Editing Heracles (section)

===Hero or god===
Heracles's role as a culture hero, whose death could be a subject of mythic telling (see below), was accepted into the [[Twelve Olympians|Olympian Pantheon]] during Classical times. This created an awkwardness in the encounter with [[Odysseus]] in the episode of ''[[Odyssey]]'' XI, called the [[Nekuia]], where Odysseus encounters Heracles in [[Hades]]:

{{Blockquote|<poem>And next I caught a glimpse of powerful Heracles—
His ghost I mean: the man himself delights
in the grand feasts of the deathless gods on high&nbsp;...
Around him cries of the dead rang out like cries of birds
scattering left and right in horror as on he came like night&nbsp;...<ref>[[Robert Fagles]]'s translation, 1996:269.</ref></poem>}}

Ancient critics were aware of the problem of the aside that interrupts the vivid and complete description, in which Heracles recognizes Odysseus and hails him, and some modern critics deny that the verse's beginning, in Fagles's translation ''His ghost I mean&nbsp;...'', was part of the original composition: "once people knew of Heracles' admission to Olympus, they would not tolerate his presence in the underworld", remarks [[Friedrich Solmsen]],<ref>{{cite journal |first=Friedrich |last=Solmsen |title=The Sacrifice of Agamemnon's Daughter in Hesiod's Ehoeae |journal=[[The American Journal of Philology]] |volume=102 |issue=4 |year=1981 |pages=353–58 [355] |doi=10.2307/294322 |jstor=294322 }}</ref> noting that the interpolated verses represent a compromise between conflicting representations of Heracles.