At the amphitheatre gates, three girls had been queuing since dawn with amphorae of watered wine, figs, wax tablets and absolutely no chill.
“OMG,” said Livia, scratching HERCULES HAS RIZZ into the plaster with her hairpin. “I would let him clean my stables.”
“You don’t have stables,” said Flavia.
“I would acquire stables.”
This was not the demigod Hercules, obviously, but Hercules Maximus Felix, a Roman arena fighter from Capua who had chosen his stage name with subtlety.
Inside, the vendors sold little clay Hercules torsos, lion-skin bonnets. Livia purchased a full set of the commemorative apples of the Hesperides and also three suspicious vials labelled Actual Hydra Venom, Babe. Both the other temple priestesses rolled their eyes, but each still bought three as well.
When Hercules entered, the whole crowd screamed. Not war-scream or grief-scream, but the special high civic shriek of girls witnessing forearms. His thighs were democratic. His beard had policy implications. He waved just the once to stir up dust and thirty-seven respectable maidens fainted in the bleachers.
“He is such a baddie,” whispered Claudia of Tibur, in Rome for the Games and already composing a scroll sponsored by ever-popular Horace New Consortium.
Behind her, an Apollo tribute act tuned his lyre. “Y’know, in my day, men had pulse without all this branding.” O, he muttered, but few listened and no one cared. Things moved fast and crazes shift. Just last month, a Coriolanus-themed fighter had gone viral for sulking outside the city gates, but now this new gladiator Hercules Maximus Felix gave looksmaxxed facecard plus pure cross-market appeal: monsters, masculinity, redemption arc and oh, a damned excellent pelt.
Hercules disembowelled a chancer to his right, and raised his gruesome club in air.
“I can fix you,” intoned a breathless widow, mouthing the words down to the arena.
Young Claudia held up her polished bronze mirror to catch his reflection. “Follow me for more demigod content,” she whispered to no one and everyone. She side-glanced down below and afterwards would always swear he winked at her.
Then Hercules lifted his fake Nemean lion skull and smiled. The amphitheatre lost its mind. Laurels flew. Doves panicked. A senator’s wife threw her girdle and blamed Venus.
***
Later, historians would call it hero cult. They would write of divine honour, ritual devotion, masculine excellence and perhaps the old Imperial ache for greatness, long-suppressed.
But on the wall by the vomitorium, under three hearts and a badly drawn thunderbolt, someone had written the truer record in blocky Times New Roman: HERCULES CAN GET IT.
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Kathleen Bryson is from Alaska and lives in North London. She is the author of 3 evolutionary non-fiction books and 4 novels; the writer-director of 5 underground feature films and an artist with 10 solo art exhibitions. Her first full-length poetry book, Luciferin, will be published imminently by erbacce-press. Her work moves between fiction, evolutionary science, poetry, underground cinema, paintings, myth, animality, sexuality and deep time. She holds a doctorate in evolutionary anthropology from UCL and is currently an EU Postdoctoral Fellow investigating virtual reality. Her website is www.kathleenbryson.com.