With Hercules' labors over, his journeys begin the tv series. I've been mentioning Robert Graves' The Greek Myths as a sourcebook for the show. This has been mentioned by Rob Tapert in numerous interviews, and according to David Eick, Rob's assistant at Renaissance Pictures, and co-producer (currently the creator of the "Battlestar Galactica" remake), "The Greek Myths" were used extensively:

"I did a show with Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi called HERCULES. At one critical point during development of that show, Rob Tapert instructed everyone at the company to go home and read Robert Graves, to become immersed in mythology and Greek myth. Everyone dutifully went home and read the materials, and I very deliberately chose not to. Something interesting happened. Over the course of the next few months, I was the guy in the room that it had to make sense for. Someone in the room would say Narcissist was such and such, and I would say "I don't know what that means." It was a good balance, because there was always a voice for the audience saying you can't just have things written for people who know the mythology, otherwise we won't have a TV show." This statement indicates that everyone involved was on the same page as far as the show's basic approach to Greek myth. Graves' book is extensively annotated, and his interpretation of the myths gave them much greater access to their inner workings had the staff simply relied on a more superficial retelling of them. The book's main thesis is that the ancient myths are actually layered, like a geological site, revealing within the more recent tales far more ancient ones, in which we can glimpse a prehistoric matriarchal culture that was overthrown by the fierce warlords that later ruled Greece: we can find men like them in The Illiad, brash, cynical and disrespectful of the more refined eastern culture of Troy, with its matriarchal traditions still going strong. Tapert's staff digested these ideas, and we can see them everywhere on the show, including the sets and costumes. We can also glimpse a bit of the show's underlying motifs in Eick's statement. He mentions Narcissus was "such and such": if we consult Graves, we can fill in the blanks. Narcissus was a narcotic, and was known as Spring Dionysus, and "...elsewhere he is called Antheus (see 159.4), a surname of Dionysus."⁰¹

We'll see why this association is important later on, in the first season of "Xena"!

The series begins with The Wrong Path, borrowing Euripides' approach by having the murder of his family as the motivation for Hercules to help others in his journeys. The motivation in the play, Herakles, stems from his quest for redemption, since he himself killed them. That darker side of the story has been set aside for a Dionysiac character, since the murders are described as a kind of bacchic madness. Such a character will have a dark past to overcome, and only then can Hercules' story be told in full. She'll appear later on this brief season, but until then, the Dionysus motif will manifest itself nonetheless. Hercules may not have inherited the darker side of Dionysus, but he'll represent the god's brighter mission of bringing freedom to all men, regardless of their station.

The next episode, Eye of the Beholder, introduces the Cyclops motif to the series. We know we're back in Euripides' satyr play when we meet the chief satyr himself, Salmoneus. His name even sounds a bit like Silenus, and this may be no accident. A point made throughout Graves' book is that the ancient Greeks read great significance into words that sounded alike: they were not coincidences, but a sign of higher truth. One example Graves' provides is "Silenus" and "Solon", who, contrary to what we might think, had a number of things in common. We'll explore this more later this season, but the notion of sound-alikes being important is found throughout Euripides' plays, who was fond of puns. Of course, we wouldn't know this unless we read a good annotated edition of his plays, but given the preference made by Rob Tapert for the heavily-annotated "The Greek Myths", I would assume he'd want the same kind of resource for Euripides, and therefore make use of these puns as another kind of creatively liberating tool. Sometimes, annotations aren't even necessary in Euripides: in The Bacchae, he has Dionysus tell king Penthius, "Penthius means 'sorrow'. The name fits you well."

Getting back to Salmoneus: he's stripped naked by the 50 daughters of Thespius, at one point, his hairy body and mischievously arched eyebrows providing a very satyr-like moment. Since we know that Rob was familiar with the Queen Omphale story in Graves, then we can be sure he knew about Pan's involvement in it, in which he mistakes Hercules for a woman, since he's wearing the Queen's clothes. Humiliated to learn otherwise, Pan vows never to wear clothes again, and insists his worshippers attend his rites equally unclothed. In the myths, Pan is analogous to Silenus, who's also a goat-man, and this association with clothes helps shapes Salmoneus's character. Here, he's a clothes-salesman, specializing in togas, a new type of garment. Actually, togas are not Greek, but Roman, so they would be new in the Greek world. Why togas? Perhaps because of the Roman association: Salmoneus's character is not just as a Pan-figure, but a self-interested merchant who negotiates himself into the middle of the worst kinds of situations, but who ends up doing the right thing at his own expense. We can find a similar character in the film that's used as a source of inspiration for Hercules and Xena: Spartacus. Peter Ustinov's character, Lentulus Batiatus, is the slave-dealer who discovers Spartacus, and will be the man who helps free his family at the end. He's the comic relief in a grim movie, and his character dovetails nicely with the goat-men of the satyr plays. In this episode, the association with satyrs and Dionysus is made explicit when we find Salmoneus in a tavern, trying to cut a deal with Hercules. In the background, the music playing is the bacchic samba beat from Black Orpheus!

This episode's featured player is a cyclops who tends Hera's vineyards. The man in charge of the vineyards is a rat-like fellow who carefully tends the cyclops lifelong resentment of the villagers who cower with disgust at his monstrous appearance. They also resent him as the one who changed the course of the river to irrigate the vineyard. He protects them at the villagers' expense, to protect the source of the wine that'll be poured at the "festival of the believers". This is one of several signs that we're in a story about Dionysus: this festival involving wine sounds very much like the festival of Dionysus, which we'll see later; it may not be the very same festival, but it invites the comparison, especially with the star of The Cyclops involved.