Hercules and Peter Francisco

In the first-ever episode of the Badass of the Week podcast, me and 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.

My original article on Hercules can be found here, and Peter Francisco has his own chapter in the first Badass book, which is available for purchase over on my store page.

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Episode Transcript:

It is almost midnight as two large constrictor snakes slowly slither down the walls of a quiet nursery towards the two twin boys who lay sleeping in a crib at the center of the room. These are not just any ordinary serpents. They are dark emissaries sent by a vengeful goddess on a cruel mission to choke the life from these children in the name of the Queen of Olympus. 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.

Ben: Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of The Badass of the Week podcast! My name is Ben Thompson. I am the author of The Badass, Epic Fails, and Guts and Glory book series-es. 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 19 years now, but it's time to start something different. And to help me do that, I'm going to be bringing on a co-host. So let me introduce you to Dr. Pat Larash.

Pat [00:01:22] Hey, what's up?

Ben [00:01:23] Pat is an academic. She's here to bring the show some degree of respectability

Pat: And gravitas.

Ben: Pat is a Ph.D. classicist. She teaches Latin and ancient Greek has taught at at the college level. And she came to one of my book readings once.

Pat [00:01:37] 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?

Ben [00:01:50] 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 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 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. What do Leonidas and Genghis Khan have in common? What about Vlad the 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 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 give 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 pushing forward and never gave up. For me, that was the one thing that all of these badasses had in common.

Pat [00:03:22] 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 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 transcends ideology. And, you know, some philosophers would argue that everything is ideology. There is nothing outside ideology.

Ben [00:04:07] 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 in 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 did that, maybe I can get my inbox cleared before I go home from work today.

Pat [00:04:34] 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, etc., etc..

Ben [00:04:59] Yeah, and we're going to be 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 punching them repeatedly until they're unconscious and then drowning them in a river.

Pat [00:05:22] 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 am talking about the legendary mythological Greek hero, Hercules.

Ben [00:05:47] Was Hercules smart?

Pat [00:05:49] 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.

Ben [00:05:56] Yeah, that's that's the weird thing with Greek myths. They're like way more bizarre than the ones you read when you were a kid.

Pat [00:06:02] 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 people in the river and, you know, yes, he he punches his way out of situations. But he also sometimes thinks his way out of situations. And, to be fair, his thinking kind of always includes the fact that he has the brawn in addition to the brains. Like, he's not going to sit down in front of a computer and hack his way into the CIA mainframe or something like that. He's going to come up with creative ways to use his muscle. And he, you know, with this combination of of brawn and brain, he manages to think and punch his way out of some pretty unwinnable situations.

Ben [00:06:57] I'm excited to hear about it.

Pat [00:06:58] I'm excited to tell it.

So, Hercules. We know from Greek and Roman mythologies. His Greek name is Heracles, and I mentioned this — he's better known these days as Hercules, but the Greek name Herakles actually tells you a little bit about his origin story. The name means “glory of Hera”. Glory to the Queen of the gods. And so Hercules, his “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 Mitrione, and slept with her that way. So Alcmene, the woman, didn't know she was cheating on her husband. And anyway, so she gets two boys, one of whom is totally mortal and one of whom is Hercules. And when Hercules was born, Hera was here. He was jealous because her as 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.

She sends snakes to strangle baby Hercules. And what do you think baby Hercules does? He strangles him right back.

So he saves himself. And his little brother. 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 Hera following him. This will become relevant many, many times later.

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 Hera. 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 rage and he's now kind of more in touch with reality, it'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 somehow. Okay, not killing someone in battle, but murdering someone. So you go to the Oracle at Delphi, which Hercules does, and the Oracle says, “okay, you've got to perform ten labors for King Eurysthias”. So Hercules says, “okay, I'll go perform ten labors for King Eurysthias.

Ben [00:09:15] So my understanding of the labors is kind of that Eurysthias and Hera are kind of working together to make these labors impossible for Hercules. Like, give you possible things to do so that he will either die or fail. I mean, he did fly into a psychotic killing rage and murder his own children. So maybe 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.

Pat [00:09:43] Exactly. Because, standard operating procedure, if you're just like a mere mortal and you kill someone and you go to the oracle of Delphi, if you do the things 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 time, Hera had it in for him.

Ben [00:09:59] Was that actually normal? Like if you killed, if you like, went into a rage and, like, murdered your wife, you had to go, like, do penance at the Oracle of Delphi?

Pat [00:10:06] That was one way to deal with it. 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 12 labors of Hercules? Where did that come from? Did we not know how to count? Is this like a base-10 base-12 thing?”

So the original contract, the original deal was for ten labors, but as Hercules does a few of them, some of them are kind of not counting. King Eurysthias 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 or another of which, you know, you can totally get all Ray Harryhausen on when you imagine them in your heads. But I'll just go through a few of them. The first one is an Nemean Lion.

So some of the labors actually were because there was a specific beast that was terrorizing a specific village. And the Nemean Lion actually was terrorizing the area of Nemea. Why was the lion terrorizing the area of Nemea? A, it was a lion. B, it was a ferocious lion specifically like raised by Hera or made more ferocious by Hera to cause problems on purpose. And it's got an impenetrable skin, so Hercules 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 know it's Hercules because he's got a club and he's got this lion skin draped over his shoulders. So this Lion, that's how he gets that iconic lion skin. And to everyone's surprise, he survives.

He also has to kill the hydra, which is the snake where when he chop off one had several grow back. He has to capture the Ceryneian hind, which is big fancy deer. He has to do that and bring it in alive. He has to capture the Erymanthian boar, which just was just plain terrorizing the countryside. He has to clean the Augean stables. And it may seem like What? Isn't punching his way through fearsome beasts what he's all about?

So the Augean stables. There is this king Augeas. 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're immortal, you have a lot of time on your hands to eat and poop. So Hercules looks at these stables. Now, here's the deal. King Augesas is the guy who owned the stables. He said “if you do it in a day, I will pay you. I will give you 10%. I will give you 1/10 of the cattle.” And Hercules is like, “okay, cool.”

So he's looking at the stables, maybe holding his nose. Now, this is something that could occur to Hercules, not to me, because I'm 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, 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 Augeas. 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 Eurystheaus says “I'm not going to count this. I don't care that you cleaned the stables, you had help, you didn't clean the stables. The rivers cleaned the stables, and also you got paid for it, so you didn't suffer enough.”

Ben [00:13:30] 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 him.

Pat [00:13:38] Yeah. I mean, the stables probably smelled a whole lot better, so I'm sure it was a net positive for society.

Ben [00:13:43] Yeah, it's true. He was just too clever for his own good.

Pat [00:13:46] Yeah. On the other 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, and I was like, “Oh!”

Ben [00:14:00] That's fantastic.

Pat [00:14:02] Yeah, it was. It was fun. Yeah.

So he has to you have to keep on doing his labors. He does not let that daunt him. So, don't be daunted. Even when people give you trouble about your contract.

He has to rid the Stymphalian marsh of these metallic birds. He has to bring in the Cretan bull. He has to capture the mares of Diomedes. These are horses that not only talk, but they're flesh eating. Like they’re man-eating horses. Labor number nine, Eurytheus sends Hercules to get the belt of Hippolyta. You 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 lady wear support undergarments or something. Shapewear. But really in this context, it's the Greek word zona. It means belt, and it's not even necessarily just a fashion belt. It could also we could also imagine as being like a Batman type belt, you know, like she could gird her sword there.

Ben [00:14:59] You know, from what we know of the Amazons, like, definitely like carry a quiver of arrows off it. Something like that. Right? Something.

Pat [00:15:05] Yeah, totally.

Ben [00:15:06] Pretty awesome belt. If like one of the labors is to go get it. Yeah. Pretty sweet.

Pat [00:15:11] Yes it's a sweet belt. And also, it belongs to Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, who most certainly will kill you if she decides to. So Hercules goes to Themischyra, 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 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 Eurytheus?” And initially she says okay, and it's going to be this peaceful sort of thing. But remember, Hera 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 in Hippolytus ear, “Hey, Your Majesty, I think this guy is up to something shady. Don’t trust him.” So violence happens. That did not need to happen. It did not need to happen if everyone was above board and Hera stayed out of it. But that's not the point of the story.

Ben [00:16:09] Yes, it wouldn't be Hercules if he didn't have to, like, punch his way out of a problem.

Pat [00:16:12] Exactly. So he does punch his way out of this problem, to Hippolyta’s detriment. And he takes the belt and he slips it all the way to Eurytheus.

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. 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 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, 16th 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. He was on the wrong side in the war between the Titans and the Olympians, between Atlas and his generation and Zeus and Hera 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? Because geographically he's near where the Hesperides and these golden apples are, but also be because he is the father of the Hesperides, the nymphs, the young women who guard these apples. So Hercules is thinking — see there you can see he uses his brain. He thinks, how can I do this in a way that is most effective and easiest? So Hercules goes to Atlas. He says, “Hey, Atlas. Hey, kid. You know, could you do me a solid? Could you just have a word with your daughters? All 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 says okay, and Hercules puts the sky on his shoulders. Atlas goes and gets the apples. So we've got the apples in a way that Hercules can get to them. But Hercules, remember, Hercules is holding up the sky. So Hercules says to Atlas, “Hey, the sky is heavier than I thought. And like, I can totally do this. I can totally do this, you know? But could you just kind of. Can you just hold it for me for a sec while I adjust my lion skin for padding assistance?” Okay. Hercules goes off to adjust his lion skin and never comes back. So Atlas is still there, holding up the sky. But Hercules has his apples. And. Yeah, there you go.

Ben [00:18:37] Fantastic. There's a brains one that also included being strong. A lot of his great ideas involve being exceptionally strong, but you know that works out for him.

Pat [00:18:48] Yeah. Many of these schemes, they would not occur to me. I am not of Herculean strength, so I would not it would not even have occurred to me.

Ben [00:18:55] That a lot of the schemes are like, “Oh, actually what if I just lifted the sky for a little bit? That'd be cool. Like I could totally solve my problem with that.”

Pat [00:19:03] Because that's a thing that he can do.

Ben [00:19:05] “I can't drown these people. I'll just lift the sky.”

Pat [00:19:08] And he's also someone who can go down to the underworld. The 12the labor is to get Cerberus, the three headed guard dog of the underworld. And you know, Ben, you were saying earlier that Hera was kind of conspiring to make these labors as impossible as possible. So going down to the underworld. Yeah. So, Hercules, he is mortal. Even though his father is Zeus, he is able to die. And we'll this will become relevant later. Spoilers.

Ben [00:19:36] Spoilers for a story that was written 3000 years ago.

Pat [00:19:39] Oh yeah. Okay. But the thing is, these are myths, so yeah. So Hercules, you have to go down and get Cerberus from the underworld. He brings Cerberus back and King Eurystheus is so scared when he sees the three-headed dog that he goes and hides in basically a large piece of pottery.

Ben [00:19:55] And he captures it by just clubbing it. Just hit two with his club, knocks it out and drags it basically.

Pat [00:19:59] Yeah\. I mean, I would have preferred a story involving, like, bacon or something, but, you know. Brute force. That's it.

Ben [00:20:09] Yeah, well, if it didn't work he could probably divert some river to drown him, maybe.

Pat [00:20:15] Okay, so, finally, even though he's done, what, 20% 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 Gaia and Poseidon. He competes in an archery contest. I haven't said much about archery, and not surprisingly he’s very good 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 flake's 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 of it all. Honestly, there's so much cattle theft going on in mythology. There's a. There's a brouhaha. He winds up killing the princesses brother. I think he throws him from the walls of the city.

Ben [00:21:07] As you do. He's seized by madness and just goes on these massive killing rampages. he only does the labors once, but he'll go on a few more killing rampages, I think.

Pat [00:21:17] Yeah.

Ben [00:21:17] Someone’s just like, “Hey, Hercules, can you help me with this?” And he's just like, “RAAAAGH!”

Pat [00:21:22] Yeah, exactly.

Ben [00:21:24] Throws 20 people off the walls of the city, strangles a couple of guys, runs away.

Pat [00:21:28] 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 Emphalae of Lydia. For a year. Somehow one thing leads to another. He sires a child with her and then, you know, moves on.

Ben [00:21:50] As you do.

Pat [00:21:52] People. People like to have sex with Hercules or people want Hercules is, you know, amazing, Herculean. Well, we would say good genes. But his they want his Herc-itude to be passed on to their offspring.

Ben [00:22:04] Just want to see what it's all about. Right? I could imagine that. Just curiosity.

That's a thing that comes up a lot with these that 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 the old the old school like Greek myths books where everything is a little bit more like staid and proper and everybody's wearing the togas and, you know, oh, this great guy did this to this great hero, did this. But there's a lot of weird sex stuff in Greek mythology. And Hercules had that one thing where I think he had like he had sex with 50 women in the same night. Like some he killed 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 kind of off guard when I started learning about the Greek myths later on. It's like Disney characters having sex, which I mean, like even with Hercules as an example, like a lot of those Disney things are based off fairy tales and myths and things. So when you do learn the real myth, it's like, “oh, the Little Mermaid dies at the end”. Or whatever, you know, watching all this crazy stuff.

Pat [00:23:20] 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, okay. He has shown that he has been able to punch his way one way or another through, you know, not only the 12 labors that Hera and Eurytheus came up with, but, you know, this thing, that thing and the other thing, Sea monsters.

But 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 woman named Danaera now. You know, they've had a little talk about their, you know, their respective relationship histories. And Danaera’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.

Ben [00:24:17] I don’t like where this is going.

Pat [00:24:19] Yeah. So she talks to a Centaur. Centaurs knew, like herb lore and potions and stuff like that. And she talks to the center 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. Hmm.

Anyway, Nessus provides Danaera with I think it's some sort of cloth with his bodily fluids. And Nessus says, “Hey, you know, make sure he comes into contact with this and he'll stay faithful to you. He won't cheat on you.” So, of course, Danaera believes the Centaur and gets Nessus’s seamen on Hercules.

And, well, okay. It is true that Hercules did not cheat on Danaera after that. Instead, it turns out that Nessus’s semen is incredibly poisonous, 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? It's this raging, consuming fire. So. He kills 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 the goddess of youth. And presumably that 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, which just kind of, I don't know, the Chuck Norris of Greek antiquities.

Ben [00:26:06] Solve all of your problems with punching or violence. Just violence of all all different manners. Yeah.

Pat [00:26:12] Yeah. So how can we 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, 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 and road. There is the personification of vice. And we should imagine these as sexy ladies, because that's how these things work. Or at least the personification of Vice, should be a 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 was this trend of trend like this practice of finding Christian allegories in stories that 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.

Ben [00:27:32] Instead of punching a three headed dog, you're like punching your desire to not go to church today.

Pat [00:27:39] 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.

Ben [00:27:47] Yeah. Yeah. And then 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 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 a couple of years ago. 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 skin because they think they're Hercules or they're, 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. You can usually tell because they're depicted looking like Hercules. He's kind of like, like, you know how like it's not like the Napoleon of antiquity because like, all the crazy people kind of think that they're him.

Pat [00:28:44] Yeah. I mean, I don't want to go, like, armchair psychoanalyzing people who've been dead for two millennia, But yeah, he's, you know, there is there's definitely cosplay going on. And I think, I think you're free to hypothesize whatever you want.

Ben [00:29:09] 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. Kind of like what you were saying. Hercules became a very popular figure at the time, But that story has been timeless and people have kind of been reading it even in like colonial America. People 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 call him the Virginia Hercules. And his name is Peter Francisco. And he's one of my favorite stories in the American Revolution, because you were kind of talking about, you know, how we can view Hercules in a historical context. And Peter Francisco was one of these guys that I love, like the stories that I love, where 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. He just he just kind 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 and move forward. So let's talk about Peter Francisco for a second.

Pat [00:30:28] So this is cool. So he's he's a real guy.

Ben [00:30:30] 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. So he first appears on a foggy night in 1765 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, darker hair, darker eyes. There were 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.

Pat [00:31:24] Yeah. And the name Francisco, that doesn't sound like one of your Anglo names, like Smith or Adams or Arnold, for sure.

Ben [00:31:30] You know, basically, yeah. Named Francisco. And he probably was 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, 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.

Pat [00:31:59] So that's one way to parent.

Ben [00:32:00] And so so Peter gets taken in by this family, and within a few years, he is gigantic, right? He grows to be… well, 6’6”, 280 is kind of where we place him height and weight wise, and just and remember that, like the average American at this time is like 5’6” to 5’7”. Yeah. So he's a foot taller than everybody else probably 100 pounds heavier than them. He's a big, strong dude. And so he, of course, becomes a blacksmith 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 is 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 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.

Pat [00:32:56] So that's yeah, that's cool that we have an eyewitness or we have an actual original audience member and we know exactly what effect that speech had.

Ben [00:33:03] Oh, that's a really good point, right? Like, yeah, he was just so, 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 northeast, serving with George Washington's army. He gets shot twice. He gets stabbed a bunch of times. He fights through several battles. He's the biggest, strongest guy in the Army and he's pretty successful warrior. In the early days of the revolution George Washington, at one point awards him a medal and a sword, a five foot long broadsword. So not a two handed sword, but like a Scottish style broadsword with the basket on it, kind of like a Highlander kind of thing. And he says as part 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 in relation to this this award that he gave him.

After that, he goes to Valley Forge, which was not a good time..

Pat [00:34:10] 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.

Ben [00:34:16] Yeah. Yeah. Like the big winter at Valley Forge, where they all went there and basically, like, they'd been fighting, and they thought maybe this wasn’t going to work out. Maybe we're all we were 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. Yeah.

Pat [00:34:33] Supplies and morale were really low. Was it like winter of 1777 About 25% of the troops were deemed unfit for duty for one reason or another.

Ben [00:34:43] 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 paid.

Pat [00:34:51] Yeah.

Ben [00:34:53] So he's already a veteran of several battles. He's been fighting since basically day one of the war. He's got a couple of, like, high notes to his to his career. And the first one comes at the the Battle of Stony Point, New York in 1779.

So the idea was this little group under a guy named Mad Anthony Wayne. And we'll see why he's called Mad 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 the British were holding it. They had more guys in the Americans and they had a couple of ships in the harbor. But the Americans decided they're going to go in at night and try this like night attack. They're going to try to try to feint, 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. 20 guys. We're just going to run in through the gates, try to get the gates open, try to cause chaos and like kind of carve the way for the rest of the American attack to come through. So Americans have about 200 guys. There's like two or three hundred British defending it. But the success of this operation is dependent on this 20 man special forces, forlorn hope.

Pat: What a name.

Ben: So Mad Anthony is called Mad Anthony because he is going to lead this personally. And his second in command is a guy named Francois Louis de Fleury. He's a French, French American. And then the guy that is at the front of the charge is Peter Francisco. So they do this sort of plan. It works. The Fallen hope attacks the first volley basically that the British fire, Mad Anthony Wayne gets hit and goes down. He's down and bleeding and he's just like trying to like scream and yell for his guys to keep going. So. So Colonel Fleury has to pass to lead the attack. And him and Francisco are the first two guys in of course. Right. And 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 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 going to take. They were a little surprised to see this, you know, seven foot tall monster charging at them with a broadsword.

Pat [00:37:07] I would be surprised too.

Ben [00:37:08] Yes. But they 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 guys off and goes down. They get to the the small group of Americans, these 20 guys, and they're down there losing people all over the place. But Francisco and Fleury 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 torchlight. And maybe you can see flashes from gunfire, right? There's no there's no spotlights or anything like that. It's dark and nobody knows what the heck is going on. Francisco and Fleury are like way behind enemy lines, like in their base, killing their dudes and they get up to the flagpole. Peter Francisco is like, He's cut. He's shot twice. The British officer leg slashes him across the chest with a saber. He kills that guy, kills a couple other guys, and kind of holds the line while Fleury pulls down the British flag and puts up the American flag.

Pat [00:38:23] So it's like literally, literally capture the flag.

Ben [00:38:26] Literally capture the flag. Yeah. And, you know, it doesn't seem like much, right. You know, a video game, it ends there.

Pat [00:38:32] It's like, oh, it's just a symbolic gesture.

Ben [00:38:33] 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 candidates are going off, all the muskets are going off as flashy explosions and screaming. And they look up at the tower and there's American flag over the tower and they're just like, Oh, crap, we lost. It's like, let's get out of here before we die. So they all surrender or retreat. The two British warships in the harbor, each of them had enough firepower to level that fort, probably.

Pat [00:39:02] Oh, totally, yeah.

Ben [00:39:03] They don't see the flag go up. They hear the cheering of the Americans having. Should the fort the British think that it's fine? They're like, Oh, we did, we did it. We took it. We we want no problem.

Pat [00:39:13] Oh, they thought it was the British cheering.

Ben [00:39:14] They thought it was the British cheering. Yes. And they're like, Oh, 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.

Pat [00:39:30] So.

Ben [00:39:34] Yeah. So they they captured and basically single handedly. Peter Francisco and Colonel Fleury and that's it, right? Kind of a crazy story. It's this little fort in upstate New York, but it's a pretty Herculean feat that he undertook there.

Pat [00:39:50] 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 was 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 credit for it for the tactic.

Ben [00:40:14] 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.

Pat [00:40:23] Yeah, Yeah.

Ben [00:40:25] In hand-to-hand combat. But it worked, right? I mean, yeah, there is a certain cleverness of beating your way through the enemy, and then.

Pat [00:40:33] You got way more bang for his book. So that was at the end of Francisco's career. Did he go on to do more derring do?

Ben [00:40:39] 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 counters by sending Peter Francisco down there to deal with them. Well, let's talk about the Battle of Camden in 1780. Camden is in the Carolinas. Peter Francisco is fighting. They're losing. Horatio Gates is in command of the American forces there getting defeated. Francis goes out there by himself. He's surrounded by dead countrymen and the Brits are charging him. Cavalry 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.

Pat [00:41:37] Steals his horse.

Ben [00:41:40] 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 get safe. I'll I'll be right back. So then after the commanding officer rides off, Francisco is 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.

Pat [00:42:14] I bet he could, too.

Ben [00:42:15] 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 1100 pounds and it's on wheels and he drags it by himself. It's so generally designed to be dragged by 1 to 2 horses. But Peter Francisco, big, strong guy, no problem. Quick thinking on his part.

Pat [00:42:43] And big musculature.

Ben [00:42:44] Yes, this guy was definitely pretty ripped.

Pat [00:42:49] Yeah.

Ben [00:42:49] Or he could have been like one of those. I don't know if you ever watch, like the ESPN, like strongman competitions. They never like huge muscles are just giant dudes. And it's just like they lift his unbelievably heavy things, but they're not exactly like they're not shredded. They're just monstrously huge guy. It's kind of how I picture Peter Francisco. Yeah, So came down to defeat a couple months later. There's the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, which is an American victory. It's a turning point in the South. Like the Americans are losing, losing and they have a pretty successful fight at Guilford Courthouse after kind of being in trouble for a while. They have a pretty successful attack. Their Virginia Hercules is out there, Peter Francisco. He's credited with killing 13 British soldiers with a broadsword during this battle, including one guy who they said got his head chopped off. Long ways which you can try to imagine what that might look like.

Pat [00:43:44] Ooh, that's got hurt.

Ben [00:43:45] I mean, maybe it didn't It was just pierce the brain immediately.

Pat [00:43:48] Oh, that's true. Yeah.

Ben [00:43:49] Just might be 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.

Pat [00:43:56] I don't ever want to be in a position to find out, but I can easily imagine this guy doing. Yes.

Ben [00:44:01] Just he was definitely strong enough to make that happen. But this battle doesn't work out that well for for Francisco, he kills 13 British soldiers, but he's completely surrounded the rest of his units kind of falling back. He's wading into the is 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 12 times. He gets shot a couple of times, passes out, bleeding all over the battlefield. The battle continues on without him. He's laying there, presumed dead on the battlefield. Except. Doesn't die. He gets back up and he just kind of drags himself to a nearby farmhouse to try to try to get help. And luckily, he finds a friendly farmhouse that 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 bleeding bandages and things.

Then the British Cavalry rides through because they've heard that he's here and they heard that he's alive and they have come to get him, 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 27 saber cuts and six bullets in him, like, you know, maybe go investigate that. Yeah. The guy they sent to investigate is a guy named Bannistere Tarleton, who I will I would like to talk about on this show at some point in the future. Tarleton is. Yeah. I mean, the best way to describe him is that the bad guy in the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot is pretty much based off him. He's 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 just burn the whole place to 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 the Americans and the other Americans. And so and so Tarlton's legion shows up. It's about 12 guys. It's a squadron of British cavalry. They ride up to the farmhouse. They're going to talk to the Virginia Hercules, and they're going to give him a hard time.

Pat [00:46:13] Talk to him.

Ben [00:46:14] Yes, they're going to 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 up.

Pat [00:46:31] Nor should he.

Ben [00:46:32] 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 scatter and then he steals six of their horses and rides away.

Pat [00:46:48] He steals six of their horses.

Ben [00:46:50] He kills three of these guys. He steals six horses, rides off unscathed.

Pat [00:46:54] While half dead.

Ben [00:46:55] And rejoins is you're not dead, not done with the war. He continues on, and he serves under Lafayette during the Yorktown campaign, which, as you know, is the end of the war.

Pat [00:47:05] And Peter Francisco was there.

Ben [00:47:06] 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.

Pat [00:47:18] Yeah. Probably never had to pay for a drink the rest of his life.

Ben [00:47:21] Certainly not. He goes back, he becomes a blacksmith. He learns how to read, which he didn't know how to do before this.

Pat [00:47:26] Oh, good for him. Yes.

Ben [00:47:28] And he marries three different women, I think the same as Hercules. Had three different wives, right? Yeah.

Pat [00:47:32] Well, it depends on how you define married, but. Yeah.

Ben [00:47:34] Okay. All right. So, yeah, so he had he had three different wives, presumably not at the same time and did not die from Centaur semen. He died of old age at the age of 71. Despite all of the battle injuries and wounds he had sustained during the course of his life, he dies in 1831 as just like a great unsung hero of the American Revolution, who was just this great war hero that that nobody really talks about when we talk about the American Revolution. Yeah, he had a slightly better end than the mythological Hercules. Yeah, he didn't get to be a constellation, but he wasn't set on fire by centaur jizz.

Pat [00:48:11] I, I'd say Francisco had the better end, you know?

Ben [00:48:14] Yeah. I'm going to go with you on that one. Yeah.

I guess that's kind of all we have to talk about today. The Hercules, the 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.

Pat [00:48:30] Well, as lessons go, I guess it's useful for a very, very, very small proportion of the population. And for us mere mortals, we have to figure out something else. But yeah, we.

Ben [00:48:38] Have to be differently clever. Yes.

Well, that's all we have for today. And thank you guys so much as always for listening. And we'll see you next time.

Pat [00:48:47] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.