Hercules (Civ6)/Civilopedia

Heracles – better-known in English by his Roman name, Hercules – is the son of Zeus, and a hero that epitomized strength, if not good judgement. Hera, Zeus’s wife, hated Heracles for being the product of one of Zeus’s many affairs, and sought to bring ruin upon him however she could. This started in the cradle, as Hera sent snakes to kill the infant Heracles. Even then the boy was strong enough to overcome the serpents, and his strength only grew. His wisdom, however, did not keep pace with his physical strength: Heracles killed his music tutor with a lyre, threw a close friend (whose father and brothers he also slew) over a wall, tossed the herald Lichas into the sea, and, most tragically, killed his own children.
This latter act was done in a fit of madness after he was cursed once again by Hera. In order to atone for this act, Heracles undertook his famous Labors: slaying a monstrous lion (whose skin he later wore); defeating the hydra, a multi-headed snake whose blood was poison, and who would re-grow two heads whenever one was lopped off; stealing the girdle of Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons; and a number of other beast-slaying, livestock-stealing, stables-cleaning sorts of things.
Heracles’s tale ends tragically. As a centaur attempts to steal his wife away, Heracles shoots him with arrows dipped in the hydra’s poisonous blood. As the centaur dies, he whispers to Heracles’s wife that his tunic, soaked as it is in lusty centaur’s blood, would cause Heracles to fall more deeply in love with her. She convinces him to do so, and Heracles dies horribly from the poison, giving us all a powerful lesson about the benefits of not wearing shirts when one has the physique of a Greek god.
Heracles has had a long career after his death. The story of a tragically slain hero, the son of the supreme god, was an appealing one in the Mediterranean during the Roman era, and Hercules developed a sizeable following. Even in India, Greek-inspired Gandhara sculptors depicted Vajrapani, the protector of the Buddha, as Hercules with his iconic club and lion-skin.