Hmm, yeah, so he Heracules,
he is he is mortal even though his father is Zeus.
(19:31):
He is able to die, and well, this will become
relevant later.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Spoilers, So spoilers for a story that was written five
thousand years ago.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Woo yeah, okay, but the thing is these are myths.
So yeah, so Hercules he has to go down and
get Cerberus from the underworld. He brings Cerberus back, and
King Eurystheus is so scared when he sees this three
headed dog that he goes and hides and basically a
large piece of pottery, and.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
He captures it by just clubbing it, right, He just
hits it with his club, knocks it out, and drags
it basically.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I would have preferred a
story involving like bacon or something, but you know, no,
brute force. Brute force, that's what.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah, clubbing it didn't work. He could probably divert some
river to drown on maybe, Okay, So.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Okay, So finally, even though he's done what twenty percent
more labors than he thought he needed to, finally he's good. Okay, fine,
he's expiated his murder of his children, and he goes
and he has all sorts of random adventures, like kind
of like one off adventures. He wrestles with the son
of Gaya and Poseidon. He competes in an archery contest.
I haven't said much about archery. He's not surprisingly good
(20:38):
at archery. There's a princess's hand in marriage at stake.
The king who is in charge of deciding whose daughter
gets to marry flakes on that promise. Hercules is like, what,
you broke your promise. I'm entitled to something. So he
steals some cattle. All sorts of things happen in the process.
It's a it's all honestly, there's so much cattle theft
(20:59):
going on in the pology. There's a there's a brue
ha ha. He winds up killing the princess's brother. I
think he throws him from the walls of the city.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
As you do. He's seized by madness and just goes
on these massive killing rampages. Really does the labors once,
but he'll go in a few more killing rampages. I think.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
But he's just like, hey, Hercules, can you help me
with this? And he's just like, ahh yeah exactly. She
throws twenty people off the walls of the city, strangles
a couple of guys runs away.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, And what happens when you murder someone You have
to expiate it. You have to atone for it. So
to atone for this, he has to be a slave
to Queen Omphale of Lydia, and for a year, somehow
one thing leads to another. He sires a child with her,
(21:48):
and then you know, moves on as you do. People
like to have sex with Hercules, or people want Hercules'
you know, amazing Herculean. We would say, good gene, but
his they want his curtetude to be passed on to
their office.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
But they just want to see what it's all about, right,
I could imagine that also, just curiosity. That's a thing
that comes up a lot with these that are like
I love because I mean, when I grew up, I
was learning the Greek myths from elementary school, you learn, like,
you know, not just like the Disney version because that's
a little later than my time, but you know, just
the old the old school like Greek myths books where
(22:26):
everything is a little bit more like staid and proper
and everybody's wearing the togas and you know, oh, this
great god did this and this great hero did this.
But there's a lot of weird sex stuff in Greek mythology,
and the Hercules had that one thing where I think
he had to like he had like had sex with
fifty women in the same night, like some he killed
(22:46):
some monster, and the king was like, for a reward,
you can, like you know, have sex with all my daughters.
So he did it. There's a lot of like extreme
violence and like weird sex stuff, which caught me like
kind of off guard when I started learning about the
Greek myths later on. It's kind of like thinking about
like Disney characters heading sex, which I mean, you know,
like even with Hercules as an example, like a lot
(23:10):
of those Disney things are based off fairy tales of
myths and things, so when you do learn the real
myth it's like, oh and then the little mermaid dies
at the end or whatever, you know, letting all this
crazy stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, so Hercules has all sorts of adventures, some of
which are driven by madness, some of which are driven
by him being upset that he wasn't given his due
or his reward for punching his way through some monster
or other. So he is okay, he has shown that
he has been able to punch his way one way
(23:41):
or another through you know, not only the twelve labors
that Hara and Eurystheus came up with, but you know
this thing, that thing and the other thing sea monster.
But he, I said, I mentioned earlier that he was mortal.
So how does he die? How does this seemingly invincible
guy die? What finally gets to him? Well, he's married
to a named Dean Neira Now and Danira, you know,
(24:04):
they've had a little talk about their you know, their
respective relationship histories, and Dania's thinking, okay, she's totally into Hercules,
but she also wants him to be faithful to her.
And this is maybe a little bit out of character
or maybe shall we say, maybe Hercules needs a little
bit of help staying faithful. Yeah, so she talks to
centaur because centaurs. Centaur's new like herb lore and potions
(24:26):
and stuff like that, and she talks to the centaur
named Nessus, and basically Nessus says, hey, my bodily fluids,
and I'll leave it to your imagination to guess which
bodily fluid we're talking about. Mm hmm. Anyway, Nessus provides
Dianira with I think it's some sort of cloth with
(24:46):
its bodily fluids, and Nessus says, hey, you know, make
sure he comes into contact with this, and he'll stay
faithful to you. You won't cheat on you. So of
course Danira believes the centaur and get Nessus's semen on
Hercules and will okay, it is true that Hercules did
(25:06):
not cheat on Dianea after that. Instead, it turns out
that Nessus's semen is incredibly poisonous. Hercules, and he feels
like his body is burning up, and I think he
actually he may literally burst into flames. Now he's Hercules.
He tries to punch his way through things. He tries
to solve problems. What is the problem? What is the
fearsome beast hates this raging, consuming fire, so he kills
(25:30):
himself to get away from the pain, and he dies,
but he is the son of a god, and eventually
he gets taken up to Mount Olympus. This doesn't happen
to everyone, and he becomes a basically a god or
he gets to hang out on Olympus forever after, and
he marries Heibi, the goddess of youth, and presumably that
(25:53):
works out and they have a copacetic marriage. So that's Hercules,
and he is so badass that you know, not only
were these stories told about him, like it's come on,
I don't know that, Chuck Norris of Greek antiquities.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and solve all of your problems with punching or violence,
just violence of all different manners.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, yep. So how can we justify how can we
get a moral lesson out of Hercules going around punching people? Okay,
so it is true that sometimes he actually helps people,
like when he punches his way through a beast that is,
you know, devastating the countryside. Or if you're medieval or
Renaissance Christians, you can take inspiration from a very small,
(26:34):
less punchy story of Hercules called Hercules at the Crossroads,
where Hercules is at a crossroads, and then there is
the personification of virtue on one one of the roads,
and then on the other fork in the road there
is the personification of vice. And we should imagine these
as sexy ladies, because that's how these things work. And Hercules,
or at least the personification of vice should be a
(26:55):
sexy lady. And Hercules has to choose, should he choose
virtue or vice. Of course he chooses virtue, and this
is enough to make him like okay. For medieval Christian
writers and artists, and also the Renaissance and in the
Middle Ages, there is this trend of a trend or
like this practice of finding Christian allegories in stories that
(27:18):
had nothing to do with Christianity. And so Hercules punching
his way through all of these fearsome beasts got turned
into a Christian allegory for you know, prevailing over moral obstacles.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Instead of punching a three headed dog, you're like punching
your desire to not go to church.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Today, exactly, exactly exactly, So that's all you need to do.
You take a story that you think is cool just
because it's cool, and then you say it's allegorical.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, yeah, we like these Hercules ones. We don't want
to throw these stories in the garbage because they don't
have they're not biblical. But maybe we can find some
way to like kind of rationalize why it's cool and
he was popular like basically for all of history, right,
I mean they're still doing they're still doing Hercules. I
think the rock was Hercules like a couple of years ago.
(28:10):
But like, yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you
about with with Hercules was you see a lot of
like Roman emperors wearing the lion's skin because they think
their Hercules are there. They believe to be equivalent to
Hercules or something like that. And the Roman emperors that
do this are never the sane ones. It's always the
crazy Roman emperors who are doing this, the ones who
are like completely have lost it and gone off the rails.
(28:33):
You can usually tell because they're depicted looking like Hercules.
He's kind of like, like you know how, like it's
kind of like the Napoleon of antiquity because like all
the crazy people kind of think that they're him.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Yeah, I mean I don't want to go like armchair
sycle analyzing people who have been dead. For two millennia.
But yeah, he's no, there's there's definitely cosplay going on,
and I think I think you're free to hypothesize whatever
you want. And let's put a pin in that and
go to a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Okay, you were talking about Hercules. I have a story
prepared for today as well. I'm going to talk about
a guy from the American Revolution who was known as
the Virginia Hercules, and kind of like what you were saying,
Hercules became a very popular figure at the time, but
that story has like been timeless and people have kind
of been reading it. Even in like colonial America, people
(29:31):
knew the Hercules story and he's basically been like the
original like graphic novel hero and continues to be. And
so around the time of the American Revolution, we had
another big, strong guy who punched his way through most
of his problems. Most of his problems, of course were
British people, but they called him the Virginia Hercules. And
his name is Peter Francisco and he's one of my
favorite stories from the American Revolution. Because you were kind
(29:54):
of talking about, you know, how we can view Hercules
in a historical context and Peter Francisco one of these
guys that I love, like the stories that I love
for the guy really doesn't contribute much to the history
of the American Revolution except that he just like took
out a lot of the enemy, right, He just kind
(30:14):
of fought his way through the war, was very successful,
and then that was it. He doesn't like get into
politics afterwards. He doesn't do anything else except solve his
problems with violence and move forward. So let's talk about
Peter Francisco for a second.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So this is cool. So he's a real guy.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, yeah, he's a real guy. And it's you know,
I think with a lot of things, you get a
little bit of you know, history being exaggerated over time,
and so that happens. But we know this guy existed.
We've seen his handwriting, you know, we have letters that
people have sent to him before. So he was a
real guy and his story is really weird.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
So he first appears on a foggy night in seventeen
sixty five on this little wharf in Virginia right on
the coast. There's just like a five year old boy
who speaks no English, standing on the edge of the dock.
The kid's like gigantic, and nobody knows who he is
or where he came from. We think maybe Portugal, just
because of like the descriptions of like he had, you know,
(31:11):
darker hair, darker eyes. There was some Portuguese trading going
on in this area around this time. I don't know
really how they come up with these things, but one
of the best guesses is that he is in Portuguese
or Spanish or something like that.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, and the name Francisco that doesn't sound like one
of your Anglo names like Smith or Adams or Arnold.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
For sure, you know. Basically, yeah, names Francisco. And he
probably wasn't like, didn't speak Spanish, so maybe I don't know,
I don't know, but he didn't speak English. And so
they find him and he gets adopted by a rich
Virginia family. He ends up being kind of tangentially related
to Patrick Henry, who was a member of the Virginia
government and is very famous for doing the speech of like,
(31:51):
you know, give me liberty or give me death, the
speech that my mom used to recite perfectly word for
word every time me and my brother were driving her crazy.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Oh that's one parent.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And so so Peter gets taken in by this family,
and within a few years he's gigantic. Right. He grows
to be six six two eighty is kind of where
we place him height and weight wise. And remember that,
like the average American at this time is like five
six five seven, So he's a foot taller and everybody
else probably one hundred pounds heavier than them. He's a big,
strong dude. And so he of course becomes a blacksmith
(32:23):
because that's a job that you can just be successful
by being big and strong. And then you know, when
he's not blacksmithing, he's performing feats of strength in his village.
He's lifting wagons, he's doing stuff like that. He's just
trying to impress girls. And when the war starts, as
it does in the American Revolution, he's obviously a pretty
prime candidate to become a soldier, and he's super in.
(32:44):
So I talked about that Patrick Henry, give me liberty
or give me death. He was there, Peter Francisco was
there to watch that speech happen. He's so pumped he leaves.
He's just like, I'm joining the army. And he joins
the army and he goes off to war.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
So that's yeah, that's cool that we have an eyewitness,
we have an actual original audience member, and we know
exactly what effect that speech had.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Oh that's a really good point, right, Like, yeah, he
was just so excited about hearing about it that he
was just like, I'm in, I'm signing up right now.
And so he goes off and he enlists in the
Virginia Militia and he starts fighting. He's serving up north.
He's serving with George Washington's army. He gets shot twice,
he gets stabbed a bunch of times, he fights through
(33:24):
several battles. He's the biggest, strongest guy in the army,
and he's pretty successful warrior in the early days of
the revolution. And George Washington at one point awards him
a medal and a sword, a five long broadsword, so
not a two handed sword, but like a Scottish style
broadsword with the basket on it, kind of like a
highlight during kind of thing. And he says as part
(33:47):
of the citation, General George Washington says, without him, we
would have lost two crucial battles, perhaps the war and
with it our freedom. He was truly a one man army.
That's what George Washington writes about him, writes about him
after the war, but kind of in relation to this
a war that he gave him Valley Forge, which was
not a fun time.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah, Valley Forge. I feel like anyone who was at
Valley Forge for any length of time he was there.
I assume he was there in the winter.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, Yeah, like the big winter at Valley Forge where
they all went there and basically like they've been fighting
and they thought maybe this wasn't going to work out,
maybe we're all maybe we're all going to lose. Like,
you know, the winter sucks. Everybody's kind of deserting. Just brutal, brutal,
very low point for the American Army.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Yeah, supplies and morale were really low. It's like winter
of seventy seven, about twenty five percent of the troops
were deemed unfit for duty for one reason or another.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, everybody's sick, everybody's starving, everybody's just going home because
they're like, I don't have to do this anymore. I'm
just leaving. I'm not getting they were getting paid h Yeah. Yeah.
So he survives that war and he gets the sword,
and he's already a veteran of several battles. He's been
fighting since made day one of the war. He's got
a couple of like high notes to his career, and
(35:05):
the first one comes at the Battle of Stony Point,
New York in seventeen seventy nine. So the idea was
this little group under a guy named Matt Anthony Wayne.
And we'll see why he's called Matt Anthony Wayne in
a minute. They were going to try to take this
fort at this place called Stony Point. It was a
coastal fort on a river. It's in New York, and
(35:25):
the British were holding it. They had more guys than
the Americans, and they had a couple of ships in
the harbor. But the Americans decide they're going to go
in at night and try this like night attack. They're
going to try to try to faint, try to draw
the British garrison out, and then they're going to try
to send a little group of guys called a forlorn hope.
Twenty guys were just going to run in through the gates,
try to get the gates open, try to cause chaos,
(35:48):
and like kind of carve the way for the rest
of the American attack to come. Through. So Americans have
about two hundred guys, there's like two or three hundred
British defending it. But the success of this operation is
dependent on this twenty man Special Forces Forlorn Hope. Matt
Anthony is called Matt Anthony because he is going to
lead this personally, and his second in command is a
(36:09):
guy named Francois Luis de Fleury. He's a French American.
And then the guy that is at the front of
the charge is Peter Francisco. So they do this little plan.
It works. The Forlorn Hope attacks the first volley. Basically
that the British fire Matt Anthony Wayne gets hit and
goes down, is down and bleeding and he's just like
(36:30):
trying to like scream and yell for his guys to
keep going. So Fleury, Colonel Fleury, has to lead the
attack and him and Francisco are the first two guys
in of course, right and they get in there and
they get up on the walls and it's just these
two dudes fighting a bunch of British and the British
had been tipped off that the Americans were coming, so
they were ready. The British commander had all of the
(36:53):
British soldiers sleep in their uniforms with their weapons loaded
and ready. They knew the attack was coming, they didn't
quite know what form it was gonna take. They were
a little surprised to see this, you know, seven foot
tall monster charging at them with a broadsword.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
I would be surprised too, yes, but they.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Were armed and ready, and so Peter Francisco just kind of,
you know, just kind of pretty much single handedly slices
his way through the defenders. He kills three guys in
the courtyard. He gets up on the walls. He's throwing
guys off the wall like Hercules style. He has one
of his like you know, possessed by rage or possessed
by madness, or however Hercules phrased it. He's just throwing
(37:32):
guys off, cutting guys down. They get to the small
group of Americans, these twenty guys, they and they're down.
They're losing people all over the place. But Francisco and
Flurry get to the flag that's on the top of
the British fort. The rest of the American attack starting
to come. It's complete chaos. It's night. Nobody can see anything.
It's not like they have flashlights. Everybody's using torch light
and maybe you can see flashes from gunfire. Right there's
(37:54):
no there's no spotlights or anything like that. Is dark
and nobody knows what the heck's going on. Cisco and
Flurry are like way behind enemy lines, like in their base,
like killing their dudes, and they get up to the flagpole.
Peter Francisco is like he's cut, he's shot twice. A
British officer like slashes him across the chest with a saber.
(38:16):
He kills that guy, kills a couple other guys and
kind of holds the line while Flury pulls down the
British flag and puts up the American flag.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
So it's like literally literally capture the flag.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Literally capture the flag. Yeah, and you know it doesn't
seem like much, right, you know, in a video game,
it ends there.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
It's like, oh, it's just a symbolic gesture.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Sure, exactly, except that with all this chaos and everything
going on around them. You know, some of these British
troops that were ready, they run outside, they see all
this chaos and gunfire and all the cannons are going off, well,
the muskets are going off, the splashing, explosions and screaming,
and they look up at the tower and there's an
American flag over at the tower and they're just like, ah, crap,
we lost, Like, let's get out of here before we die.
(38:55):
So they all surrender or retreat. The two British warships
in the harbor, each of them had enough firepower to
level that fort. Probably oh totally yeah. They don't see
the flag go up. They hear the cheering of the
Americans having captured the fort. The British think that it's fine.
They're like, oh, we did it, we took a we won,
no problem.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
They thought it was the British chair.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
They thought it was the British cheering yes, and they're like, okay, cool,
don't worry about it. And then the next morning when
the sun came up, they were like, oh wait, actually
that's an American flag. And actually the Americans took every
cannon on that fort, and they're all pointed at us
right now, so they had to turn and run away. No, yeah,
(39:35):
so they captured it. And it's basically single handedly Peter
Francisco and Colonel Francois Fleury and that's it, right, like
kind of a crazy story. It's this little ford in
upstate New York. But it's a pretty herculean feet that
he undertook there.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Yeah yeah, and like a lot of the herculean feats.
I don't know if this was their intent or if
it's just sort of a moment of like, yeah, go us,
go us when they replaced the flag, But it seemed
like it took a lot of strength to do it.
But it's like this one little thing that turned things
so decisively that even if they didn't plan it out,
even it was just a spontaneous thing, they should take
(40:12):
credit for it. For the tactic.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah yeah, it's that thing you were talking about with
Hercules being clever, right, it was. It was his clever
plan to kill every British person between him and the flag.
Yeah yeah, in the hand to hand combat and then
replace the flag. But it worked, right, I mean, there
is a certain cleverness of beating your way through the enemy.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And then got way more bang for his book. So
was that the end of Francisco's career or did he
go on to do more daring.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Do So that's not the end of his career. There
is more to be had. So after the fighting goes
on in the north, the action kind of moves to
the south. The British aren't having a lot of success
up north. They have some loyalist support in the South,
so they're going to move down there and try to
turn the war into more like combat in the southern colonies.
Towards the end of the war, George Washington by sending
(41:00):
Peter Francisco down there to deal with them. Well, let's
talk about the Battle of Camden in seventeen eighty. Camden
is in the Carolinas. Peter Francisco is fighting, They're losing.
The Horatio Gates is in command of the American forces.
They're getting defeated. Francisco's out there by himself. He's surrounded
by dead countrymen and the Brits are charging him. Cavalry
(41:20):
charge comes at him. He gets cut with a cavalry saber.
He kills the cavalry guy with the bayonet, pulls the
guy off his horse, jumps on the horse and rides
off to safety. He's like the last surviving member of
his unit, and he escapes by killing a British cavalry
officer and riding away to escape.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
Steals his horse.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Okay links up with his former unit, who has already retreated.
He was probably covering their retreat, which is a thing
that he's very famous for doing over and over and
over again. Gets back there, finds that his commanding officer
has been shot and is wounded, gets off the horse,
gives the horse to his commanding officer, says, you need this,
you need to ride to a hospital and gets safe.
(41:59):
I'll be right back. So then after the commanding officer
rides off, Francisco's like, you know what, Like I rode
past a bunch of unmanned cannons back there, I bet
like I could probably drag a couple of those off
the battlefield before the British steal them.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
I bet he could too.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, it's very clever thinking, right, It's herculean levels of
clever thinking, which is like, you know what, the British
won't capture all of these cannons if I just run
over there and drag them back with my bare hands.
And so that's what he does. He runs back, he
saves a couple of cannons from the battlefield. One of
them is eleven hundred pounds and it's on wheels, and
he drags it by himself. It's generally designed to be
(42:36):
dragged by one to two horses. But Peter Francisco, big
strong guy, no problem, quick thinking on his.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Part, and big musculature.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yes, this guy was definitely pretty ripped. Yeah, or he
could have been like one of those I don't know
if you ever watch like the ESPN, like strongman competitions,
and they never like huge muscles or just giant dudes,
and it's just like they lift these unbelieve peably heavy things,
but they're not exactly like they're not shredded, they're just
monstrously huge guys. It's kind of how I picture Peter Francisco,
(43:10):
so capdence a defeat. A couple months later, there's a
Battle of Guildford Courthouse, which is an American victory. It's
a turning point in the South, like the Americans are
losing and they have a pretty successful fight at Guildford Courthouse.
After kind of being in trouble for a while, they
have a pretty successful attack there. Virginia Hercules is out there,
(43:31):
Peter Francisco. He's credited with killing thirteen British soldiers with
a broadsword during this battle, and including one guy who
they said got his head chopped off long ways, which
you can try to imagine what that might look like.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Oh, that's got hurt.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
I mean maybe it didn't. It dis pierce the brain immediately.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Oh that's true. Yeah, just it might be.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
A very pleasurable way to die. If you had to
choose how to be killed by Peter Francisco on the battlefield,
that might be top five.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
I don't ever want to be in a position to
find out, but I can easily imagine this guy doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yes, he was definitely strong enough to make that happen.
But this battle doesn't work out that well for Francisco.
He kills thirteen British soldiers, but he's completely surrounded. The
rest of his unit's kind of falling back. He's wading
into the enemy. He's killing them left and right. He's
getting stabbed over and over again. He gets stabbed somewhere,
depending on who you ask, somewhere between six and twelve times.
(44:22):
He gets shot a couple times, passes out, bleeding all
over the battlefield. The battle continues on without him. He
is laying there, presumed dead on the battlefield, except he
doesn't die. He gets back up and he just kind
of drags himself to a nearby farmhouse to try to
get help, and luckily he finds a friendly farmhouse that
(44:45):
are sympathetic to the Patriot cause, and the family there
takes care of him. They put him in one of
their guest rooms. They give him some food and water,
they bandage his wounds, They get a doctor for him,
and he recovers a little bit. He's still pretty messed up.
He's still got like bleedingages and things. When British cavalry
rides through because they've heard that he's here and they
(45:06):
heard that he's alive and they have come to get him. Oh,
you can't leave a guy like Peter Francisco alive if
you hear that he's around, if you hear news that
like the doctor's been off treating some six foot seven
dude with twenty seven saber cuts and six bullets in him, like,
you know, maybe go investigate that.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah, the guy.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
They said to investigate is a guy named Banister Tarleton,
who will I would like to talk about on this
show at some point in the future. Tarleton is, I mean,
the best way to describe him is that the bad
guy and the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot is pretty
much based off him. He was a real bad dude.
Tarleton was kind of the like. He was of the
school of like the Americans aren't going to submit, let's
(45:46):
just burn the whole place of the ground until they
change their minds. Really rough kind of guy. And his
troops were mostly loyalists colonists, so very which was some
of the most brutal fighting of the war, was not
between the British and Americans, but between and the Americans
and the other Americans and so and so. Tartletan's legion
shows up. It's about twelve guys. It's a squadron of
(46:07):
British cavalry. They ride up to the farmhouse. They're gonna
talk to the Virginia Hercules. They're gonna give him a
hard time.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Talk to him.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yes, they're they're going to arrest him. And before they
put him in chains, they get him out. They drag
him out of the house. The commander of the squadron
demands Peter Francisco's belt buckle and the silver buckles on
his shoes, and Peter Francisco he doesn't want to give those.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Up, nor should he.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
No, even though he's half dead. He draws the enemy
officer's sword from its scabbard off, the guy kills him
with it, kills two other guys with it. They all
kind of scattered, and then he steals six of their
horses and rides away.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
He steals six of their horses.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yes, he kills three of these guys. He steals six horses,
rides off unscathed while half dead, and rejoins his yet
not dead. Not done with the war, he continued and
he serves under Lafayette during the Yorktown Campaign, which, as
you know, is the end of the war.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
And Peter Francisco was there.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Peter Francisco was there, and that's it, right, that's the
end of the war, Like the British surrender of Yorktown,
that's the end of the war. Peter Francisco is this
big time Virginia war hero. He goes home.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
I bet yeah, probably never had to pay for a
drink the rest of his.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Life, certainly not. He goes back, he becomes a blacksmith,
He learns how to read, which he didn't know how
to do before this. Oh good for him, Yes, and
he marries three different women, I think, the same as
Hercules had three different wives.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
Right, yeah, well, it depends on how you define married.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
But yeah, okay, all right, so yeah, so he had
three different wives, presumably not at the same time, and
did not die from centaur seamen. He died of old
age at the age of seventy one, despite all of
the battle injuries and wounds he had sustained during the
course of his life. He dies in eighteen thirty one.
As just like a great unsung hero of the American Revolution,
(47:55):
who was just this great war hero that nobody really
talks about when we talk about the American Revolution. Yeah,
he had a slightly better end than the mythological Hercules.
You didn't get to be a constellation, but he wasn't
set on fire by centaur Jiz.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
I'd say Francisco had the better end, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Yeah, I'm going to go with you on that one. Yeah,
I mean, I guess that's kind of all we have
to talk about today. The Hercules and Virginia, Hercules, Peter Francisco,
two big, strong guys who never met a problem that
couldn't be solved by punching it in the face and
strangling it.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Well as lessons go, I guess it's useful for a
very very very small proportion of the population and for us, myrtles,
we have to figure out something else.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
But yeah, we have to be differently clever. Yes, well,
that's all we have today, and thank you guys so
much as always for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Phibbs,
and Allie Lamer. Mixing and music in sound design is
(49:07):
by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to
Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week is based
on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where you
can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If
you want to reach out with questions ideas, you can
email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com. If
(49:32):
you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell your
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