RT book part
T1 What Identity for Hercules Gaditanus? The Role of the Gaditanian Hercules in the Invention of National History in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Spain.
A1 Fernández Camacho, Pamina
A2 Filología Clásica
K1 Hercules Gaditanus
K1 Estoria de España
K1 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada
K1 Joan Margarit i Pau
K1 Florián de Ocampo
AB Hercules Gaditanus was a popular incarnation of the hero/god in classical antiquity. Widely recognized as a Hellenized, and then Romanized version of the Phoenician god Melqart, he was worshipped at the temple of Gades, Spain’s most ancient city. In the late medieval period, when the first attempts were made to write a national history of Spain, he became a key figure, connecting Spanish ancestry with the prestige of classical antiquity, and acquiring the role of a prestigious founder. And still, there were a number of problems with this Hercules: the inconvenient idea of conquest by a foreigner, the many contradictions about his nationality and ethnicity, and the persistent notion of the coexistence of more than one Hercules in the area, transmitted by both pagan and Christian authors. The solutions found for these problems show a remarkable amount of creativity on the part of Spanish historians, and a study of the sources, the chronology and the rationale behind those solutions is crucial to understanding how the Spanish past took shape around the figure of our hero.
PB Brill
SN 9789004435414
YR 2020
FD 2020-07-21
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/33968
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/33968
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 07-nov-2026